2012-04-01
post/20312250092
It’s been two weeks since I posted Mark and Roland Cunningham’s X-ray photograph of Alan B Shepard’s Apollo 14 spacesuit, which is now at well over 8,500 notes (thanks to being featured on Tumblr’s Radar).
I wasn’t the first (and I’m sure I won’t be the last) to post this image. For example, it was featured in an article on the Smithsonian’s spacesuit collection in the New York Times, along with annotations. Nonetheless, thanks to all of you who liked or reblogged the image, and those of you who’ve tagged along as followers since. (captioned image via)
2011-06-28
post/6993785792
Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration (via deathbeard)
I keep thinking that I’ve drummed this point home, but perhaps not, so: it still amazes me that almost everything we do online has a timestamp (if not two), and yet services are so bad about exposing them, and especially about using them as a way to organise your stuff.
Flickr has a calendar view (which perhaps isn’t as obvious as it should be, but it’s there). Tumblr has dated archives, even if they only show you them at a crude resolution. Elsewhere, though? Barely anything. Sigh.
2009-07-05
On Taking Notes
Yesterday’s note on Ephemerality was a bit of an experiment. During the day at OpenTech, I’d not really been taking notes, but I had posted a few observations to Twitter. For the talk by Gavin Bell, I thought I’d try to type notes directly into the official iPhone Tumblr app.
This was my longest experience with typing on an iPhone or iPod touch, and I think I could get better with practice, but I wouldn’t enjoy learning. Looking back, I’m not sure the piece holds together well, and that might be because I still find editing hard: moving the insertion point via touch and the loupe effect seem far more fiddly than the combination of cursor keys and Emacs keystrokes available on the desktop.
It’s also hard to insert links into a piece composed on the iPhone; task switching is of course more painful than it is on a (admittedly more powerful) full-size computer. I really felt this when I was trying to keep up. It also makes the finished report far less useful.
In summary, I think the utility of getting the text up on the web live, especially from an iPhone, is far lower than I’d anticipated, and that in future I’ll stick to taking notes on paper. If I did ever want to try and liveblog an event, in the way Jeremy Keith does so well, I’d have to use a full laptop, since then I’d have the space to edit, streamline and add links to a post.
2008-09-16
Android at Google Developer Day London
As part of the keynote of Google’s Developer Day in London, Mike Jennings ran a demo of Android on prototype hardware. (In fact, it may have been the first public demo of such in Europe.) Some notes:
- It works, and not slowly.
- The name of the device manufacturer was covered in tape.
- The browser seemed to load + render Slashdot on a private wifi network about as quickly as my iPod touch on the public one did
- Maps works pretty much the same on both
- The public network’s SSID makes my iPod think it’s in San Jose (is there a song joke here?)
- The demo hardware had an accelerometer, and there was a “blue dot” demo app with basic physics
- Unlike Aral, I don’t think I’d notice the lack of multitouch
- It looks like the application menu is alphabeticised, which might be a nice solution to the problem of managing long app lists.
Although I don’t really have any reason to go to the Android talks, this did make them seem a bit more appealing.
