Bruce Sterling’s essay on the New Aesthetic. This is an interesting read, even if it did nothing to counter my ambivalent feelings towards the New Aesthetic. On one hand, I like it, the idea. Even if the ‘official’ blog — which I follow — feels a lot more random than a ‘movement’ should (but perhaps I’m mistaken in expecting something like a ‘movement’). I like to think that at last we figured out an aesthetic for the early twenty-first century, that it is our generation’s Futurism, this time centered in CCTV-obsessed Britain rather than in automobile-obsessed Italy. On the other hand though, I may also believe the New Aesthetic is just a bandwagon, a neatly packaged brand for journalists and lazy curators and critics. Consider John Whitney. BEFLIX. The demoscene. The comparatively long history of Glitch art. Software art. Consider Thomas Ruff’s eroded JPEGs touring the world’s art museums (museums!). Cory Archangel’s tweets about 1990s ‘New Aesthetics’. From this perspective, the New Aesthetic seems like a brand invented by the same kind of savvy people who came up with concepts such as ‘creative industries’ and made a killing living off artists and craftspersons. But then again, most art ‘movements’ didn’t ever exist as such. ···

Journalist Alexis Madrigal calls for a post-Facebook future (mind you, what the article is really about is the increasingly diminished returns of social and mobile software). I’m all for new things, but the current situation was expected after the initial push to develop applications that leverage ubiquous broadband internet and mobile hardware with built-in sensors (mainly camera and location/GPS) pretty much consolidated. I think that now is time to take a deep breath and start figuring out what happened, what worked and why, and what it means. Bring in the academics. ···

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. The authors, Olia and Dagan, blog interesting stuff found in the Geocities torrent rescued by Archive Team. Funny I can’t even remember what was my old Geocities address. ···

PHP: a fractal of bad design is a very thorough critique of everything that is wrong with the programming language. However, I don’t believe it is constructive to attack PHP developers (such as your truly) as an horde of illiterate, masochistic fools that refuse to use proper tools. Such attacks grossly underestimate the pull of PHP’s being a good enough language for web development — incredibly easy (eg. XAMPP) to get into, well documented, and widely supported by cheap web hosting providers. It’s flawed (eg. I must reemphasize the ‘well documented’ aspect of PHP’s success, given how unintuitive its function names are sometimes) but allows me to do a quick ‘sketch’ of a webpage, hit ‘refresh’ and (often enough) voilá!, it works. And it is this ‘sketching’ (a word I’m borrowing from Processing) aspect that I find vital. To go with the author’s carpenting analogies, most people are building small houses — maybe a shed, maybe a greenhouse to keep the flowers. They don’t need complicated ‘scaffolding’ like in Ruby or Python frameworks. They just need to be able to sketch. ···

Wired’s piece on deciphering Stuxnet, a real-life spy technothriller. ···

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera. That Canon 5D Mark III is so last year. ···

An economist’s Six Rules for Dining Out. Some of his tips seem pretty universal: seemingly strange dishes at fancy restaurants must exist for a reason and are probably quite good; listening to lots of conversation means people are waiting a lot more than eating (so loud restaurants should be skipped); and dining establishments in very good locations (eg. with lots of tourists) afford to be bad and expensive, and should often be avoided. ···

The Brain on Love: what happens. ···

Procrastiworking: is what I do. As for the “creative success” part, the jury’s still out. ···

The World’s Longest Invoice. I’d have a couple of submissions for the Portuguese version. Just saying. ···

A couple of weeks ago I treated myself to a Sony Tablet S. I wasn’t very sure why I should buy it, and even though I managed to keep my gadget lust under control until I spotted a relatively cheap price, I still left the shop having weak rationalizations go through my mind:

“I make websites, multimedia and stuff — I need a tablet for testing.”

“Perhaps I’ll use my desktop PC less, thus spending less electricity.”

“Now I’ll finally be able to read those PDF documents I find so tiresome in my big desktop monitor.”

“I don’t spend money on cigarettes — I know people who could afford six of these tablets if they just gave up smoking for a year.”

Indeed, I find myself using my desktop PC less. A tablet is a convenient medium for consumption — checking news, RSS feeds and Facebook, watching short YouTube videos, reading (but not composing) e-mail, all while listening to Internet radio streams. In short: a morning computer (the bedtime slot is, for now, firmly in the grip of my Kindle).

