Showing all posts about trends
Facebook operates a little differently in Australia
28 August 2024
David Swan, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald:
Rampant celebrity cryptocurrency scam ads are as Australian as Tim Tams, koalas or the Great Barrier Reef, according to American Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who says the tech giant’s lack of focus on Australia has let scams run wild on its platform compared with other markets.
It’s always nice to be treated differently, particularly by the world’s largest social network.
RELATED CONTENT
social networks, technology, trends
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
The asterism: the proposed new symbol for the fediverse. So say we
26 August 2024
The asterism, ⁂, a typographic symbol made up three stars, is being proposed as the new symbol for the fediverse. If the fediverse needs a symbol, it’s not half bad. Does the web have a symbol? I’m not even sure. But for those who came in late, the fediverse can be defined thusly:
The fediverse (commonly abbreviated to fedi) is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term fediverse is a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”.
If you have either a Masterdon account, a Threads page, or maybe a WordPress blog, then you’re part of the fediverse. Or, as Manton Reece prefers: the social web. To me though, the fediverse is really just a specific part of the web you can choose to go.
An asterism, as you can see in the first sentence, is actually three asterisks. In astronomy, asterisms are groupings of stars. Asterisms should not be confused with constellations though. Not a half bad representation of the fediverse then:
We suggest that it’s a very fitting symbol for the fediverse, a galaxy of interconnected spaces which is decentralised and has an astronomically-themed name. It represents several stars coming together, connecting but each their own, without a centre.
The asterism is not the first symbol for the fediverse though. That was a rainbow coloured pentagram, designed in 2018. An asterism, being a typographic symbol, is certainly easier to make use of. And if you are a Threads member, you may have seen Meta’s fediverse symbol. It is made up of a small inner circle, with a broken outer circle and two dots, placed opposite each other. When seen with a Threads post, it denotes that the same post has been shared to the fediverse.
But Meta’s use of this symbol has raised the ire of the fediverse.info crew:
This other icon was created by Meta in 2024 to represent the fediverse within their product Threads. It incorrectly depicts a centralised network, with a big planet in the middle and the rest around it. We also don’t believe that a large corporation that is joining in as late should be the one defining the iconography for the fediverse.
I’m not a fan of big corporates such as Meta attempting to impose their will upon the rest of us. But I also wonder whether these fediverse.info people — or “we”— as they often refer to themselves, are likewise placed to do the same. The about page at fediverse.info offers next to no information as to who they are, certainly nothing in-depth, and really only states their objective.
Their fediverse symbol proposal seems to have been, from what I can see, well received though.
RELATED CONTENT
social media, social networks, trends, typography
New Threads micro-blogging features, badge number Easter egg
19 August 2024
Coming soon to Threads on the website: the facility to save post drafts, and schedule posts. Post insights, similar I imagine, to those on Instagram, are also on the way, according to a recent thread by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Scheduling posts and saving drafts — at least if using Threads through the website — is going to be a bonus, especially for those who prefer to use the micro-blogging platform as their main web presence. I found the option useful when I used to be more active on X/Twitter.
And for those who like such things, there’s also a fun Easter-egg feature to check out, on the app, which I’ve seen a few people writing about. Tap on the name of a Threads member on their bio, and a popup will appear at the bottom of the screen.
This shows the member’s join date, and Threads badge number. Tap again near the bottom of that, and a full screen animation will appear, displaying the same information.
RELATED CONTENT
social media, social networks, Threads, 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
Corporate jargon alternatives by Matt Watson
13 August 2024
American web developer Matt Watson has re-written many latter-day, jarring, corporate-speak terms, with words and phrases from long past times. For instance, instead of “circle back”, say “bring word again”. Or, replace “open communication” with the surely eye-brow raising “regular intercourse”.
In other examples, ASAP becomes “betimes”, change agent (what?) becomes “efficient cause”, while lean in is now “assiduously apply”. There are many more. Now all we need is a substitute to reach out. Hmm. Let me think. Hang on, I think I have it. How about “contact”?
RELATED CONTENT
More price rises are on the way for coffee drinkers
9 August 2024
Bad weather continues to hit coffee growers in Brazil and Vietnam, forcing Australian coffee suppliers to warn of shortages, and more price increases.
It’s been a tough few years for coffee producers. When I wrote about production problems almost three years ago, droughts in Brazil were impacting harvest yields, causing a reduction in supply. Labour shortages, occasioned by the pandemic, saw growers in NSW also struggling to harvest.
By early 2022, there were fears coffee might be on the way to seven dollars a cup. Mercifully, that dire prediction has yet to come to pass.
A large cup of takeaway coffee costs five dollars at the places I usually go to. It’s a sensible price, especially if paying with cash, as I sometimes do. I’ve become quite used to having no small change rattling around in my pocket, even if current coffee prices are leaving me more, er, out of pocket.
If the cost of a cup were to press on towards the six dollar mark, I’d start becoming seriously worried about the viability of many coffee shops. Surely some customers would start cutting back, though there is the argument that consumers continue to make smaller comfort purchases, while forgoing other, more costly, outgoings.
And check out the image in this ABC News article, which breaks down the cost of a cup of coffee in Australia. For a small cup, coffee beans only constitute about twelve percent of the total cost. The rest of the money goes elsewhere. But perhaps we should be thankful in Australia after all. A cup of coffee costs about eight dollars in San Francisco, while people in parts of Switzerland pay ten dollars. Five dollars must seem a like a joke to coffee drinkers in those locations.
RELATED CONTENT
The three main processes used to produce decaffeinated coffee
31 July 2024
Tangentially related to the previous post. Do you drink decaffeinated coffee? Did you know there are three common methods used by decaf coffee producers to extract caffeine: the carbon dioxide method, Swiss water process, and finally, solvent-based methods.
Not all methods are one-hundred percent effective though, as minute quantities of caffeine remain in the finished product.
Michael W. Crowder, professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Miami University, writing for The Conversation, details each method, and their overall effectiveness. Here I was all this time thinking to-be-decaffeinated coffee beans were simply left out in the sun for a while, or something.
RELATED CONTENT
Coffee happy hour, discount prices for early bird customers
31 July 2024
Coffee happy hours at cafes? This is the first I’ve heard of the idea, but I like it. A growing number of Australian cafes are offering coffees priced at about three dollars a cup, for a couple of hours daily. This compared to the current average cost of about five dollars.
Cafe owners concede happy-hour prices are not making them a whole lot of money, but are hoping the deal will bring in a few new customers.
It’s a smart move, given coffee shop owners are not only competing with numerous other operators, but cheaply priced machine brewed coffee, priced at about two dollars a cup. Coffee making machines are common at service/petrol stations, and convenience stores, and the resulting brew is sometimes not bad. All the more so when there are no cafes to be found.
Their coffee and donut combination deals can also be hard to look passed as well…
RELATED CONTENT
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.
RELATED CONTENT