To which I’d add the choices:
They are all from the USA
They all have incredibly bad shoes
Last(.fm) to the party
This last week I’ve been using Last.fm an awful lot.
I know I must be in the tail of the adoption curve on this (hey, I’m an old married man now, I’m allowed!) but I’ve really been enjoying it as a source for new music.
I type in three ‘established’ bands I’ve heard of, and generally the profile radio option returns a continuous stream of acts that I’ve never heard of, or don’t own much of – but nevertheless enjoy.
The interface design makes me wince each time I visit though. I might take a crack at an alternative Last.fm interface in the next week or so, after using it a bit more.
The future of worrying about your colleagues
Chris has bought a bluetooth GPS and hacked together a feature on his website which reports his current position via his mobile phone.
Checking this morning it reported this about 30 minutes ago:
Current location is
lat 60.016373,
long 24.916592.
map
Last seen at 05:55 GMT (probably 8:55 local), 05/10/04.
Moving at 1.8 mph.
I loved the fact that I could picture Chris walking at a brisk 1.8 mph… However, clicking on the “map” link gave me pause for thought. It seemed that Chris was in the drink, several kilometres into the Baltic from Helsinki!
I’m about to leave for work, so hopefully I will find a dry and safe Chris to report a bug to. More seriously, Chris makes a good point about his experiment for those working on ubiquitous computing:
“Unless I try it myself, I will never know what unexpected consequences publishing this information will have. Self-ethnography is not scientifically valid, but I think it’s one of the best ways of empathising with the problems new technology creates. If I won’t use it, I shouldn’t expect you to either.”
BBC News Online meets Wikipedia
A very nice hack by Stefan Magdalinski, which cross-references BBC News stories against the Wikipedia and, also blog entries on the subject matter retrieved from Technorati.
For instance, viewing this story on the happy news that Michael Howard is not thought to be prime-ministerial-material, returns wikipedia entries on Michael Howard, Tony Blair, the Conservative party*, the Liberal Democrats*, and the BBC!
A great proof of concept, which although BBC News have recently introduced their pretty good ‘google-news’-like Newstracker to some of their pages, introducing clearly-delineated links to blogs and the wikipedia would be far more engaging I believe.
(* the links go to ‘disambiguation pages’ due to there being multiple political parties by these names around the globe)
—-
UPDATE: Stefan exposes the thinking/ideology behind the hack, and it’s source-code here
The UI nightmare that is the London Bus Ticket Machine
London bus ticket machine, plus bus and bus user (to help explain the whole arcane process)
Originally uploaded by Tom Coates.
If there is one thing above all others that makes me growl at Mother London on my return visits, it is the London Bus Ticket Machine.
Tom Coates has done a great job in highlighting all of it’s deficiencies at his Flickr stream.
Ken Livingstone should be ashamed of this, London’s design community should lobby hard to fix it; and Londoners in general should rise up against it’s crappitude.
Cloud Atlas
This afternoon I finished reading “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell. Enjoyed it greatly, although I’m not sure I could tell you why. The structure delighted but the subtext eludes like a particularly entertaining bar of thoughtsoap in the nice warm bath of storytelling.
This passage, an aside by a minor character, stopped me cold:
Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history such as the sinking of the titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave.
Yet a virtual sinking of the titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction – in short, belief – grows ever ‘truer’. The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent.
⢠The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to ‘landscape’ the virtual past (he who pays the historian calls the tune)
⢠Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future too, We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up – a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone.
If you strike me down now…
matt goes packing crazy
Originally uploaded by ChrisDodo.
Maybe I’m getting too much into the DVD re-release spirit
The journey begins…
^ image from blam1.com
A long silence here, as I had been concentrating on getting married to Foe. It was a fantastic day, and now I am the happy husband of a wonderful woman, who when asked early on in our relationship whether she had seen the Star Wars movies, replied that – yes – she had seen one of them, called “Ewok Caravan of Courage”.
The DVDs of the original trilogy arrive this week.
The art of the twenty-year dropkick
From Ecyrd:
“Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don’t treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less. We invent new things like online role-playing -games, where the money does not come from duplication of bits (which cannot be stopped, regardless of your DRM scheme) but from providing experiences that the people want.
We saw that you were old and weak. So we took advantage of it: told you things that you wanted to hear so we could kick you in the head in twenty years. Some of us told you that the future is going to be interactive – what did you do? You started to think how to make interactive movies (CD-I, anyone?), not what it really means, while we wrote games and tried to understand the new mediums, not how to bolt it on onto old things.
We lied to you. And we apologize for that, but it was for the greater good. So we’re not the least bit sorry.
Signed: The Computer Industry”
» The Butt Ugly Weblog: We lied to you
UPDATE: So poor old Ecyrd is getting smacked by everyone, especially Les Auteurs. As Yoz points out, Ecyrd glosses over some very salient points when it comes to some of his supporting arguement, but I know some of the back story to what he was trying to say, so I think characterising him as some uberzealous /.’er who wants everything to be free is not quite right. I can’t speak for him, but when he’s done this riff before IRL, it’s been about the inability of the computer industry to deliver on it’s promises/appeasement to/of the content industry, while simultaneuously shafting the users and the artists – NOT that all art and creativity should be free. Maybe the humour and the message got lost in translation. I’ve personally seen Ecyrd pay an awful lot of money, over and over again for art and creative works, especially those of Hayao Miyazaki! What this does however illustrate is that both artists and users are pissed off at how broke this stuff is, and the current options presented by the Redmond/Anaheim axis. Joshua and Warren are two artists doing something about it at least. Let’s move on from the smackdowns to a militant, united front between smart artists like those guys, and smart users/technologists like Ecyrd that can and will present compelling alternatives to the technology companies. Like mine I hope.
Petafloptimism 