monday
monday
working in a conference room
working in a conference room
sometimes you turn on a screen and people are magically there
sometimes you turn on a screen and people are magically there
ifttt
Trying out ifttt (if this then that), a web service that lets you create your own automated tasks, triggers and actions from various social media and digital channels (email, sms, instagram, twitter, dropbox, etc). For example, you can create a task to save every new photo you take in instagram to dropbox. Love the idea.
Time Machine 020507
While backing up 1,274,742 items to Apple’s time capsule via time machine, I thought of the original The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and re-found this quote: Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.
Total Recall: Your E-Memory
I have a healthy obsession with self-documentary, data-streaming and collecting, so you can imagine my delight when Mark Krynsky twittered that he had just posted about 75-year-old Gordon Bell, lifestream pioneer, who was covered in the Wired article, Microsoft Researcher Records His Life in Data. Over the course of a lifetime, humans take in more […]
One in four songs sold in U.S. is from iTunes
Reading this and re-realizing that I live in a bubble of technological affluence: One in four songs sold in U.S. is from iTunes NPD MusicWatch’s report indicates that audio CDs remain the dominant format, responsible for 65 percent of all music sold in the first half of 2009. But digital music, which makes up the […]
My First Citizen/Social Media Inauguration
Yesterday’s inauguration of President Barack Obama was significant in so many ways. For web geeks like me, it’s the first time citizen media played such a significant role during an inauguration. Given Obama’s grassroots campaign and his message of citizen responsibility, this is only apropos. Numerous netizens, web sites, blogs, video sites and social networks […]
On the Go
I’ve been tweaking the design of my site behind the scenes for the last few weeks and made the changes live tonight. Of course, there will be continuous tweaks, but I feel purged! Overall, I’ve tried to reduce clutter and simplify the structure and presentation – a proper cleansing. It’s an evolution but also a […]
New Interface Paradigms
It still strikes me as fascinating that the iPhone and the OLPC (or XO) laptop were both released in the last year, and yet they’re such radically different “computing” and communication devices and concepts. I’ve spent some time playing simultaneously with the iPhone, the XO or OLPC laptop, and my regular computer combo – an […]
Now Your Plants Can Call or Twitter You
Botanicalls is a project by students at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program. It’s “a system that was developed to allow plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the Botanicalls network needs water, it can call a person and ask for exactly what it needs. When people phone the plants, the […]
Thoughtful Reduction and the Miniaturization of Expression
As I was designing for a client web application today, I kept living through John Maeda’s first law of simplicity: thoughtful reduction. The goal was to design a new comments system for parts of the site so members were more likely to leave little notes for each other. In order to make it fun and […]
My OS Doesn’t Work Like My Mind
I’m still thinking about simplicity/minimalism vs. experiential and emotional experiences. If memory is strongly attributed to adrenaline, then shouldn’t we design for optimal emotional attachment? Or, do we design so it’s “so simple” that you don’t have to think about it? The folder-file organizational structure of current operating systems (OS) does nothing to trigger emotional […]
Self-Sousveillance
I came across this post while looking for information on attention recording and one of the paragraphs regarding self-documentary really resonated with me. Greg Yardley writes: I’m also running the Attention Recorder because I’m afraid of forgetting. When I studied Russian history, some time ago, I was struck by just how little remained of people, […]
Fast vs. Slow
In our accelerated culture, I can think of a particular Devo song and have it downloaded from a music site within seconds. This instant gratification is in contrast to other desires: eg. the slow food movement, craft, longevity. What things do you want instantly and what do you want to take your time with? I […]
Tell it All
I’ve had phases where I was really into digital video. In the early 2000s, I shot a lot of footage of my daily life with my one-chip Sony DV cam and turned them into web clips of abstract scenes set to music. Then there was a period where I shot documentary video at electronic music […]
The Web 2.0 Movement Described
While there have been many seminal posts on Web 2.0 in the last several months, I strongly recommend reading “Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?” by Bryan Alexander, Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). Thanks to Bryan for the mention of eHub at […]
Foldera Simplifies Your Digital Life
These days, like many of you, my life is filled with electronic communications, whether that’s email, chat, collaborative project management, mobile messages, or other data sources. I’ve written about this in the past. On any given day, I spend hours on communications and between my work as Ideacodes, eHub, and personal communications, I pretty much […]
Twenty Years Later: No Longer Just a Hobby
Today turns out to be the twenty year anniversary of when George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs. In the post, “February 3, 1986: Divorce, Mogul Style,” Chris Seibold tells how Lucas decided to “see a smallish piece of his Lucas Film empire” to raise cash to settle his divorce. Given Lucas’ predicament, Steve Jobs […]
The Future Hasn’t Arrived Yet
I came across an old blog post of mine that caused a double-take. The post, titled “One-Screen Access to Your Life” isn’t about Netvibes or another Web 2.0 application, but cites a story at the New York Times from November 2002. Yale computer scientist David Gelernter is glad that the Microsoft trial is behind us, […]
Kevin Kelly: Out of Control
Though it was written more than ten years ago, this caught my attention and seemed particularly relevant again. From Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. As we make our machines and institutions more complex, we have to make them more biological in order to manage […]
Info-bits in Flux
In a recent blog post at O’Reilly, Giles Turnbull writes, “A while ago, I thought I’d try an experiment: could I organise all my work, all my personal stuff, all my writing, in one huge text file?” You may think he’s crazy, but my first thought was “Cool! Another geek like myself who keeps everything […]