New Now Know How

I’ve said to some people that I was being given a car or three. Here’s the only one of them worth saving:

I’ve named it Harvey. You can learn more about Harvey over at my car blog.

I moderate a discussion forum. It is a continual (inner) struggle to let the forum be what the members want and to reign them in when they go too far.

Often there are crisis that arise because members can represent themselves to be other than they are or because people do not believe that people are who they say they are. Other problems come from people not acting on (through?) the forum as they would in real life. Being a car forum full of young guys, this often takes the shape of posturing and insults that would probably never be said aloud in a pub, or, if they were said, would end up in one or more bloody noses.

The participants of these electronically mediated virtual communities acquire skills that are useful for the virtual social environments developing in late-twentieth-century technologised nations. The participants learn to delegate their agencies to body representatives that exist in imaginal spaces contiguously with representatives of other individuals. The become accustomed to what might be called lucid dreaming in an awake state — to a constellation of activities much like reading, but an active and interactive reading, a participatory social practice in which the actions of the reader have consequences in the world of the dream or of the book. The older metaphor of reading undergoes a transformation in a textual space that is consensual, interactive, haptic, and that is constituted through inscription practices — the production of microprocessor code. The boundaries between the social and the “natural” and between biology and technology take on the generous permeability that characterises communal space in the most recent virtual systems.

From Allucquère Rosanne Stone The war of deire and technology at the close of the mechanical age, 1995, MIT Press, pg121

Pongmechanik is Pong re-created out of hardware. It uses a relay computer!

Pongmechanik is an electromechanical conversion of the classical game Pong. And instead of more realistic graphics, it ever accurately to reproduces the original Pong. The user is hardly changed. However the game breaks open the Black box: What takes place in the computer, becomes again perceptible and comprehensible.

The question before us today is: why are mobile phones chock full of functional goodness when cordless phones can’t or don’t do a lot of the things that a mobile phone does? My really old mobile phone has an easy to use addressbook, a multi-line screen and buttons that are easy to press. My cordless landline phone has a single line screen that is hard to read, big buttons that are difficult to press and a 10-position address book that only stores numbers. Also, a cordless landline phone only has to transmit to a base station that is inside your house while a mobile phone has to transmit to a base station that is 5 kilometers away! Yet, the mobile phone is smaller, has better buttons (well, mine does), has an easy-to-use address book, is light and slips into a pocket. Weird. Why do cordless phones mock us so?

Merlin hates his phone with a passion. So much so that he’s made a pod-cast about it.

At the top of Merlin’s hates about his (cordless, landline) phone:

• buttons that suck
• Bad UI for:
  • caller ID
  • address book entries
• form factor
• weighs as much as a toddler

Merlin, of course, uses his extreme hatred of his phone to segue into a life lesson. As he points out, most things in your life are temporarily not broken. So that you know what you hate about your object du jour Merlin’s advice is simple: make a list. If you’re on Mac, Merlin suggests Quicksilver (which is free). I would use wikidpad which isn’t at all the same thing as Quicksilver but it works for me.

The Guardian has a story on Wikipedia and the relative quality of its articles as judged by some experts in the field.

Samuel Pepys? 6/10. Bob Dylan? 8/10.

Not bad.

But, Haute Couture? 0/10. Why? Because, in part, according to Alexandra Shulman, Editor of Vogue, “every value judgment it [ie, the article] makes is wrong”.

Every value judgement it makes is wrong?

(via Matt Jones)

Rhys’ recent post on Manila reminded me of part of a story about the demise of the Atari Research Lab. The story takes up on the day of the close of the lab. At 8am word came down that a new boss of Atari was going to close the lab. People were scurrying about trying to rescue some of their personal belongings. Because they were quite annoyed, some large-scale pilfering took place, “chairs, bookcases, sofas, stereo systems and television sets”. This is my favourite part:

Amid the confusion, scurring, shouting and occaisional screams, Larry Bowles sauntered in the front entrance, walked up to the security guard with a comb wrapped in a wad of tissue paper, and said, “I need an equipment pass for this personal item I’m taking inside.”

“What is it?” the guard asked, pulling out the form.

“It’s a Dynair switcher,” said Bowles, naming an extremely expensive, high-end piece of video-editing gear.

“Okay,” the guard said, writing out the pass.

An hour or so later, Bowles came back downstairs lugging a huge, expensive, top-of-the-line Dynair video switcher, went to the door, and handed the guard the pass. “One Dynair switcher,” the guard said. “Personal property. Thank you.” Bowles put it in his car and drove away.

(from “The end of innocence, part I: Cyberdammerung at the Atari lab” in The war of desire and technology at the close of the mecanical age by Rosanne Allucquere Stone, 1996)

I’m probably just a little young to remember the heyday of the Apple II. I remember being somewhere between 8 or 10 and my mum bringing one home (she was a teacher and it was a loan over the holidays). Perhaps it was an Apple IIe. Anyway, it introduced me to computers, games, programming (to a degree) and, in combination with Lego is probably responsible for my geekiness even today.

Mr Jalopy (raconteur, renaissance man, hot-rodder, hacker), remembers the II and has a plea for Steve:

Build open systems. Build new business models. Apple owns the box, they should call the shots. Don’t pander to the media companies. Don’t adopt standards that handcuff us forever. Build for rocket scientists and teenagers.

Apple are still interesting, but their hints of expansion into a media-zaibatsu worries some people:

Now I ask, “Do you want to sell DRM’d Desperate Housewives episodes or do you want to change the world?”

Interesting:

Better Desktop

Better Desktop is a project dedicated to sharing usability data with Linux developers. Over the past year, we have conducted many usability tests on different parts of the KDE and GNOME desktops.

Tango

The Tango Desktop Project exists to create a consistent user experience for free and Open Source software with graphical user interfaces.

I’m tempted to try Red Hat Fedora but I’d need a massive PC upgrade to make it work.

Ricky writes that various companies in Australia are getting into biodiesel. Cool. The news.com.au article he writes about says that biodiesel is made from “plant oil or animal fat” which is true, but the problem with that is producing the raw material cheaply enough to make it worthwhile. By “cheaply” I don’t mean inexpensively in dollar terms but in energy terms.

According to “The Answer is Biodiesel” (also here) by Michael Briggs from the University of New England’s Biodiesel group, biodiesel is a lot better in Overall Energy Balance than the current vogue in alternative energy cars, hydrogen.

Briggs says (and shows) that producing biodiesel in large-scale commercial production is quite simple and efficient, particularly if the raw material comes from algae ponds rather than crops. It’s an interesting idea and one that’s convinced me that biodiesel is significantly better than hydrogen.

NPR (National Public Radio) has a cute story on speech recognition that, surprisingly, acknowledges the flaws as well as benefits.