Tag: Technology

Eyes on the skies

From Geometric Analysis Reveals How Birds Mastered Flight:

Many of the somersaulting, spinning and plummeting maneuvers that birds have mastered aren’t ones that anyone would want to experience in a passenger aircraft. But uncrewed aerial vehicles, also known as UAVs or drones, are freer to make drastic maneuvers, and their increasing popularity for military, scientific, recreational and other uses is creating more opportunities for them to do so.

At the very least, drone-watching seems as if it’ll get more interesting1 as drones swoop in from an unexpected angle and bank hard at the last second to kill their speed and change their direction before landing with an attention-seeking flourish on the drone-pad next to your front door.

[Via Sentiers 230]

  1. Will Amazon’s drones play nice with other retailers’ drones when it comes to finding a perch, or will they get weirdly territorial about defending their (air)space? ↩

Excel eSports

If you watched ESPN2 during its stint last weekend as “ESPN8: The Ocho,” you may have seen some odd, meme-friendly competitions, including corgi racing, precision paper airplane tossing, and slippery stair climbing.

Or you might have seen “,” a tournament in which an unexpected full-column Flash Fill is announced like a 50-yard Hail Mary. […]

Having read Excel esports on ESPN show world the pain of format errors I feel a little bit better that even these Excel experts can occasionally find themselves screwing up and botching a formula’s reference when under time pressure. Mind, they’re making these mistakes in competition mode; what’s my excuse, when I’m in just the office, doing this stuff between answering phone calls and emails?

Excel makes juggling with data so easy to do that it’s possible to forget that it’s not always the best tool for the job.

[Via MetaFilter]

Put away

Hell, yes! The future needs files…

For many mobile users, files are like dinosaurs, a holdover from the bygone desktop era. Sure, they “work” but, they’re mostly there because, you know, ancient history. I’ve discussed this issue for the last 2 years and I usually get some version of “get over it grandpa”.

I’m not here to tell you exactly what should happen, but more what you should want. For me, it’s a travesty that people don’t understand why files are so powerful and more importantly, how they need to evolve for mobile. I want all OSs, including mobile ones, to properly support real files as they are amazing, inspiring, and possibly the future of how we build our digital future.

This is the biggest challenge Apple users are facing as Apple find themselves having to balance the needs of users of their various platforms as MacOS moves ever closer to the iOS way of doing things. Some future iteration of Siri might be clever enough to locate everything the user is looking for if it can talk to all the Apps and get them to query their own datastores for search results, but that’s a pretty dicey proposition and I’m not sure that’s the way to bet.1

Sidelining the creation of files to an option on the Share menu while your OS provides a lamentably weak Files app is definitely not the way to go. If creating iPadOS had been the genesis of a different approach to the needs of users that would be one thing, but using the Files app on iPadOS is just such weak sauce for anyone who used a halfway decent file manager on a Mac or Windows or Unix system.2

Also…

[The Mac…] created the “Desktop”, a temporary holding place for files. People needed folders for longer term storage but it was also powerful to have a temporary ‘working area’ for recent files. The original Mac even had a “Put away” command that would return a file from the Desktop back into its original folder location (sadly removed in OS X). This small bit of history shows how adding a tiny amount of metadata can have a significant positive impact on a user’s workflow.

I’d completely forgotten that “Put away” was ever a thing on the Mac desktop. Our computers are capable of this3 so why can’t they offer such useful and helpful features?

[Via adactio, via philgyford’s pinboard]

  1. Yes, I’m old. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong about this.  ↩

  2. I refer the honourable member to my previous footnote.  ↩

  3. Metadata is a wonderful thing!  ↩

Earth.fm

Earth.fm. Like Spotify / Apple Music / Amazon Music, but for nature soundscapes.

A nice soundscape while I’ve been at home today. Looking forward to trying it out at work when I’m back in the office tomorrow.

