In spite of the article being 5 years old, I still found it interesting and relevant.

The details of how the data was captured was helpful.

The things I found most interesting fall into 3 parts:

Part 1) It's heartening to see people enjoying their kids:

> I told my son to clear my schedule. He bashed two wooden blocks together in understanding, encouragement, and sheer admiration.

Go Dad! Enjoy it while you can!

If you have an experience like mine: as a 57yo at the time, and well aware of what was coming. When I went from daily interacting with my son, who was finally old enough to speak with as a adult, he suddenly moved away to college over a weekend and I almost never see him any more 8-(

I never expected the fully anticipated experience of empty-nest to affect me so strongly 8-/

Part 2)

> I care about this for two reasons.

> The first is a principled fuck you.

I had to laugh 8-) This somehow reminded me of a line in one of my favorite movies: The Live Aquatic.

Bill Murray's character is asked: This leopard shark is an endangered species. What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?

To which he replies: Revenge...

Part 3) The obligatory proprietary OS bashing:

Several times, the author states: "A device that is essentially a mouse..."

It should be pointed out, that a mouse is a USB class device. That is to say, it is a standard USB device that requires no proprietary driver (except for the purpose of exfiltrating data that the mouse maker has no functional need of, or other "value added" purposes)

Pretty much any special feature of the device can be implemented as a user space library.

The author is working on a Mac, the situation is even worse on windoze, where even a actual mouse will ask you to install a custom device driver.

This is why linux, with a broad support of standard USB class devices, is now significantly superior to windows in USB device support. For almost any typical type device, when you plug it into a linux computer, it just works. No driver install or other configuration needed.

Even if you need a driver to support your tablet on some version of an OS that doesn't provide support, there is a GPL waycom driver:

https://github.com/linuxwacom/input-wacom

tl;dr: linux good, windoze sux, mac getting worse...

In the current world, every computer company in any way associated with h/w or s/w or online activity is now also in the data borker business.

This is similar to the way the car dealership industry is now basically a subdivision of retail loan banking. Try buying a car with cash, versus a lease or loan. But, of course, it's not just milking the idiot herd for all it can, its "maximizing efficiency", for somebody...

So much for the glowing future brought to you by unbridled capitalism...

That's it. Try not to use Waycom, or at least not on Mac or windoze...

Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application you open (2020)