Showing all posts tagged: technology
Cars with manual transmissions are becoming fewer and fewer
27 August 2022
Cars with manual transmissions are sadly going the way of the dodo… but who am I to complain, so is working from an office block for many people.
I learned to drive in a manual, though I did my first drive in an automatic, around an empty shopping centre parking lot one Sunday afternoon. At one point I could change gears on a manual without using the clutch, it was quite easy once you knew what to do.
As Matt Crisara writes for Popular Mechanics though, automatic transmission vehicles are becoming better, and, really, manuals are quite needless.
Being able to drive a manual car is about so much more than the simple joy of being in control of a machine. Most of my sense of accomplishment came from navigating the steep curve of learning how to drive a stick shift with my dad at my side — it’s not something you master overnight. I’m not ashamed to mention that it took me a few sessions in a parking lot to get the fundamentals down. Now, fewer kids are going to have this chance as manuals become harder and harder to find.
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The intrusive nature of mobile phones predicted in 1920
22 August 2022
William Haselden, a British cartoonist who died in 1953, quite comically foresaw the potential nuisance mobile phones could cause, were they ever to be invented. At the time Haselden drew this cartoon, possibly around 1920, landline phones were still something of a novelty, with Americans sharing one such device between ten people.
I’m not sure when mobile, or portable, phones were first envisaged — likely relatively early in the piece though, even if their development took decades — but I doubt Haselden thought they would ever come into existence. Instead I suspect he was foreshadowing the vexatious nature of a communications device permitting a caller to contact another person at any time they wished, whether the person being called liked it or not.
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illustration, smartphones, technology, William Haselden
Publisher to profit from sale of used textbooks sold as NFTs
8 August 2022
Publishers may soon see more return from the sale of second-hand electronic books, if a proposal by British educational and textbook publisher Pearson to sell their titles as NTFs is successful.
Educational books are often sold more than once, since students sell study resources they no longer require. Publishers have not previously been able to make any money from secondhand sales, but the rise of digital textbooks has created an opportunity for companies to benefit.
NFTs confer ownership of a unique digital item by recording it on a decentralised digital register known as a blockchain. Typically these items are images or videos, but the technology allows for just about anything to be sold and owned in this way.
At the moment few digital books are sold as NFTs, with the exception of some self-published novels, though this may change in the wake of Pearson’s proposal.
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Who are the famous people who make your town notable
3 August 2022
Finnish map designer and geographer Topi Tjukanov has created Notable people, a global map showing the birth places of well-known and famous people. Use your mouse to drag the globe to the desired location, and the scroll wheel to zoom in and out.
Using data from Morgane Laouenan et al., the map is showing birthplaces of the most “notable people” around the world. Data has been processed to show only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank.
The nearest listed notable person born close to my present location is Australian film and TV actor Steve Bisley, who starred in the original Mad Max movie in 1979.
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geography, Steve Bisley, technology
Somerton Man identified as Carl ‘Charles’ Webb
3 August 2022
Derek Abbott, a professor at the University of Adelaide, claimed last week to have identified the so-called Somerton Man, perhaps bringing a close to one of the most intriguing, and lingering, Australian mysteries of the twentieth century.
In December 1948, the body of a man thought to be about forty, was found at Somerton beach in Adelaide, capital of South Australia. His body showed no sign of trauma. He was not carrying any identification, nor were there missing person reports for anyone matching his description.
In the months following his death, a suitcase containing some possessions, was located, but offered no clues as to who he was. A scrap of paper, bearing the words tamam shud, was found concealed in clothing the man owned. The fragment was later found to have been torn from a page of a book of poems titled Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, originally written in the twelfth century.
It was all enough to send the rumour mill into overdrive. People variously believed Somerton Man to be a spy, a displaced war veteran who’d made his way to Australia, or a jilted lover who’d presumably somehow taken his own life at the beach one night.
South Australian police exhumed Somerton Man’s body in May 2021, to further their investigation, but Abbott had been making progress separately. Working with Colleen Fitzpatrick, an American genealogist, he concluded the man to be Carl “Charles” Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne.
While mystery still surrounds the circumstances of his death, Abbott believes Webb may have travelled to Adelaide to see his ex-wife, who moved there after the pair separated several years prior.
