dichotic noise

Over this weekend (9 – 11^th April) I watched on Ustream the Citability CODEATHON. I already knew about Citability​.org from Silona Bonewald (@Silona on twitter), but the codeathon (from an spectator point of view) was very interesting as both discussions and prototypes.

What is citability​.org?
Citability supports making public government documents and data available online and citable such that they can be easily referenced for public debate, commentary and analysis. This requires that archived versions of documents be stored and linkable so that changes can be easily spotted and reference links remain intact.
(from http://​dccodeathon​.pbworks​.com)

(more…)

I’m running the next P2PU ‘Introduction in Cyberpunk’ course. One of the aspects I’ll be focusing on is the blending between near-​future and present, and between fiction and reality.

I found this endorsement on twitter by Lt. Worf to be in this spirit.

(more…)

2010 is the new 1984

“So, in the end, what it comes down to is that iPad offers new metaphors that will let users engage with their computers with dramatically less friction. That gives me, as a developer, a sense of power and potency and creativity like no other. It makes the software market feel wide open again, like no one’s hegemony is safe. How anyone can feel underwhelmed by that is beyond me.” — Joe Hewitt

Today Grapefruit turned 10.

Ten years ago, me, Marius Ursache and Stefan Călin Liuțe joined forces and created Grapefruit (back then called ‘Grapefruit Design’). We were the first in Romania to tell and do many things about corporate and brand identity, naming, brand manuals and web sites.

(more…)

The alarm clock projected its cardioid waking field over the bed. The substance of his dream started to fade away and crisp reality was pouring in…

“Damn it, not again, not when I’m dreaming of her” he shouted, kicking away the clock’s antenna towards the wall. He closed his eyes, she was still there: soft and warm, sleeping in his arms and slowly fading away.

He opened his eyes — she was gone. (more…)

I updated the code of the previous experiment (Sharing Ubiquity Commands) such that when you open an URL that contains a shared Ubiquity action, it won’t open Ubiquity in preview mode, but display a small icon.

This also allows to display multiple commands on one page, and by using Ubiquity annotation database I could create this command history; such that when you revisit a page where you had already applied some ubiquity commands you will see the icons for each, awaiting re-​applying.

(If the video is clipped, try it here)

Note: The icon and the icon insertion code is repurposed from Aza’s Mouse Based Ubiquity experiments.

My experimental (read ugly) code is available at http://​gist​.github​.com/​2​0​1​053

I’ve just read Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot.” I’m stunned. There is no way I can analyse it objectively; as it renders back to life vivid bits of memories from my childhood. Let me explain.

I was born behind the so-​called “Iron Curtain,” been raised in a communist society where we were taught that we were the chosen ones, that our ideology was the purest and our technology was the best. And supposedly — in our glorious history — we invented everything and the perverted capitalists had again and again stole from us, but in the end we will prevail.

(more…)

“Ubik helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Your friends will say, Christ, I used to think that you weren’t fun. But now, wow! — Safe when your privacy settings match your level of comfort, do not forget to review them often. Avoid prolonged use.”

(more…)

I recently spoke with Aza Raskin at FOWA on Ubiquity commands/​annotations sharing. I promised I’ll prototype something, here it is…

(If the video is clipped, try it here)

When someone applies an Ubiquity command to a piece of content that tells us what’s the type of that content. The user is making an annotation which is not made for the annotation sake, but made for solving a real need. That annotation if shared could be useful in various ways.

But first let’s look at all the data involved, consider that Alice is selecting some text on a web page, invokes Ubiquity and types ‘translate to japanese’. We have the folowing elements:

1. user: anonymous or with an identity (URI)
2. web page address (URI)
3. selected content
4. Ubiquity command (URI) with arguments

(more…)

“Here be dragons” is a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the medieval practice of putting sea serpents and other mythological creatures in blank areas of maps. (Wikipedia, Here be dragons)

As a reaction to the Utopian science fiction (frequently set into a distant glorious future), cyberpunk projected all our fears into the uncharted territory of the very near future.

What separates us from the near dark future is a kind of unspecified, yet imminent apocalypse. Hence, most of the cyberpunk scenes are post-​apocalyptic ones, where the apocalypse is a given, part of a forgotten history:

“…no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won.” — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Chapter 2)

(more…)