2013-04-30
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2013-04-23
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When you fire up the Tumblr iOS app out of wifi/cellular range it warns you with a red banner featuring the symbol used to indicate the location of fallout shelters in the US in the 60s.
The fallout shelter sign omits the centre circle used as a radiation hazard symbol, in order to represent safety from radiation.
Therefore, technically, it makes some logical sense: it is a lack of a specific kind of radiation that makes Tumblr unavailable. But the combination of the symbol and the red warning banner seems a little incongruous.
But perhaps we’ll soon be recycling the symbol as a warning to network dependent individuals: enter this area and you’ll be cut-off from your information support system.
“Ditch the tech” as they say in that Dollhouse episode.
Aside from the interesting musings on the meaning / choice of the symbol, perhaps this is one for Little Big Details?
(I wish Lee had waited a minute to take this, by the way.)
2013-03-14
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Conclave results for adjacent popes, by NBC Today via Sascha Pohflepp.
Edit: the first photograph is actually of John Paul II’s funeral, rather than Benedict’s election, but there is one rogue phone camera in the bottom corner, so it still looks as if it’s the availability of technology, not the type of event, that dictates the difference in camera usage.
Edit: see also.
2013-02-26
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William Gibson: The Net Is a Waste of Time for the New York Times, 14 July 1996 (via).
“Considerably less random, and less fun.”
2012-11-21
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NYC Replaces Pay Phones - The Daily Beast (via slavin)
Islington in London started something similar years ago, with a “technology mile” and iPlus kiosks. They still seem to be there, and I’m not sure if they’ve been spruced up recently, but my main memory of them is that they were terrible to use.
Partly it was the old-style touchscreens, which were unresponsive, and partly it was that I suspect they really didn’t have fast enough connections, but the kiosks themselves ended up being largely ignored, while the wifi wasn’t worth the hassle of connecting to when there was 3G around instead.
I also recall that BT converted a few of their telephone boxes to include keyboards so you could send SMS and emails from them, but I don’t think I ever saw anyone using one (and at £1 a shot, I can see why).
Obviously, technology moves on, and a new attempt with a new generation of hardware (hell, three or four cycles of Moore’s Law have passed) might well prove more usable and useful, but I thought it was worth adding a little historical perspective from another city.
(via slavin)
2012-11-06
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2012-10-15
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Alexis C. Madrigal, in the Atlantic: Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong.
Perhaps this crystallises why I’m upset with the state of the internet at the moment: I’m following everyone else in looking at the corralled data stacks, not at the edges where, it seems, many people’s experience of the network still is.
2012-09-29
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Raging Thunderbolt, in John Gruber Is A Smart Guy (Or, Maps).
He’s not wrong to state this, but a little historical perspective: at this point five years ago, the only phone that came with a mapping application installed was the iPhone, with its Maps application (coded by Apple, data from Google). Nokia at this point had begun to offer mapping applications (and built-in GPS), but my memory of trying to install one on an N73 (after they’d stopped charging for the app) was one of failing repeatedly.
If you go back just another five years, the state of the art was Streetmap and Mapquest, both of which had interfaces with what seems now to be startlingly primitive indirect manipulation: if you wanted to look a tile to the right, you clicked on the little arrow to the right of the maps. If you were very lucky you had a big enough screen to expand to a 5x5 view, instead of the default 3x3.
Nonetheless, maps are now essential. It doesn’t matter that this is a change that took less than five years; whether or not we deserve to feel entitled to them, we definitely miss it when they’re not there.
2012-04-30
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Bill Nelson, HBO’s chief executive, paraphrased in the Economist’s article from last August: HBO and the future of pay TV.
(Re-reading that article was prompted by a friend asking why I hadn’t streamed Veep to see if I liked it. The answer is that I can’t pay HBO to let me do so.)
