notes.husk.org

"Commonplace books that survive from the Tudor period contain a huge variety of texts, including..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:04:27 +0100

“Commonplace books that survive from the Tudor period contain a huge variety of texts, including letters, poems, medical remedies, prose, jokes, ciphers, riddles, quotations and drawings. Sonnets, ballads and epigrams jostle with diary entries, recipes, lists of ships or Cambridge colleges and transcriptions of speeches. Collecting useful snippets of information so that they could be easily retrieved when needed, or re-read to spark new ideas and connections, was one of the functions of a commonplace book. But the practice of maintaining a commonplace book and exchanging texts with others also served as a form of self-definition: which poems or aphorisms you chose to copy into your book or to pass on to your correspondents said a lot about you, and the book as a whole was a reflection of your character and personality.”

- Tom Standage: How commonplace books were like Tumblr and Pinterest, drawing from the research for his forthcoming book.

See also: the distractions of social media, 1673 style.

"The UNIX system has a command, nice, which allows a user to voluntarily reduce the priority of his..."

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 01:12:32 +0000

“The UNIX system has a command, nice, which allows a user to voluntarily reduce the priority of his process, in order to be nice to the other users. Nobody ever uses it.”

- Operating Systems: Design and Implementation 3rd Edition (via notational, otnld)

joshuanguyen: dbreunig: Mike Krieger explains why Instagram...

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:01:00 +0100

joshuanguyen:

dbreunig:

Mike Krieger explains why Instagram uploads photos so quickly.

It’s slight of app.

Great deck on why speed is a feature. Esp. on mobile.

I’m a little surprised this is news to people; it took me a few months to figure out that Instagram had to be doing this, but I always think of myself as slow.

The billion dollar valuation for the company still looks high every time I see it, but the critics who suggest that sharing photographs from mobile phones is either obvious or was already solved haven’t thought at all about how well that app works. (It’s reminiscent of the dismissiveness of Twitter a few years ago, which amazingly I still hear around the office occasionally.)

"Pinterest is requiring sites to individually and explicitly opt-in to “this image is not..."

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:10:25 +0000

“Pinterest is requiring sites to individually and explicitly opt-in to “this image is not available for public sharing”. In fact, the way they are providing for you to do this isn’t even something that individual photo owners could have done on their own - it had to be implemented at a Flickr-wide level, rather than by photo owners. This bothers me.”

- Tom Insam, on Pinterest and Flickr. I have to say I somewhat agree, since lots of Flickr users also complain about images of theirs going to Tumblr with little or not attribution.

I believe there’s a way to opt of the Tumblr bookmarklet on Flickr, but I’m not sure what it is, and it’s not that easy to find. Certainly these days I tend to use the Flickr-side sharing, since if that’s enabled, I assume the poster is OK with me using an image here, and the attribution gets handled automatically.

"While I love (and happily paid for) Pinboard, I also like the Delicious model where sharing..."

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:32:43 +0000

“While I love (and happily paid for) Pinboard, I also like the Delicious model where sharing bookmarks is something social. I think the transition of many users from Flickr to Instagram is costing us a lot in terms of a shared and relatively open context for connecting around photos.”

- Anil Dash, Getting the News at News.me.

"Sharing without intention is not social, it’s overwhelming, it’s noise. Not everything I read, I..."

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:04:22 +0100

“Sharing without intention is not social, it’s overwhelming, it’s noise. Not everything I read, I endorse. Not everything I watch, I like. Not everything I listen to, I want to share.”

- Jeff Gibbard;: Facebook: The Timeline and Frictionless Sharing.

Incompetence, Malice and ereading

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 17:41:00 +0100

I’ve been meaning to write about URLs, text and non-web online publishing for a while, but now I don’t have to, because Craig Mod has, and he did it better than I could have done. (He’s also going to get more attention, which is great, because it’s more likely things will change.)

Some choice quotes (although you should read the whole thing):

Am I reading text? If the text in your ereader isn’t text but is instead an image (.jpeg, .png, etc) then, by golly, your ereader’s incompetent.

Can you copy text? If you can’t, your ereader’s incompetent.

Is there a publicly facing pointer (URL, etc) by which you can reference the content in your ereader?

As Mod notes, it’s amazing that things like the iPad Wired app, which fail all three of these points, have been so highly praised. However, I’m more inclined to put malice (or its close relation, “business reasons”) as the reason for some of these decisions, in some apps. Despite the fact that Twitter, Facebook and email can drive readers to a site, it seems some companies would rather their magazines and newspapers lived in hermetic isolation.

At least the Guardian’s iPhone app, which is far from flawless, has the ability to email a link and post to various services, although (oddly) it fails to have a simple “Open in Browser” option. From what I’ve seen, neither the Wired app, nor any of the Mag+ publications, have such obviously useful features.

At least, as Mod notes, we’re only six months into the life of the iPad (and barely a couple of years into widely-used mobile devices). Perhaps with time will come a realisation that locking things down isn’t the best idea.

¹ Hat tip to dan w for the links.

² In one of his footnotes, Mod approving notes Instapaper, which I agree gets almost everything right. Hopefully at some point I’ll write about the (somewhat weak) social aspects of the app, though.)

"As the Kindle and Nook march on, people’s reading choices will increasingly be hidden from..."

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:30:46 +0100

“As the Kindle and Nook march on, people’s reading choices will increasingly be hidden from view. We’ll go into people’s houses or squeeze next to them on the subway, and we’ll no longer be able to know them, or judge them, or love them, or reject them, based on the books they carry.”

- Mark Oppenheimer, in Slate Magazine, in a piece titled “Judging a Girl by Her Cover”, subtitled “Why I’ll miss a world where books make the first move.”

Sure, technology hides the name of a book, but it could also bring it back. In one of his books Cory Doctorow talks about a system where cars swap tracks wirelessly; similarly (and with less worrying for old-fashioned copyright) there’s no reason why you couldn’t have a system where iPhones advertised what book a person was reading.

Of course, it’d be possible to lie, but it’s possible to do that already: if you really get ashamed of reading Dan Brown, you can wrap it in a Stephen Hawking dustjacket.

He goes on: “Worse, they will no longer be that perfect lending object.” Well, with luck, they’ll be even better: an object you can give away, maybe even using something like Phil Gyford’s proposal for pay-per-point or Lee Maguire’s threshold pledge system.

Remember: for everything we lose when we move from physical to digital, there’s something we can gain, if we just think it through.

"2 megabit Universal Service Obligation will remain unchanged from the draft. No explanation of how..."

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:50:29 +0100

“2 megabit Universal Service Obligation will remain unchanged from the draft. No explanation of how this will be achieved, beyond deferring to major ISPs and telecoms companies (renowned, of course, for their altruism). The USO will specifically not mandate acceptable latency or contention—just line-speed.”

- nevali writing in Tumbled Logic about the likely shape of the Digital Britain report.

The report won’t mention upload speed either, which I expect will probably end up being, at most, 256kbps, although it may be as little as 128. That’s not enough to run a home MP3 stream from, say, and it makes uploading photos slow and video tedious. So much for the internet as a two-way medium.

(With apologies to Dan Hon, who mentioned this once and has now seen it turn into a particular bugbear of mine.)