Anyway, why the Sony S? Wouldn’t the iPad fit the “tablet for testing” scenario much better, on its market share merits alone?

Yes. The high-definition new iPad would be much better for that. Its screen is all the superlatives you’ve read about everywhere else, and I it wasn’t that much more expensive. Alas, there’s something the iPad doesn’t have, and it goes right to the core of my ‘religious issues’ against Apple:

A SD card slot.

Meaning: a way for me to put stuff in my computer (that’s what a tablet is) without being dependent on iTunes, some specific OS, or any cloud service. Seeing a friend struggle to watch some videos on her iPad made me feel good about my decision. If I download, say, the new episodes of Mad Men on my PC, I can save the files to a SD card, insert it into the tablet, and watch Don Draper’s birthday party right away. That is how I use my computers. Anyway, what other impressions did the Tablet S give me so far?

The Good:

Removable storage was my requirement, so I’ll reiterate: the Sony has a proper SD card slot, allowing me to check photos I take. It’d be a nice bonus to be able to watch videos shot with my DSLR but the tablet’s 1GHz processor lacks the horsepower to display 1080p video encoded at good bitrates without going into a severe stutter — oh well. SD cards are also much better to handle than the mini/microSD used by other tablets, which are too fiddly to handle on a daily basis.

Honeycomb. This is highly controversial, but I found the Android 3.2 shipped with the tablet much better than iOS. Apple makes the highest-resolution displays on sale at your local electronics shop, and what’s in it? A grid. No recent emails, no calendar, no weather widget or whatever — no, a grid of icons. Desktop widgets make perfect sense in a tablet, probably more so than in conventional computers (I sure don’t miss widgets in mine), and Android wins here. Android also supports multitasking, and it works well in the S, the processor being quick enough to manage things at that level. And while I’m not a big fan of its often-praised notification system (sometimes it becomes tedious to clear notifications one by one — strange since the Android 2.1 running on my phone has a ‘clear all’ button), I’ll stand and see what improvements the promised upgrade to Android 4.0 holds.

The shape. The Sony Tablet S is really comfortable to hold. All reviews I had read mentioned holding it was like holding a folded magazine, and they are right. It’s screen is slightly tilted if I set it on a table, making its handling more natural. Still, there’s a downside to the unorthodox shape though: many third-party tablet accessories won’t fit, so — finding it unacceptable to spend 80 euro in an ‘official’ case — I had to settle for a somewhat ugly folding case that covers the back camera (not that I would make much use of it).

GMail and Google Calendar. These apps had to be good and they indeed are good and easy to use. And feel solid, unlike Google Reader.

The Annoying:

The charger. After purchasing the tablet I must have said some loud expletive as I opened the box and came across the dreaded proprietary charger and its weird and fragile-seeming connector. The Sony S won’t recharge through its USB port or through some other ‘standard’ charger, so you’re stuck. Still, I found that the battery lasts long enough that if I just leave the charger in my little nest of chargers the whole process is relatively painless. But beware, if I traveled a lot and had to take that… thing on my luggage, perhaps I’d choose another tablet.

The apps’ look and feel. Android is true to its Linux roots when it comes to the fragmentation of its applications’ look and feel. Many apps just seem weird as some UI elements are resized, while others go into strange alignments, since most are developed for phones’ smaller screen resolutions. Still, consistency is one of the things I hope that will improve with time.

YouTube. The official app is great — except it won’t let me browse and watch my own Watch Later playlist. What’s the point, then?

The Despairing:

The web browser(s). What the hell? Just because the tablet is a ‘mobile device’ I expected more than a ‘mobile browser’ — the kind that resizes and reformats webpages for your ‘mobile’ screen. I mean, the Tablet S has a 1280x800 resolution, which the same as the laptop I had until recently. I want to be able to see websites’ real pixels, — I want those settings that pretend to turn off resizing to actually work. And the problem isn’t exclusive to the stock browser — Firefox for Android brings the same half-baked web browsing experience.

