Monday, September 13th, 2004
What’s Nokia up to with the 7280?
You’ve certainly heard of the recent batch of new nokia phones with the 7280 getting most attention. I’m still not sure whether it’s just plain ugly or ugly as hell, but that’s not the point of this post.
As someone pointed out in a thread on the apple insider forums, nokia mentions
Nokia Collector supports synchronization with Apple for photos, audio files, and video clips
on the 7280 product page. I’ve already wondered what kind of software they’ll put on this phone with its oddly shaped 104×208 pixels screen, but this bit is especially intriguing. So far only symbian series 60 phones are mac-syncable, not their (broader) series 40 product range, but even series 60 only allows pim syncing afaik. Besides that i highly doubt we’ll see series 60 on the 7280, a smartphone os on a phone without real input options wouldn’t make much sense to me. And what’s this nokia collector they mention, a new application? Anyone knows more about this? The most interesting part however is that they specifically mention synchronization capabilities “with apple”, no mention of microsoft or windows…
Sunday, September 12th, 2004
The World Government map
In his presentation at the language of networks conference Brian Holmes showed a beautiful map titled “The World Government” and now that i’m finally back on broadband i hunted it down successfully. You can find the map at the universit?© tangente website. Their “about us” is in french so i honestly have no idea who these guys are or what they’re up to, babelfish wasn’t much help either. A grayscale version of the world government map in pdf format is available for download, the link for the colored print version sent me into online nirvana however. They’ve tons of other interesting maps for download at their site and they’re all a thing of beauty. Now i need to hunt down a good print shop to make these into posters for my room.
Saturday, September 11th, 2004
Comanche webcomicserver
Remember that recommendation for dailystrips for all your webcomic aggregation needs two weeks ago? My only complaint back then was that it doesn’t serve rss feeds.
Just yesterday i came across comanche, the webcomicserver, a php script by Marc Rohlfing that pretty much serves the same purpose. Its advantages: it serves rss feeds, it’s (apparently) still actively developed, it’s easily skinnable and because it’s written in php you won’t have to deal with perl (that’s an advantage in my book). Its downsides: fewer strips are supported, it appears a lot less mature than dailystrips and it doesn’t work correctly for me right now. But just because it doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean it won’t work for you, i’m actually fairly certain that the cause of this trouble lies somewhere in my apache configuration. If i can sort it out i’ll keep you posted, if not, i’ll just stick with dailystrips.
Diary writing makes you sick
Skip the plans to stop drinking, smoking, drugging, just quit blogging: Dear diary, you make me sick
Keeping a diary is bad for your health, say UK psychologists. They found that regular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness.
And this shortly after i heard Bruce Sterling voice his opinion that blogging is good for the soul. Let’s hope that weblogs are really more than just obnoxious online diaries… (via antipixel)
Friday, September 10th, 2004
EcoBot II self-sustaining robot
The ecobot 2 got a lot of attention recently:
To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity.
The topic of a robots right to batteries briefly came up during the timeshift spirit symposium q&a. This made me realize that i’d never really spent a thought on this.
Gadgets that care for themselves and don’t require constant recharging would be a lot more convenient and this is already happening, for example recent generations of the irobot roomba and sony aibo can return to their charging station autonomously when running low on power.
However, the thought of self-sustaining robots and a robots “right” to power make me feel a little uncomfortable, and the development of “release and forget” robots that feed from living organisms just freaks me out.
Can you imagine how hard it was to resist including a superfluous matrix reference in this post?
Site Maintenance
I’ve been fiddling around with the site some more lately, so if something’s not working please let me know.
The most obvious change is the new header graphic. I’ve long been looking for a simple header graphic but couldn’t find the right typeface, until i recently found jethose in the free font section of identifont. Almost exactly what i had in mind all along. You can download the font @transporter.at, it comes in full, loose and pixel flavours. Did i mention that it’s free?
After reading this sitepoint article about css image replacement which highlights two techniques, i decided to use the method introduced by Mike Rundle because it works without additional markup and works perfectly well most of the time: it’s quite simple, is compatible with any modern browser (the very definition thereof explicitly excludes netscape navigator 4), degrades reasonably well in older browsers with poor css support and works with screen readers and print stylesheets. The only downside i can currently think of is that the replaced text won’t be displayed in modern browsers with image loading deactivated because the text’s actually pushed far off-screen, but that’s a nuisance i’m willing to accept. It’s also the image replacement technique used by Jeffrey Zeldman, so i guess it can’t be too bad.