[Via swissmiss]

Dave Winer, Revolutionary

Dave Winer wants publishing platforms to stop locking writers into using the platforms’ own writing tools to compose content:1

I’d like to see someone like Substack or Medium, for example, who says “Write your stuff in your favorite writing tool, export it in Markdown, and give us the link. We’ll take it from there.”

That way you could:

  1. Use a tool that fits your writing style perfectly.
  2. Developers would be incentivized to create such tools.
  3. You could use more than one service, say use Substack to manage your mail list, and Medium to manage your web presence, and Facebook for discussion among your friends, Slack to discuss among your work colleagues. […]
  4. Great archival services could come about because they could be one of the services you cc on your writing.
  5. Service providers could make custom toolkits to make it easy for tools to adapt to this interface. […]
  6. Who knows what else will come about.

[…]

It’s amazing that we have this incredibly powerful network, but the business models of service providers protect their services by not allowing writers a choice in writing tools.

Everyone wants to make money and try to build an empire on the basis of their suddenly being an essential middle-man. Even if that entails complicating the task of providing access to (mostly text) files over a network, a process that the World Wide Web made a pretty decent start on resolving a couple of decades ago.

  1. Apologies to Dave Winer for the length of the quote from his original post, but I thought the points he was making about the implications of the basic concept he’s putting forward deserved to be spread far and wide. ↩

Some people

Let’s see how long it takes for Amazon Go-style technologies to spread to other retailers. How long will it take for the rest of us to learn from the attitudes of … some people.

(Normally my reaction would be that it’ll be a long time before such technologies get deployed anywhere I regularly shop, but given how keen local branches of supermarket chains have been to radically reduce the numbers of staff deployed on tills during opening hours I’ve a feeling I’ll be encountering this technology sooner than I imagine.)

[Via Memex 1.1]

The Future

Happy Valentine’s Day from Facebook:

Happy Valentine’s Day! Just logging in for a quick scroll? Take your time.

You’re not on here as much as you used to be. Still, we’ll never forget you. In fact, we at Facebook love celebrating the moments and people you’ve worked really hard to forget. So now that you’re here, please enjoy this picture of you and your ex-boyfriend from five years ago.

You really loved that wine bar. Look at how happy you were. And is it just us or is your body snatched in this pic? Do you still own that blouse? Oh, right, it doesn’t fit anymore. Just like your ex, it’s gone now. […]

So, which is the most depressing vision of a social life in the 21st century: Facebook as a bitchy friend, or Ericsson’s vision1 of a social life where your domestic appliances are apparently your only company after a dinner date falls through?


from comsicomsa on Vimeo.

[Facebook humour via The Overspill, Ericsson video via Sci-Fi Interfaces]

  1. From just over a decade ago. Back when having a robot vacuum cleaner was a sign we were living in the future. ↩

Insane and Ludicrous

Reading this article about The lost history of the electric car – and what it tells us about the future of transport raises an interesting question:

[Aas more people bought private cars…] electric vehicles took on a new connotation: they were women’s cars. This association arose because they were suitable for short, local trips, did not require hand cranking to start or gear shifting to operate, and were extremely reliable by virtue of their simple design. As an advertisement for Babcock Electric vehicles put it in 1910, “She who drives a Babcock Electric has nothing to fear”. The implication was that women, unable to cope with the complexities of driving and maintaining petrol vehicles, should buy electric vehicles instead. Men, by contrast, were assumed to be more capable mechanics, for whom greater complexity and lower reliability were prices worth paying for powerful, manly petrol vehicles with superior performance and range.

Given that electric vehicles require less maintenance and don’t necessarily have to offer Insane and Ludicrous modes for acceleration, will future generations of car see manufacturers offering electric vehicle models optimised for local, urban journeys?1 Or will that particular marketing opportunity be overtaken by the whole notion of owning a car giving way to subscribing to a transport service, so that the very idea of sinking serious amounts of cash into owning a car will seem as outlandish as the proposition of urban streets piled high with horse shit?

[Via Memex 1.1]

  1. Let’s assume that genuine self-driving vehicles are several generations away yet, whatever Elon Musk’s fans would like to believe. ↩