In writing The Missing Building Blocks of the Web, Anil Dash reminds us of the future we’re missing out on, the future where the web is for publishing stuff on a human scale: Though the world wide web has been around for more than a quarter century, people have been theorizing about hypertext and linked… Continue reading Small pieces, very loosely joined
Category: Uncategorized
WALL-E, revisited
Seeing WALL-E BUT IN 7 DIFFERENT GENRES – especially the Jony Ive / Apple Keynote variant – serves as a reminder of the power of trailers (and clever editing) to sell us on a film, but mostly just makes me want to watch WALL-E again for the first time in a few years.[note]Was it really… Continue reading WALL-E, revisited
Hybrids
Digital Collage Artist Creates Weird and Wonderful Animal Hybrids From a sealion/horse creature named a Horseal to a Labrador puppy/albatross combo called a Labratross, Fredriksen renders his weird and wonderful critters by first finding two images that go well together. “The angle has to be right, and it helps a lot if the skin/fur textures… Continue reading Hybrids
Mark Zuckerberg’s 14 year apology tour
Zeynep Tufekci on Why Mark Zuckerberg’s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook: At a minimum, Facebook has long needed an ombudsman’s office with real teeth and power: an institution within the company that can act as a check on its worst impulses and to protect its users. And it needs a lot more employees whose… Continue reading Mark Zuckerberg’s 14 year apology tour
Fribo
The idea behind Fribo seems to me to be much more palatable than the prospect of every household getting an internet-connected microphone that broadcasts details of everything within earshot to a central server: When a Fribo in your home hears a noise that it recognizes, it sends a message to another Fribo in your friend’s… Continue reading Fribo
TV catch-up: back soon
Apologies if posting falls away over the next few days. I find myself playing catch-up with a couple of TV programmes that are both due to return to our screens later this year and consequently my time for web browsing is a bit limited between, say, now and the weekend. The first show, courtesy of… Continue reading TV catch-up: back soon
Steven Bochco, R.I.P.
Steven Bochco, whose active years came just a bit too early for him to pick up the accolades he deserved for setting the stage for modern TV drama, has passed away. It’s easy to forget now just how different Hill Street Blues was when it first showed up on our screens: By conveying the sheer… Continue reading Steven Bochco, R.I.P.
Focus
From Bored Panda: Aluminum foil looks pretty boring. It is used for packaging, insulation, cooking… and making really shiny balls that appear to have no real purpose, apparently. That’s right, thanks to a Japanese jeweler, the whole country became obsessed with refining these metal leaves, and we aren’t sure how to react. Having lived through… Continue reading Focus
Beware of the Leopard
I know this isn’t exactly breaking news, but there’s a small part of me that almost admires how thoroughly Amazon hide away the account-closing option [note]Strictly speaking, there is no account-closing link on their web site: Amazon insist that their customer speaks/chats to a Customer Service representative before they’ll let their customer instruct the Customer… Continue reading Beware of the Leopard
Reconstructed
The one disappointment I have with Expedia’s 7 ancient ruins around the world, reconstructed is that the ruin I’m closest to and most familiar with (Milecastle 39 at Hadrian’s Wall) doesn’t really match up to the other sites, size-wise or spectacle-wise. The entire wall is another matter, but the reconstruction of one fort just doesn’t… Continue reading Reconstructed