Google Play. There’s something I like about the app store: the ability to browse it on my PC’s (proper) web browser, and having the apps I selected already installed the next time I pick up the tablet. It’s ‘magic’ and convenient. So it’s a shame I had to browse through Play in the process. And to clarify, I am not talking about the ‘Wild West’ mentioned in Apple vs. Google debates — I am sure the iTunes store is also full of crappo apps, apps that’ll steal your data, and both. Outside of places with strict open-source rules (ex. Linux distributions), the whole App Store model is wrong because, among other things, all App Stores end up being like Tucows circa Windows ME. Google Play is a worse implementation of a bad model. Its search functionality is a joke (search! — this is Google we’re talking about!), most of the stuff in the ‘Staff Picks’ sections looks like stuff that’ll steal my data, and I invariably end up googling — proper Googling — for blog posts on “good Android apps for <X>”.

Google Reader. Really, really buggy. Google Reader reloads posts while I’m still reading them — sometimes marking that post as read and advancing to the next post. Sometimes posts marked as read completely disappear. This app had to be good. And it’s the very opposite. There are alternatives such as Feedly, obviously (it does look good but also has some minor quirks of its own — ex. for all Google Reader integration they forgot to add a way to ‘star’/bookmark a post — facepalm!) — but it’s a bit worrisome that such an important reading app by none other than the tablet OS’ manufacturer can be such a failure.

Unexpected absences of apps. I don’t really care about Instagram or other iOS app blockbusters. A browse through Play will reveal lots and lots of apps that will make your bad digital photos look like bad analog photos — Pixlr-o-matic alone will ensure Tumblr currency for generations. But there are some glaring omissions of good, official apps that don’t look like they’re going to steal your data: Facebook’s app really needs a proper tablet version, so does Twitter. But Tumblr! Still in need of an Android app that works (tablet or otherwise) — it exists, but won’t even install.

Anyway. Except for the dreadful charger, most of the Sony Tablet S’ downsides concern Android apps and the Android app market. The hardware is pretty good, and with the possible exception of a HDMI port (offered by some competitors) there’s not much else I’d want — aside from the new iPad’s screen resolution, that is. I expect the software to improve in quality, while fearing the inevitable bloat of newer versions (the app versions I had on my phone when I first bought it were pretty snappy too), and I hope to be able to revise some of the bad things I wrote here. Still, the main questions remain:

Did I need a tablet?

Probably not.

What will I use it for?

Procrastination. Only procrastination.

One of the founders of Netscape demolishes the ‘startup work ethic’: while some poor geek kills himself in a orgy of work and stay-awake drugs, some venture capitalist reaps most of the rewards while doing nothing. It’s true a few of these geeks will eventually get rich, but no human being should be thought of as a race horse. People should work 100 hours a week if they like it, not because someone sold them this idea it’ll get them rich — do yourself a favor and go buy some lottery tickets if you believe that, at least you’ll get your destiny sorted out far quicker. ···

Malcom Gladwell writes about Steve Jobs’ Real Genius. I know, I know: I too get sick when I read my feeds and see yet another article about Jobs!? Still, this one is good, and one of the few I’ve seen that demonstrates Steve Jobs was, first and foremost, an insufferable mix of perfectionist and plagiarist — a dictator who happened to be in business, not politics. ···

The Curse of Xanadu. An entertaining (and long) read about the long and fruitless development of Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu hypermedia system, going on since 1965 and which had its first (kind-of) release in 2007. Classic Wired from 1995. ···

Two good ones from Thought Catalog: No One’s Real Anymore muddles through Modern Man’s lack of coherence (even though you could argue — successfully — that’s not a ‘bug’, but a ‘feature’); and Losing Your Metaphorical Virginity, which is said to be regained whenever people find themselves in love (and I think I do agree). ···

Lightworks looks set to be the first decent open-source video editing software. I’m yet to invest real time in it, but so far it feels a little weird: the UI is too messy, and I found it shares the Avid philosophy of taking over an entire hard drive and pre-converting every single piece of media you import. Which is good if you are using Lightworks in a dedicated machine, but is an awful idea in my laptop. Anyway, the feature set is impressive — I’ll still try editing some small projects in it. ···

This looks like a very well-conceived HTML and CSS course. I’m tempted to watch some of the classes myself. ···

Dochub.io indexes HTML, CSS, DOM and Javascript/jQuery documentation in one convenient place with a nice simple interface. File under Extremely Useful. ···

