one.point.zero - Colin O'Brien's weblog
June 21 2011
I was there when acid house hit london and this is how it felt
June 25 2010
Putting the future back in the room“1970 is the same distance in time away from us now as 2050: that's how close the future is”
April 24 2010
Partisan Memorials in former Yugoslavia. Impressive modernist architecture.
January 27 2010
The drugstore where time stands still.
December 13 2009
Happy Birthday to this
I just realised this weblog is 10 years old (the site/domain is a bit older).
I made my first post in December 1999 after procrastinating close to 2 years on how to build the thing. Finally opting for a home-made system based on the code running the more like this weblog. It even got noticed at the time because it was coded in XHTML, quite unusual back then. How things change.
So, even though posting frequency has seriously dropped, it's still here. Which is an achievement in itself considering the number of others that have come and gone in the meantime.
So, here's to another 10 years.
August 10 2009
The Future Games of the Past
June 09 2009
The Rise and Fall of the earliest "dot-com". I feel old, I actually remember ClariNet.
May 17 2009
I've been having similar thoughts“ I see my kids now, and they are so clearly getting the finished products of so much, not the products in the process of invention”
March 16 2009
Time Berners Lee on the web“Among his regrets was starting Web addresses with http:// as the two slashes were redundant, leading to billions of wasted keystrokes.”
October 31 2008
Jared Diamond: Why societies collapse
September 25 2008
Project Cybersyn, the forgotten story of Chile's "socialist internet".
June 17 2008
The web time forgot. How Paul Otlet, a Belgian, envisioned a steampunk ancestor of today's hypertext.
March 18 2008
Food fight
December 17 2007
The interface at Paris:Invisible City takes a bit of getting used to but it's worth exploring.
October 14 2007
From Glitch To Blog House - is electronic music more stagnant and conservative than we'd like to think?
September 30 2007
Pirates of the Mediterranean, a fascinating op-ed piece from the New York Times recounting the attack by a loosely connected group of people on the Roman port at Ostia, followed by a massive deployment of forces, a near-draining of Roman coffers, a loss of personal freedoms and accusations of traitorship for those who didn't toe the party line. Sounds familiar?
April 22 2007
The history of electronic music's Seventies pioneers and their influence up to our days.
April 10 2007
Belgians yearn for dirt and disease“This was a glorious period in the history of Belgium. It was far less stressful in the Middle Ages, because there were no phones and no vacuum cleaners.”
January 04 2007
Loads of old Belgian television archives viewable online, from Expo 58 reports to interviews with celebrities.
November 30 2006
It's been revealed that the Antikythera Mechanism, believed to be the world's oldest analog computer, was even more advanced than originally thought.
September 29 2006
An interesting animated map showing who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history.
September 23 2006
A gigantic archive of old-school hiphop flyers from the early eighties.
August 30 2006
Today in "What have we learned from history?": the Trojan Horse.
June 06 2006
George Monbiot on Ken Loach's latest“If we knew more about Ireland, we might never have invaded Iraq.”
June 03 2006
An absolute must-see performance: comedian Robert Newman on the history of oil. A fantastic blend of history, politics and stand-up comedy that will open your eyes.