notes.husk.org

"Changing aesthetics: Shopping online for clothes typically involves scrolling through pages and..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:22:47 +0100

“Changing aesthetics: Shopping online for clothes typically involves scrolling through pages and pages of images. Mary Kantrantzou believes that this has lead to shoppers paying more attention to designs that stand out - in particular unusual colours or prints. She believes this has been a factor in the resurgence of print.”

- Soundboy: How the internet influences what we wear (via new-aesthetic)

gwire: When you fire up the Tumblr iOS app out of wifi/cellular...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:22:04 +0100

gwire:

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.)

Conclave results for adjacent popes, by NBC Today via Sascha...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:52:00 +0000

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.

"that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the..."

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:12:00 +0000

“that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call home. It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun — we seem to have a knack for that — but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator’s dream.”

- William Gibson: The Net Is a Waste of Time for the New York Times, 14 July 1996 (via).

“Considerably less random, and less fun.”

"Islington pioneered municipal wireless broadband with London’s original largest free network back in..."

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 21:57:39 +0000

“Islington pioneered municipal wireless broadband with London’s original largest free network back in June 2005. The ‘Technology Mile’ as it was then called, ran from the affluent hub of the borough at The Angel to Highbury & Islington. In February [of 2009], it was extended to 2.3 miles into the less privileged communities of Holloway Road and now runs into the ward of Canonbury, creating a virtual ‘wireless ward’ of approximately an additional square mile.”

- Roger Serrabassa Vilar: Free Wi-Fi in Islington

"Who still uses pay phones anyway? New York City has announced a new plan to transform public pay..."

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 21:54:40 +0000

“Who still uses pay phones anyway? New York City has announced a new plan to transform public pay phones into giant 311 touchscreens. The new iPad-like screens will provide information, emergency alerts, and local business deals, including coupons that can be downloaded to smartphones.”

- 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.

"So what to do? Here’s my answer. The best solution is, of course, to quote no URL at all, and..."

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 17:57:11 +0000

“So what to do? Here’s my answer. The best solution is, of course, to quote no URL at all, and instead use author, title, publication, date, etc, even for online-only sources, so that everybody who’s heard of Google can find the publication any time. – But sometimes using a web address is helpful or required. In that case my suggestion is to use bit.ly, the most popular link shortener.”

- Quoting URLs in Academic Papers | Kings of War (via iamdanw)

Boggle.

"The social sites that arrived in the 2000s did not create the social web, but they did structure it...."

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 07:54:32 +0100

“The social sites that arrived in the 2000s did not create the social web, but they did structure it. This is really, really significant.”

- 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.

"The Maps app is important because it is an essential phone feature, a feature that almost everyone..."

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 02:03:00 +0100

“The Maps app is important because it is an essential phone feature, a feature that almost everyone uses. Insofar as users have expectations, it’s shaped by how much they’ve come to rely on the app in their daily lives.”

- 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.

"There are roughly 105m multichannel TV households in America, of which 77m do not subscribe to HBO...."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:01:24 +0100

“There are roughly 105m multichannel TV households in America, of which 77m do not subscribe to HBO. By contrast, he reckons, there are only about 3m households with broadband connections and reasonable amounts of money but no multichannel TV. It makes sense to go after the bigger group.”

- 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.)