I can’t bring myself to abandon plain text — there’s something noble about it, something efficient, something respectful of the recipient’s settings for displaying text; it’s the way our forefathers did email. Keyboard Shortcut to add hyperlinks in Mail.app | Hawk Wings +1
People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind. Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine - New York Times. I’m delighted by this suggestion that the Wii and the iPhone represent a coming shift in human-computer interface design; apparently the generation driving design demands new paradigms. A welcome development – my patience wears thin!
After only a few electrical jolts, the artificial neural circuit began to act just like a real neural circuit. Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together. Different cell types obeyed their genetic instructions. The scientists could see the cellular looms flash and then fade as the cells wove themselves into meaningful patterns. After years of hard work, they were finally able to watch their make-believe brain develop, synapse by synapse. The microchips were turning themselves into a mind. Seed: Out of the Blue
Language Log: The Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation
People who see signs employing the f-word all over China, even in large stores and fancy restaurants, are not only aghast, they wonder how the dickens such a gross mistranslation could have originated and proliferated. Theories abound, to say the least. Amazing, fascinating, hilarious, and educational – I cannot recommend this link highly enough.
The RIAA has conducted about 26,000 lawsuits, and there are more than 15 million music downloaders. Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research said it best: “If you’re a file sharer, you know that the likelihood of you being caught is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid.” Bruce Schneier: Steal This Wi-Fi
The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evnt focus on events as objects. zengestrom.com: Why some social network services work and others don’t Or: the case for object-centered sociality. I hadn’t thought about it this way before, but in my experience it’s certainly true.
White privilege plays no small role in a laptop that kept shutting itself down, as though he didn’t get it. Obviously a great post and any kind of useless. The family won’t tell great-grandma that we’re married with a graffiti “problem”. We only get wordy from here) what I said in my previous post. A random yet readable recombinatory sample of my comment history on MetaFilter, via MarkovFilter. Awesome.
“I have negotiated several business deals recently without even using a telephone.” The Executive Computer; A Web of Networks, an Abundance of Services - New York Times, February 1993 (via kottke)
For a while, Mr. Hoogestraat, sitting at his computer, stares at an image of his avatar sitting at his computer. Is This Man Cheating on His Wife? - WSJ.com
The visual voicemail is something that made me realize just how bad voicemail was until now, and just how accommodating we’ve become of truly wretched UIs. Information Week: Review: Two Weeks With An iPhone
There are times when I think we’re out of our depth here. There are things that you don’t want people to know about you and things you don’t want to know about yourself. My friends and I used to suppose that, when we die, we find ourselves in a private theater, watching the entirety of our life projected onto the screen. In some versions, that’s all the afterlife was, and the film was repeated eternally. I guess the point of that meditation was to encourage one to carpe diem. The researchers in this article on lifelogging are discovering the value and risks of becoming your own TiVo.
I’m a big fan of Marc Hurst’s work with Good Experience—he writes an insightful newsletter and does important work promoting a focus on user experience. I was excited to check out his new GooToDo tool, but site asks for my unencrypted credit card details before I can try it out. This isn’t a good experience!
Sitting at home with the window open, listening to the tree branches brush against each other outside and the occasional horn-honks of Flatbush Ave, bark of dog and squeal of child... this uncomposed ambience is my creativity engine lately.
From a comment on Click opera - Ubiquity is the abyss.
Silicon Valley (Version 2.0) Has Hopes Up says the New York Times. Among the optimists is a member of a startup company producing products for the “Web log” market:
"It feels like we're 12 months, 18 months away from the equivalent of the Netscape I.P.O.," said Andrew Anker, a former venture capitalist who this month became executive vice president at Six Apart, a start-up based in Silicon Valley that aims to help businesses publish Web logs, or blogs.The article is curiously focused on secondary indicators such as traffic:
In 2000, according to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, 55 percent of the region's major freeway miles were snarled in traffic during commuting hours, compared to less than 40 percent in 2002, the latest year with data available.and fancy restaurants:
"The bleeding has stopped," said Alex Resnik, a part-owner of Spago Palo Alto. No longer do "three youngsters in their late 20's spend $3,000 on dinner," he said with a frown, but the restaurant is starting to do a brisk business again in wines that sell for $60 a bottle.The press would like nothing better than another chance to churn out 1998 style fluff pieces on the wild and crazy spending of the young geniuses of the New Economy. After all, the end of the millenium wasn't just a boom for the tech industry. The media had a pretty good ride as well.
When the researchers looked at how people returned to sites they had visited before, they discovered that context made all the difference. When subjects in their study had the chance to describe a site in their own words and were given the description six months later, they had little trouble finding the site again. Yet in today's typical bookmark applications, users cannot annotate sites they save.
The New York Times: What's Next: Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites in which we learn of a three-year $378,000 grant from the National Science Foundation which, if wildly successful, can simply rediscover the efficacy of weblog as bookmark replacement.
Will Listamatic and Layout-o-matic bring clean standards-based design to the masses? Stay tuned!
“The nation’s largest telemarketing association yesterday said its members would comply with the government’s do-not-call list on Wednesday, even though a federal judge has ruled that the registry is unconstitutional.” Group Vows To Abide by No-Calls List (TechNews.com)
Full Posts + Comments RSS Template for Movable Type: everybody’s doing it.
