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 […]
In Bob Burrough’s words (Burrough is the author of the demo):
An environmentally-lit interface takes information from the environment around the device and uses it to render physically-accurate things on the screen. It appears as if the lights around you are shining on the things on the screen. […]
This doesn’t mean you have to hold a flashlight over your phone to read the web in bed. What it means is, designers are empowered to use the design language of the physical world to design their interfaces. Gloss, glitter, glow-in-the-dark, or any other visual quality may be used. In the case of reading a website in a darkened room, the web designer may apply elegant backlighting or glow-in-the-dark treatments to maintain legibility. This is far superior to today’s method of making your phone act like a spotlight that shines in your face.
Learning China’s Forbidden History, So They Can Censor It
Chinese companies are outsourcing the censorship burden to third parties. The constant reviewing and blocking of content has to be done by humans; algorithms wouldn’t be able to catch everything. These “professional censors” — before they can start spending their days taking content down — have to be introduced to China’s forbidden history (think of […]
Learning to Love Robots
Patricia Marx, The New Yorker: The moment is equivalent, perhaps, to the juncture when fish crawled out of the sea and onto land. At the reception desk of a robot-staffed hotel in Japan, sharp-fanged, hairy-chested dinosaurs wearing bellhop hats and bow ties poise their talons at the keyboard; at a pizza restaurant in Multan, Pakistan, […]
Fine del .it
Quindi pare che questo sia l’ultimo post per un po’ in italiano. Che non mi sembrava giusto passare dall’italiano all’inglese senza dire una parola. Si fa una prova: che lo si scrive in inglese, il blog, per un po’. È una prova. Che poi magari non mi piace, magari non funziona, e si torna indietro. […]
The simplicity is the point of a tablet
Benedict Evans: The change in abstraction is the point, and adding touch to Windows or Mac misses the point. It’s like putting a mouse driver on DOS. It does make DOS better, and if DOS is all you have because you misssed GUIs, then of course you should do that. But it’s not the future. […]
I never used OpenDoc, but I find the idea behind it interesting:
The core idea of OpenDoc is to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing, or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provides a framework in which these components can run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component. These documents can then be opened on other machines, where the OpenDoc frameworks substitute suitable components for each part, even if they are from different vendors.
Instead of recreating the same set of features within each app — forcing the user to learn different ways of doing the same thing —, the idea was to abstract the core functionality of each software to make it available across the OS.
I think iOS gets closer to that but it’s probably the internet, more than anything else, that which helped unbundling the data from the underlying software — turning the latter into a service.
The Podcast Browser
I’m not a dedicated podcast follower — I listen to a few, handpicked, episodes rather than follow a specific show weekly, from start to end. Mainly — I don’t have the patience. For those of you like me, pay a visit to The Podcast Browser: they point you at episodes worth listening to.
More Than Death, Fear Decay
Robin Hanson: First, we should seriously worry about which aspects of our modern civilization system are rotting. Human culture has lasted a million years, but many parts of our modern world are far younger. If the first easiest version of a system that we can find to do something is typically be a rotting system, […]
🔐 This emoji won’t work in Safari’s title bar
Nice small detail: This emoji does not show in the title bar of Safari, presumably to prevent less-reputable sites pretending to be secure (encrypted using HTTPS) when they are not.
Is UTC enough?
Zach Holman: Years ago, I worked with a friend who had built a few scheduling calendars in a previous freelancing gig. Sometimes we’d be working on something that tangentially related to time, and as kind of a recurring in-joke he’d always tell me: Zach, whatever you do: just don’t ever build a calendar. Anyway, I’m Zach […]