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Australia, history, technology
Beat writer’s block and meet deadlines with AI writing apps
28 July 2022
Far from usurping writers of fiction, AI writing programs, such as Sudowrite, could aid authors, particularly those bogged down with writer’s block, and facing looming deadlines, says Josh Dzieza, writing for The Verge:
Lepp, who writes under the pen name Leanne Leeds in the “paranormal cozy mystery” subgenre, allots herself precisely 49 days to write and self-edit a book. This pace, she said, is just on the cusp of being unsustainably slow. She once surveyed her mailing list to ask how long readers would wait between books before abandoning her for another writer. The average was four months. Writer’s block is a luxury she can’t afford, which is why as soon as she heard about an artificial intelligence tool designed to break through it, she started beseeching its developers on Twitter for access to the beta test.
In other words, AI writing programs could act as ghostwriters, of a sort, who are paid — in kind at least — but never acknowledged for their contribution.
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For short work breaks fast fun cross platform puzzle games
25 July 2022
Cambridge based British software engineer Simon Tatham, creator of PuTTY, which I once required the services of, has also made available a collection of puzzle-like games, designed to be played for two to three minutes at a time.
I wrote this collection because I thought there should be more small desktop toys available: little games you can pop up in a window and play for two or three minutes while you take a break from whatever else you were doing.
As Tatham notes, few of the games were actually invented by him, but he has made them playable across several computer platforms, notably Windows, Apple Mac, and Unix.
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Drawing program interfaces from the 1980s and 90s
15 July 2022
Here’s a truly awesome blast from the past… a Twitter thread, by California based data storyteller RJ Andrews, with images of drawing program software used on computers in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
The image above is the Micrografx Windows Graph interface, which was released in 1987, used to create graphs and charts on computers running the Microsoft Windows 1 operating system, which launched in 1985.
While some people might say the bold fluorescent pink, green, and yellow colours against the black background clash, the more you look at them, the better they begin to look.
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The Global Music Vault, saving music for 10000 years
15 July 2022
Image courtesy of the Global Music Vault.
Much like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault which is intended to preserve plant seed specimens in the event of happenings such as natural disasters, wars, sabotage, or disease, the Global Music Vault, an initiative being supported by Microsoft, will safeguard and preserve the sonic arts for up to ten thousand years.
With the abundance of music in a variety of formats, vinyl, digital optical disc data storage (i.e. compact disc), and digital audio for instance, why is there a need take such a step in the first place? The thing is, none of these storage formats last all that long:
By Microsoft’s estimation, hard drives protect data for five years before they can go bad. Tape lasts about a decade, while CDs and DVDs can make it as long as 15 years before their contents are at risk of becoming illegible. While we seem to live in an age of progress — the iPhone can store thousands of songs in your pocket and stream countless more from the cloud — even in the best of cases, those songs will deteriorate millennia earlier than hieroglyphics carved into stone by the ancient Egyptians.
To conserve the music stored in the music vault — which incidentally will be located not far from the Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen — compositions may be etched into quartz glass, using technology developed by Microsoft to store data as 3D patterns in a glass platter:
Microsoft begins with quartz glass, a high-quality glass that features a symmetrical molecular structure, which makes it far more resilient to high temperature and pressure than the glass in your home’s windows (and, like all glass, it’s immune to the electromagnetic scrambling of nuclear weapons). Then, using a femtosecond laser — a laser that can fire for one quadrillionth of a second — Microsoft etches information as 3D patterns into the glass. Once this data is stored, another laser reads the quartz, as machine learning algorithms translate the pattern back into music, movies, or any other digital information.
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Quick and quiet e-bikes assisting Ukrainian defenders
15 July 2022
Ukrainian soldiers have been using e-bikes, specially modified to carry light anti-tank weapons, in the defence of their country from Russian invaders. The e-bikes allow defenders to move both quickly, and crucially, quietly, to positions where they are needed.
Soldiers on electric bikes have been spotted across Ukraine since the early days of the war, mostly on ELEEK brand bikes. e-bikes are fast and, critically, much quieter than a gas powered bike. They allow soldiers to perform quick guard patrols or move swiftly into position.
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