A great gallery by Larry Luckham, who captured the daily life at the Bell Labs datacenter he used to work for in the late 60s. What’s immediately noticeable is the number of women who used to work at the place. As a recent New York Times article explains, gender balance in tech used to be […]
How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color
Priceonomics: [Kodak] didn’t develop a better film for rendering different gradations of brown until economic pressure came from a very different source: Kodak’s professional accounts. Two of their biggest clients were chocolate confectioners, who were dissatisfied with the film’s ability to render the difference between chocolates of different darknesses. “Also,” Connor says, “furniture manufacturers were […]
‘People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean.’
The New York Times, in an article full of impressive photos: A conveyor that staff members call “the Cable Highway” moves the cable directly into Durable, docked in the Piscataqua River. The ship will carry over 4,000 miles of cable weighing about 3,500 metric tons when fully loaded. Inside the ship, workers spool the cable […]
Which Face is Real?
From the same people behind Calling Bullshit.
A simulation of the first ever web browser, inside your web browser
Jeremy Keith: Nine people came together at CERN for five days and made something amazing. I still can’t quite believe it. Coming into this, I thought it was hugely ambitious to try to not only recreate the experience of using the first ever web browser (called WorldWideWeb, later Nexus), but to also try to document […]
Sim Daltonism
Good app to simulate colour blindness on your Mac. There’s also an iOS counterpart, to see the world in front of you as a colour blind person. Since we’re on the subject, I recommend Contrast to quickly access WCAG contrast ratios from the menu bar.
Because Internet
Internet writing uses subtle punctuation choices to convey sarcasm and other tone of voice nuances. It’s not lazy. That’s Gretchen McCulloch, who wrote a book on how we write on the internet (it’s not out yet, but it’s available for preorders). You know, the fact that for example the fullstop in the context of a […]
Typeface: Lydian
Vox: In its first era of popularity, it was all pop and pulp, but now it seems reserved for the task of adding just the slightest bit of a smirk to extremely straight-faced endeavors: elegant magazines, important books, experimental theater, and $80 ceramic pipes. I didn’t realise how popular this typeface was until I stumbled […]
The Menu Bar
Jack Wellborn: The menu bar has been, and in my opinion remains, the best mechanism for providing familiarity, discoverability, and progressive disclosure in user interfaces on any platform. Even beyond the Mac, anyone who has clicked on a File menu in one platform has a pretty good shot at guessing where a Save command might […]
Noticing the model
Speaking of how the model of reality which a technology proposes can end up influencing and changing reality itself, here’s George Dyson: Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it /is/ human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, […]
Technologies we don’t have an artistic language for (yet)
From Robin Sloan’s newsletter, via Alan Jacobs: There’s something happening in fiction now, and to a degree in film and TV too: the time in which stories are set is scootching back, with writers fleeing to the safety of 1994 or 1987 or much earlier. Why? Because we didn’t have smartphones then. We didn’t have […]
Unexpectedly, reading a webpage on the Apple Watch isn’t as painful as I imagined it being. I’ll have to update my websites to render properly on it. It seems fairly simple: all it’s needed is yet another meta tag and some adjustments to the images.
Life online in China, Cuba, India and Russia
The Guardian: In Cuba, internet access is limited. But if you can’t get to the internet, there are ways of bringing it physically to you. It’s known as “el paquete semanal” or “the weekly packet”, an external drive loaded with thousands of hours of media content that is delivered to customers by enterprising ‘suppliers’ like […]
Your data is worth nothing
Individuals are unlikely to make much money by selling their own data, yet the same data in the aggregate can be worth a lot. Gregory Barber from Wired recently tried to put his facebook data on the market and managed to make a grand total of 0.3 cents. Tyler Cowen: The economics here are a […]
Bryan Boyer built an epaper display that shows movies at 24 frames per hour (instead than 24 frames/sec). He has called it Very Slow Movie Player (VSMP): it slows a movie down so that it can be experienced differently, so that its frames can be seen as paintings.
VSMP is an object that contains a Raspberry Pi computer, custom software, and a reflective ePaper display (similar to a Kindle), all housed inside a 3D printed case. Every 2.5 minutes a frame from the film stored on the computer’s memory card is extracted, converted to black and white using a dithering algorithm, and then communicated to the reflective ePaper display. […]
Films are vain creatures that typically demand a dark room, full attention, and eager eyeballs ready to accept light beamed from the screen or projector to your visual cortex. VSMP inverts all of that. It is impossible to “watch” in a traditional way because it’s too slow. In a staring contest with VSMP you will always lose. It can be noticed, glanced-at, or even inspected, but not watched.
Inspired by the project, Jon Bell built Slow In Translation: Lost in Translation, stretched out over the entire year as a webpage background.
RSS is undead
Techcrunch: Ultimately, all of media is prioritization — every site, every newspaper, every broadcast has editors involved in determining what is the hierarchy of information to be presented to users. Somehow, RSS (at least in its current incarnation) never understood that. This is both a failure of the readers themselves, but also of the protocol, […]
Always be streaming
Spotify, like Netflix, wants you to stream. That’s the point of a streaming service. To achieve that both platforms do two things: they make sure that the system nudges you into endless streaming (e.g. by auto-playing episodes) and they produce content which streams well. The Baffler argues that there is now a new type of […]