The first six months of Vision Pro by Michael Ball

Showing all posts tagged: technology

The first six months of Vision Pro by Michael Ball

27 August 2024

Matthew Ball, writing about the first six-months of Apple’s spatial computing, and — whether Apple likes it or not — virtual reality headset, Vision Pro:

The Vision Pro is clearly the most ambitious of their product launches since the iPhone, the first to be wholly developed under the purview of CEO Tim Cook (though various head-mounted display prototypes were underway as early as 2006), and reporting suggests that its viability was controversial internally (with some employees arguing that Head-Mounted Displays (“HMDs”) impart harm by isolating its wearers from other people and, ultimately, the world around them).

People have commented on this. Vision Pro might be an incredible device, but the experience while using it could only be described as immersive. Of course Apple did not spend almost a decade, and billions of dollars, developing Vision Pro, without that occurring to them.

There has also been discussion about less than impressive sales numbers. But the Vision Pro is a niche device. The cheapest models in Australia presently start at six thousand dollars, so no one, including Apple, will ever be expecting them to fly off the shelves. At least not in the same way as the iPhone. But if Vision Pro is of interest to you, Ball’s deep-dive article is well worth reading.

RELATED CONTENT

technology, trends

iOS 18 will bring distraction free browsing to parts of the web

16 August 2024

News sites seem to be the worst, but they’re not alone*. You want to read a news item, but are assailed by a plethora of interfering popups of some sort. But a new feature in the soon to be released iPhone operating system, iOS 18, for Apple’s Safari browser, is a step in the right direction:

As the name suggests, Distraction Control is designed to cut down on distracting elements from articles and webpages, such as sign in windows, cookie preference popups, newsletter signup banners, autoplay videos, and more.

This is welcome news for anyone simply trying to browse the web, and obtain information. I’m not sure what other platforms (e.g. Android) have a similar feature, but distraction-free technology (not to be confused with ad blocking), needs to be more widespread than it is at present.

The other option, of course, for a distraction-free web experience, is to browse #IndieWeb, or independent websites, such as this one, for instance.

* we were looking for some chairs to buy, but gave up after three vendor websites threw an array of popups at us. We just want to buy furniture, leave us be.

RELATED CONTENT

technology, trends

Threat of AI, demise of blogging, the world in February 2015

15 August 2024

Since re-booting disassociated in May 2022, I’ve been slowly (incredibly slowly) restoring selected posts from the previous version of the blog that was online between 2007 and 2017. The restored posts are tagged legacy, and also include a few posts written prior to 2007, going back to 2003.

On checking as I typed this, I see there are presently seventy-four of the old posts back here now. Considering there were about twelve thousand posts originally, bringing back selected older posts is taking quite some time. I don’t intend to restore every last old post though. Some of them are now quite irrelevant and out-dated, and many include an abundance of dead links and long gone URLs.

If twelve-grand seems a lot, many posts were link-blog style, one-sentence affairs. My priority, when time permits, is bring back more of the article-type posts, such as film reviews. Anyway, to get to my point, a couple of posts I restored from February 2015, a mere nine-and-a-half-years ago now, still seem surprisingly relevant today.

One was about an apparently AI powered then Twitter account, called INTERESTING_JPG, which, although now inactive, remains online. INTERESTING would “look” at popular photos, and describe what it saw. INTERESTING’s accuracy was so-so, to the say the least. While AI is certainly a trending topic today, the concept has of course been present for a long time.

The other post I restored, which was originally published on 16 February 2015, was about the apparent demise of blogging, and personal websites. This not quite four years after the #IndieWeb movement, which is very much based on blogs and personal websites, was founded in 2011.

So there we have it. AI and #IndieWeb, two ideas that been with us for quite some time, but are, in a sense, making waves today.

Create an AI version of yourself on Instagram to do who knows what

14 August 2024

Maybe back in 2006, I was in a discussion with then Australian web designer Jen Leheny, on the then forums of the Australian INfront, a design community we had helped establish in the late 1990’s, about WordPress. I was still using static HTML files to run disassociated, but was considering migrating to the then much in-trend CMS.

Jen said something like: “WordPress is working for me while I sleep.” I was sold. A short time later, I commenced the process of converting disassociated to WordPress.

Fast forward to 2024. A new tool by Meta, being trailed only in America at present, allows Instagram (IG) users to create an AI version of themselves. This… clone, will, says Alex Heath, writing for The Verge, allow IG users “to talk directly with humans in chat threads and respond to comments on their author’s account.”

This will, no doubt, allow harried IG users, influencers particularly, to do two things at once. Create more content. Network. Attend meetings. Take of the business side of their operation. They’ll also be able to sleep, soundly I imagine, in the knowledge the AI version of themselves is working on their behalf, at the same time.

That sounds like the good news, the pluses, of the new technology. As to the downsides. Where do we begin? What, for instance, if an IG AI avatar suggests a follower do something inappropriate, or unlawful? What responsibility might the (human) IG account holder have in that event?

This comes back to what a lot of people see as the incorrect application of AI technologies, including American author Joanna Maciejewska, who would prefer AI did her housework, not her writing. Any IG AI “assistant” should have the same purpose. Shouldn’t the technology be working behind the scenes, rather than taking centre stage?

Seven thousand five hundred tabs open in Firefox, a new world record?

