Month: January 2005

The Home Computer, Back Then

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Scientists from RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.

I noticed this intriguing image and caption up in a display in our labs and thanks to St?©fan Sinclair traced it to Matt Kirschenbaum’s blog where a comment then took me to Urban Legends Reference Pages: Inboxer Rebellion (Does Not Compute). Pity it’s a hoax – why wasn’t Rand thinking about the home computer back then? If you look closely the teleprinter is distorted and the suit is too short for the display, but the caption is so good it should be true.

Bloggers meet at the MLA

Thanks to a blog entry by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum I was led to an article in Inside Higher Ed :: MLA about “Bloggers in the Flesh” by Scott Jaschik that speculates on academic blogging and whether it should count to tenure.
An interesting point Matt makes is that you have to write assuming that your wife, chair or students might read your blog. Holding ideas in plain view can both make one cautious and lead to embarassment. I have, on at least one occaision, had someone tell me they scanned my blog to figure out what I am like as a person. So … just to warn you all … the author of this site is just a character and doesn’t resemble any living being, least of all me.

You No Touch It: Atwood’s Book Signing Device

Margaret Atwood has come up with a device for remotely signing books to save her the trouble of early flights and mini-bar food according to stories like, Online answer to writer’s angst, (The Guardian, Charlotte Higgins, Jan. 8, 2005.)
The company she has founded to develop this device is called Unotchit (U No Tch It – get it?) While having a video conference with an author followed by some personal message (spell checked, of course) faxed to me might be OK, I don’t see how this will substitute for book-signing which is about presence – being close to the authority. Hell, a book is mediated authority, why would I want more of the same instead of a moment of real presence?
What’s interesting is how gentle bloggers and journalists are being with Atwood. It’s a stupid idea that says a lot about Atwood that none of us want to consider because we like her writing so much.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is an interesting social web tool where you get a tool bar that lets you rate sites for friends or stumble to a site that others think you might like. It encourages serindipitous stumbling across things – something people have felt was missing from the IT world. Of course, there is commercial side to StumbleUpon – for a fee people can promote their sites, see the “Sponsors” page,

2. Purchase Promotion
StumbleUpon can deliver your site directly to interested stumblers. If you have a high quality site and would like to increase your traffic and get community feedback, you may Request Promotion of your content.

EPIC: Carnivore Documents

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Omnivore Source Code FOIA Document
Did the FBI build use text analysis for network-tapping? I found an interesting page on the Electronic Privacy Information Centre about Carnivore and Omnivore (its predecessor), two Internet monitoring systems created by the FBI. EPIC has a EPIC Carnivore Page with a summary and scans of documents recieved through Freedom of Information Requests. See also EPIC Carnivore FOIA Documents. The documents are fascinating given all the lines blacked out that you can try to guess at. There is a beauty to these documents with heavy black regions and “Secret” crossed out all over. Note how EPIC uses this aesthetic in their annual report.
Continue reading EPIC: Carnivore Documents

Apple and the Mini Mac

The Saturday Globe has a beg story on the Mac mini, Jobs and Apple, Globetechnology: We’re in the era of Jobs II (Saturday, Jan. 15, 2005, by David Akin). In a companion peice online, that is a “Globe and Mail Update” titled, Apple jabbed by price point, Jack Kapica makes the point that the price point of $499 that Apple is hitting in the US doesn’t work for Canada when it becomes $630 Canadian. He also complains about the price for Apples, though that’s another story.
What no one noticed is that Mac mini is not that far from an iPod. Could Apple adapt the mini by adding a small LCD and battery to turn it into a Mac response to something like the OQO? At some point of miniaturization I won’t be synching my iPod with my computer, my iPod will be the computer that I dock when at the office and listen to on the way home.

podSites: Simple hypertexts for the iPod

Audrey pointed me to a very neat idea and site, podSites.com. The site describes how to develop simple hypertexts or podSites for the iPod Notes area. The trick is that the iPod supports HTML links in the text file notes to other notes and links to audio that can play. The podSites site has instructions on how to create a podSite and “podCasting” (blogging for iPods) and so on. The site can be viewed in six basic colours – cute!