Showing all posts about technology
Elon Musk shares whiteboard outline of Twitter 2.0
20 November 2022
Jason Cartwright, writing for TechAU, analyses a whiteboard image posted by Elon Musk following the recent contentious Twitter HQ code review. Long story short, coders who failed to attend would no longer be regarded as Twitter employees. Following the meeting though, Musk shared outlines of plans to rebuild the social media service’s platform, which is being dubbed Twitter 2.0:
It’s rare to see content from inside the company, especially anything to do with current and future development items. While Musk has hinted at potential improvements to the platform, the whiteboard photo does reveal some more information.
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Elon Musk, social media, technology, Twitter
The Fanzine Scan Hosting Project preserving fanzines fanfiction
18 November 2022
For every well-known work of fiction, there’s an extended universe behind it, called fanfiction. Look at the likes of Star Trek, The Twilight Saga, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and a whole lot more, it’s all there. Stories written by adoring fans of the original books, films, and TV shows, expanding on the creator’s canon, and exploring other weird and wonderful story arcs.
At times not all of these works are sanctioned by the series creator, but that won’t always stop the most die-hard of adherents. If they think there’s a story to tell, they’ll write it. But while works residing online, in electronic format, are likely to be preserved — at least for now — publications such as zines, or fanzines, which usually exist solely in paper format, are another matter.
The Fanzine Scan Hosting Project, an initiative of An Archive of Our Own, or A03, one of the most extensive online repositories of fanfiction, along with a number of collaborators, aims to preserve physical fanzines, and eventually make as many as possible available in electronic format online. Needless to say it’s a big job, but progress is being made:
Over the last year or so, however, Open Doors’ Fan Culture Preservation Project has expanded, finally giving them room to launch the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project. So far, they’re making their way through the backlog of scans that Zinedom has already accumulated, which Dawn estimates is “a couple thousand.”
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books, history, technology, writing
Digital e-books may have a shorter shelf life than paper books
18 November 2022
This might come as a surprise to anyone building an electronic collections of books. As technologies, and even computer operating systems evolve, older versions of e-books may become unreadable, possibly after only a decade or two. A certain amount of on-going reprocessing and reformatting is required to keep them up to date, and readable on newer devices:
For those of us tending libraries of digitized and born-digital books, we know that they need constant maintenance — reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read. Fortunately this is what libraries do (if they are not sued to stop it). Publishers try to introduce new ideas into the public sphere. Libraries acquire these and keep them alive for generations to come.
I won’t go saying paper editions win out though. The world’s print books — even if they have a long shelf life, possibly spanning centuries — will eventually decay. Digital titles that are updated as time goes by will potentially be with us in many centuries time. There may be not too many paper books — aside from those in museum display cases — that will go that sort of distance.
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Algorithm says nanny murderer Lord Lucan in Brisbane
8 November 2022
British aristocrat Lord Lucan who is alleged to have murdered Sandra Rivett, his family’s nanny, in London in 1974, is said — by an algorithm — to be living in the Queensland capital, Brisbane.
A pensioner living in suburban Brisbane is runaway murderer Lord Lucan, says a leading computer scientist who claims state-of-the-art facial recognition technology has positively identified the elderly man as the missing British aristocrat.
While many believe Lucan died soon after killing Rivett and attacking his wife, speculation has endured that he remains alive, and living in hiding somewhere. Everyone, it seems, turns up in Australia…
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Can you imagine a web without GIFs when they are gone?
13 October 2022
Once the mainstay of motion design during the early days of the web, GIFs appear to be on the way out, and may soon be non-existent. I shall miss them. Some of them that is.
GIFs are old and arguably outdated. They’ve been around since the days of CompuServe’s bulletin-board system, and they first thrived during the garish heyday of GeoCities, a moment in history that is preserved by the Internet Archive on a page called, appropriately, GifCities.
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Reading the future in the cracks of your smartphone screen
21 September 2022
Image courtesy of Jan Kuss/(Instagram).
I wouldn’t go doing this deliberately… there must be better ways to learn what the future holds, like waiting until it happens perhaps. Nonetheless, there may be a way to glimpse your future in the cracks of a smashed smartphone screen, and it’s known as smashomancy.
A smartphone screen is, of course, a veritable semantic orchard of icons and affordances, titles and statuses and means of navigation. But to find true insight we must look beyond the legible to more uncertain and chaotic territory. True, a smartphone in its role as a nexus of communication is an endless stream of signal and noise, but that is extrinsic to its embodied self. To truly understand its meaning, we must understand its physical nature.
Your future is indeed in the palm of your hand.
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Craigslist keeping it simple and the same for twenty-five years
21 September 2022
When I started designing websites back in the day, you were lucky to get a couple of months out of a look. With new web technologies, and design ideas and trends, constantly emerging, it was necessary to redesign almost monthly*. We’re talking personal sites here, but in the late nineties, they were the closest thing an aspiring web designer had to a social media presence, or something like LinkedIn.
I’m certain though there are any number of still active websites that have not changed in the last twenty-five years or so, and American classified adverts site Craigslist is among them. Speaking recently to PCMag writer Emily Dreibelbis, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, says staying the same is the best way to serve their users:
Because that serves people better. I’ve learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don’t need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day.
* or what felt like every month.
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Digital nomads soon able to work tax free in Indonesia
17 September 2022
People who need little more than a laptop and an internet connection for their work, and want to live in Indonesia, will soon be able to apply for the newly introduced Digital Nomad Visa. Presently the work-permit will allow remote workers to spend six months in Indonesia tax free, though the Indonesian government is considering extending the visa to five years.
The Indonesian Government has just announced the proposed introduction of a brand new ‘Digital Nomad Visa’, with them looking to welcome three million lucky freelancers to their tropical shores for a five-year working visa. This is excellent news for remote workers, allowing visa holders to stay in paradise long-term on an international income, all without having to pay any taxes to the Indonesian government.
While the digital nomads may not be paying taxes, much of the money they earn will be spent locally, boosting businesses in the areas workers choose to reside in.
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Make mechanical versions of electric circuits with Spintronics
8 September 2022
This looks like fun for young and old alike. Hailed as the first physical equivalent of electronics, Spintronics, a game recently developed by Upper Story, can emulate just about any existing circuit configuration.
Players feel the pull of voltage and see the flow of current as they discover electronics in a tangible and deeply intuitive way, using the first physical equivalent of electronics ever built.
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All about bringing public electric vehicle chargers to Australia
5 September 2022
With electric vehicles (EV) set to sky-rocket in popularity in Australia, there has to be plenty of business and start-up opportunities in the sector. Publicly available EV charging stations, which I wrote about the other day, would be one of them.
Melbourne tech-writer Anthony Agius was behind two companies whose aim was to install and operate charging stations across Australia, and in a detailed article, he outlines what he discovered about making them available for anyone to use.
The point of this post isn’t to analyse why I’m not an EV charging mogul with dozens of stations making mad profits around the country. The point is to dump everything I’ve learned about this topic into a single place so even if I don’t make anything out if, maybe someone else will stumble across it, learn something and do what I couldn’t. Even if one extra EV charger gets installed because of this post, it’ll be an improvement over my pathetic attempt.
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