On the road but desperately need to fix something on your web server? Wapsh (original link is dead - links to internet archive) allows you to remotely login into a unix shell via your wap-enabled mobile phone. Of course, it's probably slow as hell. And that's if you can get that far without wap crashing your phone. (Can you tell I don't think much of wap?)
The Red Herring features a no-nonsense article about P2P networking that cuts through the hype. Well worth reading.
Australian grocery wholesaler Mike O'Dwyer has invented a gun with no moving parts (original link is dead - links to internet archive) that can fire one million rounds per minute, compared to actual guns where the fastest one 'only' fires 6000 rounds per minute. I can't say the invention of new ways for killing people overjoys me, but the technology does impress me.
The whole internet appliance thing has kind of floated right over my head, but Be's Aura (original link is dead - links to internet archive), a reference platform for a networkable, Be-based home stereo, is something else.
The EPA says Greenpeace’s assessment of Apple’s green credentials is flawed. They’re not that bad (but could still do way better).
The shipping industry is looking for new ways to reduce emissions and costs. One of those ways is about to get its first test: a ship partly powered by a giant kite.
The shipping industry is looking for new ways to reduce emissions and costs. One of those ways is about to get its first test: a ship partly powered by a giant kite.
The web time forgot. How Paul Otlet, a Belgian, envisioned a steampunk ancestor of today's hypertext.
The web time forgot. How Paul Otlet, a Belgian, envisioned a steampunk ancestor of today’s hypertext.
Project Cybersyn, the forgotten story of Chile’s “socialist internet”.
Project Cybersyn, the forgotten story of Chile's "socialist internet".
Bike messengers still have their place in the age of instant data transfers.
Methadone for swiping and scrolling.
Reversing the smart city paradigm. Barcelona is moving from the surveillance capitalism model, where data is opaque and owned by subcontractors and third parties, to a model where citizens own their data.
Amazing. And shared with the world.
In World War II, Britain invented the electronic computer. By the 1970s, its computing industry had collapsed—thanks to a labor shortage produced by sexism.
Basically, there's no noise isolation at all, even less than with standard earbuds. You push the volume up to compensate for noise and damage your ears. Take away: use them at home or in quiet places, don't use them in the street, subway, or other loud environments.
The cardinal error of such analysis, however, lies in its tendency to
mistake structural transformations of global capitalism for zeitgeisty
trends in the history of ideas.
The techno-optimism of the 90s was just a smoke screen.
Interesting take on (Silicon Valley) privilege versus exposure to the current Covid-19 pandemic.
They’re simply succumbing to one of the dominant ethos of the digital age, which is to design one’s personal reality so meticulously that existential threats are simply removed from the equation. The leap from a Fitbit tracking your heart rate to an annual full-body cancer scan or from a doorbell surveillance camera to a network of autonomous robot sentries is really just a matter of money. No matter the level of existential security, the Netflix shows we stream are the same.
I've certainly thought about this myself as we sit comfortably at home while delivery drivers and shop staff risk exposure to supply us with anything we need.
Interesting study showing that the simple presence within eyesight of your phone reduces your brain's available cognitive capacity.
A Wired journalist tracks down the author of the infamous Love Bug trojan that brought down millions of computers 20 years ago and made the news worldwide.
If Americans would extend the life of their cellphones by one year, for instance, it would be the climate-saving equivalent of taking 636,000 cars off the road, or about the amount of passenger vehicles registered in the state of New Mexico.
Nice to see things moving in the right direction. I just replaced the battery on my iPhone 6s for the third time. A repair centre will charge about €50 to do it for you and if you do it yourself, like I did, it will cost you €20. The constant need to upgrade is a disease.
Do you need a new phone or can you just replace the battery instead?
I held out as long as I could but I finally upgraded my iPhone 6s to a 13 mini. To be honest, the camera and battery life are better but, for my use anyway, it's not that much of a change. There's definitely work to be done on hardware obsolescence, be it deliberate or not.
An interesting look at the hype cycle in the tech world using the Theranos story as a starting point.
More generally, many of us have become ground down by tech’s promise to radically rewrite our future, only to find that it’s little more than a rebranding of the past imbalances, designed to supplant one controlling power with another.
The ubiquitous blinking cursor that we all see without seeing has a long history. It's probably one of the oldest remnants of historical computing that's still there today.
A long read, but worth it, on how technology reviews have pretty much turned into design fetishism rather than proper evaluation of functionality. It's true that bad reviews have become exceedingly rare.
This report argues that consumer technology reviewers have failed their basic nominal purpose of critiquing tools. Instead, inspired by values introduced by Apple in the late 1990s, the tech review industry prioritizes aesthetic lust as the primary critical factor for evaluating objects. The reification of these values in their scoring system is transmitted to consumers and manufacturers alike. Like other prurient things, the objects designed within this paradigm are optimized not for usefulness but for photogenic and telegenic properties, a framework that finds its fullest realization in YouTube reviews and unboxing videos.
Not The Onion:
When Tahmima Anam set out to write her popular new novel The Startup Wife, she created a world for its characters to live in, including a secretive incubator called Utopia and the fictional startups it helped launch, complete with website. One of those fake companies has captured the imagination of VCs and other investors who don't know it's a fake -- and are interested in funding it.
It's not your imagination, products you buy are worse now. Fashion falls apart. Gadgets become unusable, etc. Mainly due to accelerating market changes rather than a deliberate reduction in material quality alone.
Fast-forward a handful of decades, and now several generations of people are conditioned to buy the new thing and to keep replacing it. Companies, in turn, amp up production accordingly. It’s less so that objects are intended to break — functional planned obsolescence, if you will — but rather that consumer mindsets are oriented around finding the better object
An amazing-looking contraption built for the Soviet space program with a mechanical spinning globe and more cogs than an Enigma device.
It's nothing new if you've ever taken a step back, but this is a well written perspective on the issue.
We live in a mega-scale corporate capitalist economy, and in such a setting technology is never used to save time. It’s used to speed up production and consumption in order to expand the system. The basic rule is this: technology doesn't make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff.
In the tech world, innovation has mostly been replaced by innovation-speak. And a constant need for growth has led to products and technologies becoming the focus, rather than human benefit.
Adam Stoddard argues this eloquently, using Apple's Vision Pro as a symbol of this broader issue.
Apple isn’t alone here. This tail-wags-dog approach underpins the AI space at large, like it did with “web 3” and blockchain before it. If anything, it’s the defining characteristic of modern big tech. These are the richest companies on the planet, but they want more, and they’re desperate to find or force the next big thing in order to make it happen.
This piece, from Ed Zitron, is one of the best things I've read in a while. It puts into words what I've been feeling about tech recently better than I ever could. He's angry, but rightly so.
The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.
The average IQ was increasing year over year until about 2010, when it started declining. One popular hypothesis is the simultaneous decline of print and the increase in short-form and video content that decreases deep thinking.
A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up. You can’t just assert things in the way you can on TikTok or on YouTube… print privileges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense information, that is more intellectually challenging.