14 August 2024

A dedicated Firefox web browser fan had nearly seven thousand five hundred browser tabs open, all at the same time, at one point. And maybe still does.

Seven thousand five hundred?

I feel I’m lucky to have seventy-five tabs, no, half that number really, open, across the three browsers I run, which include Firefox. That paltry number seems to strain my system. But in excess of seven-thousand open tabs is good going, if you can do it. I’d probably forget what I’d open after a time.

RELATED CONTENT

humour, technology

Who needs LinkedIn when you can network at music festivals?

7 August 2024

Networking tips for music festivals, by Harry Carr:

Don’t make the mistake that most people make and switch off as soon as you reach Paddington. Maximise your train journey by reaching out to your extended network, to see if they are going to Glastonbury Music Festival. If there’s a speaker or business guru you admire on the conference circuit, there’s a good chance he’s being dragged along by his girlfriend, who is half his age. Drop him an email and ask him if he wants to meet up for coffee. You should aim to send between 100-150 emails on the train.

Via Things Magazine.

AND… also seen at Things, London Flipped, said to be the first full-size map of London drawn upside-down. It might seem weird, but there’s nothing strange about it at all: this is what London looks like from Australia, don’t you know…

disassociated turns twenty-one again, sort of

6 August 2024

This is — again: sort of — /timeline page content, which seems to be a bit popular on InterWebs and IndieWeb at the moment.

Today — or rather last Sunday 4 August 2024 — does not really mark the twenty-first birthday of disassociated. That would’ve been back in 2018, given the first non-blog inception of this website went online in 1997. But, the oldest, presently published blog post, dates back to Monday 4 August 2003. A post about the Windows Operating System (OS), NT4, that I’d been forced to stop using, after upgrading my then computer.

I had a few nice things to say about Windows OS’s back then, quite the contrast to the present time. Ever since properly rebooting disassociated in May 2022*, I’ve gradually been restoring selected old posts from the early days. The post I wrote twenty-one years ago, predates content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, and was instead written onto a static HTML page.

In 2007, as I was preparing to migrate to WordPress, I spent several months copy and pasting several years of “blog” posts onto a template, I would later upload into my first WordPress database. WordPressing, was the term I used to describe that process. But anyway, there we have it. Twenty-one years (unless I restore even older posts, and there’s one or two), of blog posts at disassociated.

But then again, who doesn’t like turning twenty-one a few times?

* though I’d sort of been back since September 2021.

RELATED CONTENT

blogs, design, history, technology

Only some search engines can access and index Reddit content

30 July 2024

Google, and Brave Search, are apparently the only search engines permitted to crawl Reddit, and index content published there. Other search engines, including Bing and Duck Duck Go, are presently being prevented from accessing the “front page of the internet” forum and discussion website.

Reddit appears to be concerned that search engines other than Google and Brave may use content on their website for training AI chatbots. The move has nothing to do — or so we are told — with a sixty-million dollar deal between Google and Reddit, made earlier this year.

This deal precisely allows Google to use content published on Reddit to train its AI apps though. It seems like it’s ok to take Reddit content for these purposes, so long as you’ve stumped up the cash. I wonder if Reddit members, who wrote the content in the first place, see any of this money.

Tiny Awards 2024 shortlist announced, public voting open

24 July 2024

The shortlists for the 2024 Tiny Awards have been published. Now in their second year, the Tiny Awards honour “interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be.” Think the work of small, and independent creatives.

To be eligible, websites need to be non-commercial, and launched during, or after, June 2023.

Rotating Sandwiches — a website featuring images of rotating sandwiches, go and see for yourself — won the inaugural award in 2023. The 2024 winners — there are two categories, main award, and multiplayer — will be announced on Sunday 18 August 2024.

RELATED CONTENT

awards, design, IndieWeb, technology

Sometimes my personal website looks like a bad photo of me

17 July 2024

Stefan Bohacek writing on his Mastodon page:

The problem with redesigning your personal website is that it looks great for about a week, and then you start to hate it.

This is a problem of the ages. In the late 1990’s I’d redesign my websites (I had several back then) every few weeks. Or what felt like every few weeks. The need to constantly update came from the desire to look as good as the other ever-changing personal sites that were around then.

It was also necessary — you understand — to be up with the absolute latest design trends, and apply our own interpretations and variations of them to our websites.

For instance, does anyone remember, or know of, TV lines? See an example here (not my work). TV lines became de rigueur with fad-like ferocity in late 1999 I think. If you didn’t feature at least a few images with TV lines, you were no longer with the times, you were w-a-y behind them.

The notion that a website should be redesigned about every six months began to emerge, perhaps, in early 2000. The idea being some consistency in appearance was desirable, while not lasting forever. It also, mercifully, gave us time to focus on other things. Non web things, among them.

Today, the design of disassociated has barely changed in years. It’s been in a single column “note pad” format since, I don’t know 2009/2010? The “d” logo came along in around 2013. It changes colour now and then. I call the current inception the “fruit salad” logo. It’s been here for two years.

The overall site design feels a bit bare sometimes, but I like to keep things on the minimal side. Pictures — when I post them — are meant to stand out, and not be swallowed up by the design. Otherwise though, I don’t have much time presently to think about whether I like the look or not. It’s a bit busy elsewhere right now, and writing posts is really my main priority.

RELATED CONTENT

blogs, design, history, technology

« older posts

newer posts »