Posts from — May 2003

Deaf people like the Sidekick.

Apparently T-Mobile's Sidekick mobile communicator is proving to be very popular with the deaf:

Danger was getting a lot of feedback from unexpected quarters. “We got some e-mails initially from people who were influential in the deaf community talking about how much they liked the device, and they're a great forum for providing constructive feedback,” Nothhaft said. While many deaf customers loved the SideKick, they had some suggestions: More battery life would be great. A data-minutes-only plan from wireless carrier T-Mobile would also be nice, since hearing impaired users often don't need voice minutes. And hearing-impaired gadget-lovers on online message boards — where the T-Mobile SideKick is achieving celebrity status — wanted a way to translate their text messages into voice calls.

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[Gizmodo]

this is an interesting 'accident of design'

“Digital Cameras Can Cause Blindness”.

Anil Dash spots a rather desperate sign in the window of a Manhattan shop that develops film:

I noticed this sign in front of a camera shop here in Manhattan a few weeks ago and remembered to take a picture of it the last time I walked by. “Digital Cameras Can Cause Blindness”. It's of course a not-very-funny joke from a shop that develops film images, railing against the changes overtaking their business. They've got other signs up, too, “Digital Cameras Can Cause Stroke” and a host of other maladies, including strokes, sterility, sudden death, and the dreaded “poor quality photos.”

Yet another indication of how digital photography is edging out regular film photography and how threatening that is to the entire photography establishment, from Kodak down to independent shop owners. Film isn't going to disappear, but it is going to move into a niche where it'll be used mainly for artistic and professional purposes. Shops like these are either going to have to learn to cater exclusively to that niche or learn to start printing digital photos.
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[Gizmodo]

this is another digital transformation that will cause some social ills…. i remember paging through photographs when i was a kid, the ones of family give you a good feeling for where you come from and where you are going, as more and more digitization occurs, less and less of that sensory experience is there, sure you can print them out, but its not the same. of course, photographs is what killed the family bible records too, i suppose, so one thing after another…

sometimes saturdays become sunday before you want them to… yesterday i bought and played master of orion for far too long, deciding in the end that the game is basically like civilization but not as interesting, i was hoping to get simcity 4 for the mac, 'just to see how it is' but it wasn't in yet…. grrr

so after playing that game until nearly morning, i picked up a copy of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which ended up being an interesting read for a graphic novel, much more so than the wolverine:origin graphic novel that i read a few months ago.

This book plays significantly with several of the assumptions that are built into comic books/graphic novels in ways that are quite appealing. Alain Quartermain as drug addict, along with Jekyl and Hyde, and Hyde…..are part of the play with roles that occur throughout the books. Beyond that, the book is somewhat like a satire of boy's life combined with comic books, and it has plain text parts and 'excercises' etc. in short, as a whole it is an interesting combination of things that could pique many's interest, though i wouldn't recommend it to young readers.

of course, now I'm up and its nearly noon, eating my brunch which is comprised of a nice puffy oven pancake(they tend to get a bit like a souffle with alot less work) with apple butter and a cup of earl gray tea becaue i didn't feel like making coffee.

where the boys are…. …isn’t where I want to be these days. Shelley convinced me to join the blogunlimited list, after the blogrollers list… [mamamusings]

Well I joined the blogunlimited list after Liz posted it, and i see similar problems, the tone is that of debate, instead of conversation. It is contention, and and either – or mentality, that of high modernism, corporate life, and similar debatable constructs. It doesn't have to be that way, but usually it is and it has alot less to do with gender than it has to do with the life of competition that people lead, which is more wrought out of historical developments than gender, though it is highly gendered.

Open Education Presentation – Concept to Reality.

I couldn't get onto the conference call today, but this is Stephen's outline.  See also DLORN (Distributed Learning Object Repository Network) which articulates what he's been talking about for a while.

[Serious Instructional Technology]

this is a nifty presentation. well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Cartoons. Whatever happened to Saturday Morning Cartoons? An astonishingly intelligent article about how Cable TV, dual-family households, regulations and more eliminated what more than a few of us remember quite fondly as the magical time when suddenly TV existed for our personal entertainment purposes. Anyone else remember occasionally dragging themselves out of bed at 6AM for what was ultimately five hours of really, really cool commercials? (Link from Fark!) [MetaFilter]

Let's be clear there were some horrible cartoons on then, i mean horrible, but some were classic.

friendster demographics. An odd thing about Friendster is its demographics. Based on the members in Norway (these are the only members I browse occassionally, apart from friends of friends) almost everyone's a designer, a musician, into cool technology or a blogger. Most… [jill/txt]

Well i finally joined friendster, and right now other than ego surfing it seems pretty uninteresting…. sure you can create a social network there, but isn't it more fun to use the whole web to do it, i think so….

Appalshop. The Appalshop, nestled in the hills of coal-stained eastern Kentucky, was founded in 1969 as a War on Poverty project designed to train young people in Appalachia for jobs in film and television. Today, it flourishes as one of the premier cultural outposts of a proud and struggling swath of America. Its projects include documentary films, a record label, and one of the best public radio stations in the country. [MetaFilter]

this is the sort of thing we should have more of….

The iX104, Xplore's rugged Tablet PC.

Christopher Coulter tips us off to the new Xplore iX104, a rugged Tablet PC that's really made by Wistron. The iX104 is designed to withstand a lot of abuse, and can handle extreme temperatures and humidty, a four-foot drop onto concrete, and being submerged in water. As far as specs, it has an 866MHz processor, a 10.4-inch LCD screen that automatically adjusts its brightness whether its inside or outside, and the option of using any combination of 802.11b, CDMA2000 1XRTT, or GSM/GPRS for wireless connectivity, with GPS and Bluetooth modules coming later this year. Christopher thinks that the iX104 might prove so popular with military and law enforcement (there's word that the Defense Department is placing a big order) that the best selling Tablet PC of all-time could be one most consumers have never even heard of.
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[Gizmodo]

nifty…