The other, more subtle change happened with the print stylesheet. Wordpress already comes with a fairly decent print stylesheet, but it’s far from being perfect and this has bothered me for quite some time now. Following this alistapart article i made a few cosmetic changes. Additionally, urls will be included in parentheses right after a link when you print out posts, turning printed links from completely incomprehensible and irrelevant into just slightly annoying. I guess that’s the best you can get without using semacode or qrcode. Wait, that’s a neat idea, i should look into that for the next version of my print stylesheet. Anyone done something like that?
Wednesday, September 8th, 2004
Ars Elsewhere
Another better-late-than-never post: Two weblogs that did an amazing job in writing from ars electronica are near near future and coin-operated, the personal weblog of Jonah Brucker-Cohen, host of the second timeshift symposium. Marcos Weskamp, who won an award of distinction for newsmap, also writes a personal weblog. And the new york times got a nice article about the festival today as well.
Tuesday, September 7th, 2004
AE Report #6
Ars electronica is over. Today i visited my last two sessions, forum 5: digital communities and the launch of creative commons austria.
Notes for forum 5 are available and again, don’t expect them to be entirely correct, cohesive, comprehensible or complete. Notes for german parts of the session are again in german.
Launch of creative commons was quite interesting. Funny thing is i was particularly interested in legal issues like reasons for the localization efforts or warranties and liabilities of the licensor, nonetheless it was incredibly difficult to pay attention when these things were discussed. That’s what lawtalk can do to you, a sure-fire cure for insomnia. Got most open questions sorted out though.
Lawrence Lessig already hinted at some huge news involving gilberto gil, david byrne, cornelius and the beastie boys yesterday and today Joi Ito mentioned that a sampler (supposedly featuring the aforementioned artists) will be released later this year under a creative commons license. Will be interesting remix matieral i guess.
Overall i had a great week at ars electronica. I really enjoy listening to other people, but usually there are just not that many people worth listening to. Here at ars there were lots of people with something to say and i had the impression that the audience was motivated and eager to listen. It’s been like all-you-can-eat mind-fodder and my brain’s rather stuffed now. Lots of things to process and research over the next week, but right now i need a little short-term break. Besides that i’ll be stuck on 28.8k for the next few days (no kidding, i blame it on a faulty phoneline) so i’ll be forced to step back and be a little less online anyway.
Coffee and cigarettes
I very much try to be unbiased about other people i haven’t got to know too well, but still there are two aspects that i’ve come to pay attention to for a first impression of strangers: coffee-vs-tea and smoking-vs-non-smoking. If you’re an all-tea-no-coffee non-smoker, chances are we won’t become best friends, and if you’re a coffee-addicted chain-smoker i might very well fall in love with you. That’s not to say that i hold people drinking tea and not smoking in low regard on principle, it’s just that this very simple classification worked for me more often than not in the past. I also don’t wanna say that i endorse smoking, i’d far prefer not being a hopeless nicotine addict at this young age, but nonetheless smoking is an interesting characteristic to me.
So why do i come up with this on my blog? Well, because of this fundamental classification i’m always curious about the smoking habits and hot beverage preferences of people i read online, and to my surprise i not only caught Joi Ito smoking a cigarette yesterday, but also rolling his own cigarette, and if i’m not mistaken with the same papers i’ve learnt to highly esteem over the last few years (gotta love the site). Another mystery solved.
Yes, i realize that i’m a little obsessed with Joi Ito and Bruce Sterling lately, call it physical proximity crossing into cyberspace if you want.
Monday, September 6th, 2004
Putting a face on this site (mine)
I should have done this a lot earlier, but better late than never. Whenever i read about the ars electronica festival on another weblog, i wonder who’s writing it, what s/he looks like and whether i’ve seen him/her at the festival or not.
If you think i’m doing a lousy job covering the festival and wanna slap me or wanna get in touch personally for some other reason, i’ll be at the brucknerhaus most of the day tomorrow, and here’s what i look like.