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: IE, Flash, and patents: here comes trouble
Besides paying over half a billion dollars to the patent holder, Microsoft is supposed to cripple its market-leading browser so that IE/Windows will no longer seamlessly play Flash, Quicktime, RealVideo, or Adobe Acrobat files, Java applets, and other rich media formats. Once the company does this, any site that uses these technologies will no longer work in the browser most people use.Zeldman explains why this is a nightmare for usability and interface design -- imagine having to read a web page as though it were a scientific manuscript with related figures labeled and referenced and attached, rather than allowing your browser to present it laid out like a magazine. This patent seems to lay claim to the very concept of multimedia — is this something that can be 0wnd?
Macintosh: How to Create a Small Ethernet Network - “This document explains three simple types of Ethernet network that you can create in your home or office.”
Our first computer was the Apple ][+ which my dad bought in large part because the guy who started the company attended his zendo. Particular pleasures included: Beagle Bros software, Ultima ][, text adventures, Brickout, 20 GOTO 10, PR # 6, Aztec, Wizardry, Wilderness Adventure, Ctrl-G, Castle Wolfenstein. There were many more, some of which I’ve relived lately with emulation software. Our next computer was the Mac, which was upgraded to a Mac 512k and then a Mac Plus. That thing, in its travel case, survived a fire which destroyed our Volkswagen van on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike – just south of exit 8A if memory serves. I don’t think anything else was salvageable. I was… 11? – my most affecting loss was the Gordon Korman and Douglas Adams books. My bookbag full of schoolwork was also lost, but I don’t remember having any trouble in school about it. I wonder why. Then we got a Mac SE/30. Somewhere in there I got a TI99/4A to mess around with. Finally I got my own first computer, a Mac IIsi. My high school had an internet connection so I guess I’ve been online since 1992. The big “wow” came for me when I discovered the song lyrics FTP server. I knew in that moment that this thing was big. All I’ve got going on now is this silly weblog, but back in the day I was serving up an online version of Kyosaku from my IIsi in my dorm room. I didn’t have a domain name or a static IP but I was listed in Yahoo nonetheless, so whenever my server crashed I’d have to stay up until 2-3am watching the network to grab the dynamic IP I needed.
On a totally trivial subject in which I’m extremely interested: “I had a dream of setting up a little projector to display the visuals on a wall or ceiling whenever iTunes was playing." Beyond that, I hope to rent a projector to screen movies at the mad backyard parties I hope to throw once we move into an actual house with an actual yard this summer. (Print out this post for discounted admission! ;)
At dollarshort.org there is a good discussion of Digital Video cameras. We recently bought the Canon ZR60, and (I don’t know from videography so I won’t say anything by way of review about it yet except that) it’s a lot of fun. I will say that my requisites matched Mena’s, and I’ve been thoroughly satisfied. I’ve been a little disappointed by the lack of web resources for amateur, no-budget, dogme documentarians, though – I’ve been looking for sites with reviews of DV media, iMovie 3 tutorials, and tips/techniques for shooting, and found nothing worth mentioning. What am I missing?
StrangeBanana is a website design generator which creates a new mostly-random set of CSS rules every time you reload the page. The designs are frequently horrendous, but it’s a nice surprise that at least one in ten are pretty effective.
The top result of a google image search on ‘p2p art’:
“The Enkoder Form will encrypt your Email address and convert the result to a self evaluating JavaScript, hiding it from Email-harvesting robots which crawl the web looking for exposed addresses. Your address will be displayed correctly by web-browsers, but will be virtually indecipherable to Email harvesting robots.” [dive into mark]
I’ve got an old pair of red/blue 3D glasses near my desk, “just in case” – Boy Scouts motto, you know, ‘be prepared’ – so I was searching images.google for some 3D pictures. There doesn’t seem to be any way to view the results as a slideshow, which seems not only fairly obvious but probably trivial with the Google API. In fact, the halfbakery has already considered the idea but I’m not sure the lazyweb has. What do you think?
Mozilla 1.3 is here.
They are counting on the combination of battlefield omniscience, smart bombs and new weapons like microwave pulses and nausea gases to drive Baghdadis out of their homes and bunkers. The use of "nonlethal" (sic) weapons against civilian populations, especially in light of the horror of what happened during the Moscow hostage crisis last October, is a war crime waiting to happen.War-Mart by Mike Davis.
originally posted by xowie
After the shock of losing wears off and an unmitigated free-for-all ensues, the Triads go back to talking their usual shit. There's an explosion and a Triad shouts, "Suck it!" Another player laments his own death: "Damn, dude! Fuck, I had, like, no life left! How'd you not die?" His opponent curses back. "Fuck you! Owned!"Baang! You're Dead.
originally posted by daiichi
Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester information.Whole Earth: Dancing with Systems: what to do when systems resist change.
You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, accurate, and complete information.
It’s really hard to pick a cell phone and a service, as I don’t have to tell you. All I have to offer on the topic are these couple of sites, the most helpful that I’ve found: the WirelessAdvisor.com forums and CNET’s Editors' Wireless Top 5s. I hear Verizon is the only provider who has service on the DC Metro – that’s as good a reason as any, I think.
I’d like to invite you to explore the randomWalks wiki. [Thanks to riley dog for that poor fucker with the scissors.]
Figure out what’s going on here (CSS Styling of Namespaces in HTML?).
"It was a bit odd," said Justin, "my fingers were working the controls, but they were also kind of working you."Whoa, and I was all set to get the GameCube.
