Battlestar Galactica sub-blog returns to activity
Some of you may know that I started a sub-blog for my thoughts on my favourite SF TV show, Battlestar Galactica. This sub-blog was dormant while the show was off the air, but it’s started up again with...
View ArticleGoing paperless by making manuals easier to find
As I move to get more paper out of my life, one thing I’m throwing away with more confidence is manuals. It’s pretty frequent that I can do a search for product model numbers or other things on a...
View ArticleTowards better pseudonym posting on message boards - casual commenting.
As you may know, I allow anonymous comments on this blog. Generally, when a blog is small, you don’t want to do too much to discourage participation. Making people sign up for an account (particularly...
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ClariNet history and the 20th anniversary of the dot-com
Twenty years ago (Monday) on June 8th, 1989, I did the public launch of ClariNet.com, my electronic newspaper business, which would be delivered using USENET protocols (there was no HTTP yet) over the...
View ArticleDo you get Twitter? Is a "sampled" medium good or bad?
I just returned from Jeff Pulver’s “140 Characters” conference in L.A. which was about Twitter. I asked many people if they get Twitter — not if they understand how it’s useful, but why it is such a...
View ArticleWhat's this odd twitter spam about?
Some recent searches have revealed unusual activity on twitter, and I wonder where it’s going. Narcissus searches on twitter reveal a variety of accounts tweeting links into my blog and sites, for...
View ArticleHow to do a distributed Twitter (MSM)
Dave Winer recently made a call for an open source twitter shell, which he suggests be perhaps done with a javascript framework to let any site act like twitter.com. Many people are interested in this...
View ArticleMake e-Ink tablets an add-on for our phone/PDAs, not stand-alone
It’s over 17 years since I first too a stab at e-Books, and while I was far too early, I must admit I had not predicted I would be that early. The market is now seeing a range of e-Ink based electronic...
View ArticleWanted: An IRC Bot to gateway to a twitter backchannel
It’s now becoming common to kludge a conference “backchannel” onto Twitter. I am quite ambivalent about this. I don’t think Twitter works nearly as well as an internal backchannel, even though there...
View ArticleTwitter clients, only shorten URLs as much as you truly need to and make them...
I think URL shorteners are are a curse, but thanks to Twitter they are growing vastly in use. If you don’t know, URL shorteners are sites that will generate a compact encoded URL for you to turn a very...
View ArticleThe net needs a free way to combine video and slides for showing talks
These days it is getting very common to make videos of presentations, and even to do live streams of them. And most of these presentations have slides in Powerpoint or Keynote or whatever. But this...
View ArticleCurling is the best Olympic sport
Some notes from the bi-annual Olympics crackfest…I’m starting to say that Curling might be the best Olympic sport. Why?It’s the most dominated by strategy. It also requires precision and grace, but...
View ArticleTVs should be universal, not remote controls
Like me, you probably have a dozen “universal” remote controls gathered over the years. With each new device and remote you go through a process to try to figure out special codes to enter into the...
View ArticleTime for the fourth screen -- the always on wall computer
In media today, it’s common to talk about three screens: Desktop, mobile and TV. Many people watch TV on the first two now, and tools like Google TV and the old WebTV try to bring interactive, internet...
View ArticleSome day, we'll see those old videos in hi-def
It’s been interesting to see how TV shows from the 60s and 70s are being made available in HDTV formats. I’ve watched a few of Classic Star Trek, where they not only rescanned the old film at better...
View ArticleMagazine tablet apps and the battle of design vs. content
I found this recent article from the editor of the MIT Tech review on why apps for publishers are a bad idea touched on a number of key issues I have been observing since I first got into internet...
View ArticleOlympic high-speed watching and other notes
MythTVI’m watching the Olympics, and my primary tool as always is MythTV. Once you do this, it seems hard to imagine watching them almost any other way. Certainly not real time with the commercials,...
View ArticleScience Fiction movies at Palo Alto Film Festival, and Robocars legal in...
I haven’t bothered quickly reporting on the robocar story every other media outlet covered, the signing by Jerry Brown of California’s law to enable robocars. For those with the keenest interest, the...
View ArticleLarry Niven and Greg Benford on "Bowl of Heaven" and Big, Dumb Objects
Last month, I invited Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, two of the most respected writers of hard SF, to come and give a talk at Google about their new book “Bowl of Heaven.” Here’s a Youtube video of...
View ArticleThe importance of serial media vs. sampled and Google Reader
The blogging world was stunned by the recent announcement by Google that it will be shutting down Google reader later this year. Due to my consulting relationship with Google I won’t comment too much...
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