June 2009
91 posts
7 tags
3 tags
“He draws a distinction between “professional” bloggers and “traditional”...”
– Rafe Colburn, in More On Say Everything, his commentary on a book about the early history of blogging.
6 tags
The Computer Of 2010
In 2000, Forbes stuck their neck out and predicted what The Computer of 2010 would look like (via, via), complete with a frogdesign illustration:
Specified as a portable device that docks in your work (to a big-ass table) and in your home (“so your house becomes a smart operating system”), the main notable feature of the Computer is that it’s built on optoelectronics, which...
4 tags
“An entire industry of manufacturers offloaded their complete user-experience to...”
– Ben Ward, concluding his long (but right-headed) commentary on a BBC News report: Windows 7 pricing gets unveiled.
6 tags
4 tags
Unix In Your Pants
Last week I posted about how all the phones I care about were designed in the United States, rather than Europe, Japan or Korea. They’re also not really phones, but computers. They have one other thing in common- they all run Unix.
This really is shocking if you were around in the 1980s, or even the early ’90s, but the inexorable progress of Moore’s Law - combined with clever...
7 tags
“Wouldn’t happen at the Guardian, now would it Simon?”
– Richard Rutter, commenting on the Best Daily Mail poll ever, one of Simon Willison’s images on Flickr, and the fact the Mail withdrew a gamed online poll.
Well, it now looks like there is an analogue at the Guardian; their page asking “is it time to return the Parthenon Marbles”...
5 tags
“Temperatures are forecast to reach 33C this week and it is thought that the UK...”
– Heatwave forecast triggers the first UK alert over health fears | The Guardian
5 tags
Rabbit Hole: Danish Bridges
(A rabbit hole is an area where I start looking at a single page, and then all of a sudden I’m reading chunks of Wikipedia, or considering more and more expensive and featureful alternatives. I figure that if I’ve gone down one, I should save you the hassle of doing so, by summarising the trip.)
(This is the first in an irregular series, inspired by a post by Matt Patterson on...
7 tags
Two Performances At GDIF
Yesterday evening, thanks to tips from Michael (who posted photos from Thursday promptly) and Anna (who mentioned it on Twitter), I trundled across to the east of the city for two very different performances as part of the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival.
Up by the new planetarium at the Royal Observatory, there was Sputnik, a short, intimate, somewhat charming solo dance/performance...
3 tags
“My Lords, is my noble friend aware that, as a person over 60, I am continually...”
– Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate, in a debate on those over sixty and the internet in the Lords (via).
4 tags
6 tags
5 tags
“Some films have certificates like U or PG; this one should be OMG with a row of...”
– Peter Bradshaw’s one-star review of My Sister’s Keeper in the Guardian. I don’t think he liked it.
4 tags
WatchLadytron - Runaway. Vaguely similar to La Roux’s effort, but if you ask me, both a much the song and video are far better, the latter if only because it’s more tightly constrained.
I’ve had Velocifero on my iPod for ages, but it was only when Tom Coates mentioned Ghosts and I rewatched this video (YouTube helpfully blocking everything else from the UK, thanks!) that I realised...
4 tags
7 tags
5 tags
4 tags
“YouTube says uploads from mobile phones have increased 400% since iPhone 3GS...”
– Tim Bradshaw on Twitter. (Remember yesterday’s Flickr upload figures?)
3 tags
4 tags
6 tags
7 tags
5 tags
4 tags
5 tags
“Kasabian are the great heretics of British rock; 21st century renegades with a...”
– Someone at Sony has definitely got “lysergic vision”. And hearing.
5 tags
5 tags
“Got too many tabs from pushy sites on a weaker browser? Try a Flash blocker,...”
– John Dowdell (who ‘works at Adobe in San Francisco’) responding to John C Welch in a comment on Adobe on “HTML5” by suggesting that people run an application to block an Adobe plug-in.
7 tags
5 tags
4 tags
A Quick Quiz
(As suggested by andym)
Without looking, can you list the Google logo colours in order?
8 tags
5 tags
Visible Likes
Yesterday Tumblr announced that it’s now possible to share your likes with people. Unfortunately, every feature brings with it a crop of new feature requests. For example, why don’t liked by pages have RSS feeds? Will it be possible to follow someone’s likes in your dashboard? Meanwhile, it makes the social aspects of Tumblr even more twisty.
Since the site’s creators seem...
5 tags
3 tags
5 tags
5 tags
4 tags
“For things that matter, written words are unambiguously better than speech. To...”
– Yes. Tim Bray in ongoing · The Internet’s Payload.
6 tags
Kindle’s DRM Rears Its Ugly Head →
iamdanw:
In summary, kindle books can only be resynced to a kindle or iPhone a limited number of times. The number of times varies book to book. The number of times is not publicly listed. Once you exceed the number you have to buy the kindle ebook again.
From reading the follow-up post, it turns out that the limit is actually on the number of devices; the number of downloads is unlimited per...
3 tags
“I continue to believe that the vast majority of members of this House are...”
– John Bercow, newly elected Speaker of the House of Commons.
3 tags
Election
If first past the post is such a good system that it’s used for Westminster elections, why did the MPs choosing their Speaker not use it, instead using a multi-round process that guarantees the candidate has at least 50% of the vote?
6 tags
5 tags
“They say all good things in life come to an end. Today we announced that Kodak...”
– Audrey Jonckheer, Kodak Worldwide Pro Photographer Relations, on A Thousand Words: A Kodak blog about photography (via)
5 tags
9 tags
6 tags
“From the outside it looks a bizarre choice of resource allocation on the part of...”
– Emily Bell on the unmasking of NightJack by the Times, in the Guardian.
5 tags
6 tags
“‘What’s with the imperial units?’ Malley asked, as we watched...”
– The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod quoted on LibraryThing; an example of that sort of science fiction I was talking about. (Thanks to Tom for the link.)
7 tags
“We are doing everything possible to create a global market with as much...”
– Mike Gold, of Bigelow Aerospace, quoted in a New Scientist story, NASA attacked for sticking to imperial units. (Edit to correct link, to a much longer version)
It concludes “NASA says that the $370 million cost to convert the Constellation programme to metric is too high.” Have these...
4 tags
“it was only until very recently that the US started producing the best mobile...”
– Justin Blanton | To Pre or not to Pre?
This is a parenthetical remark that’s gone somewhat unnoticed in Blanton’s (worth reading) post about the Pre, but it is quite remarkable.
I remember the time, not so long ago, when the US cellphone market was a joke. British people would take...