A good list of tips and resources on improving a website’s performance. ···

The Arty Bollocks Generator writes tedious artist statements for you. How long until someone gets a text generated here published? You know it’s bound to happen. See also: acb’s Postmodernism Generator. ···

PDF-Mags.com. Exactly what it says. ···

The Internet as Hyperbole — A Critical Exhamination of Adoption Rates by Gisle Hannemyr is a paper with compelling arguments against the popular perception that people adopted the Internet much faster than other new communication technologies such as radio or television. The demonstration much ICT policy is based on a meme-ified anedocte makes this a compelling read. ···

Neal Stephenson on Innovation Starvation. That’s what happens to nations full of Nixons. ···

Charlie Stross writes about the existential quagmire of the ultra-rich, the ways most of us are richer than the ultra-rich of past generations, and the ways the ultra-rich are not rich at all. ···

George Monbiot on how the elites became destroyers of wealth. Much is made clear by xkcd’s crushing, epic Money infographic. ···

A short guide to lazy EU journalism. Granted, as even though I consider myself a literate European I do have a lot of trouble understanding how the EU institutions work. These lazy journalists won’t help. Please do your job already! ···

Christian Thorne’s two-part essay (part one, part two) on Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds is one of the best pieces of film criticism I have ever read. ···

It appears a Russian filmmaker called Ilya Khrzhanovsky took over a large part from the Ukrainian city of Kharkov and turned it into a 24/7 film set. And that has been going on for five years. Almost resembles a real-life Synecdoche, New York. ···

Stu Maschwitz’s totally inconclusive guide to choosing a pro video camera. We live in a glorious era of wonderful and affordable imaging technology, but in a depressing age of nitpicky trade-offs and difficult choices. ···

Free online courses by famous philosophers. Since I’m really getting into watching OpenCourseWare videos (at least until the fifth season of Mad Men starts), perhaps I’ll put some of these on my watchlist. ···

Was Marx Right? A very relevant article, published not in some Pravda but in the Harvard Business Review. Mind you, I think the fact that the author spends the first three paragraphs in apologies and explaining he isn’t a communist is quite revealing about our societies’ mindset. Even if the communist remedies tried in the past were catastrophic failures, that doesn’t necessarily mean the Marxist diagnostic is wrong. For the most part, it is not. ···

Ikea Heights is a soap opera filmed in Ikea stores. While open. And without the staff noticing. Good job! ···

License plate SQL injection for the win! Could this be real? I guess someone read this. ···

Codecademy is a good (and fun!) place to learn yourself some Javascript. The interactive tutorial is still pretty short, but hopefully it’ll grow. ···

3D computer graphics done in 1972, by one of the founders of Pixar. As impressive as it may be, I still find it short of the awesomeness of Ian Sutherland’s Sketchpad demonstration from nine years earlier. I mean, that one still is pretty awesome today. ···

What People Don’t Get About My Job — from A(rmy Soldier) to Z(ookeeper). An interesting set of testimonials. ···

The evolution of the Web. A cool visualization of the evolution of web browsers and technologies since 1990. Things really got out of hand in the last few years… ···

Browsers running Javascript are the hottest thing right now in visuals programming: vvvv has its .js counterpart; while the toxiclibs have been ported for use in Processing.js. ···

Bootstrap, made by Twitter, looks like a good approach to a HTML+CSS framework. ···

Falsehoods programmers believe about names. A fascinating read about the actual complexities of implementing something as simple as people’s names in an application. (via Boing Boing) ···

Convoluted TOS and ‘open’ APIs will be the death of us. A good rant on the pitfalls of using public web APIs and being subjected to the whims and Terms of Service of whoever provides it. Open APIs allow people to do great stuff, but there will always be issues of trust. Handle with care. ···

A transcript of Charlie Stross’ talk Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD. Worth a read if only for the idea that network security is increasingly synonymous with identity security — as Stross points out, if our existence also manifests itself in bits, protecting those bits becomes a very basic need. ···

A DSLR controller for Android. Looking at this made my Android 2.1 phone go from ‘great’ to ‘piece of shit’ instantly (as it requires Android 2.3). Even though I’d probably not use this app that much. ···

90 percent of people don’t know the shortcut to find a word in a webpage. Actually, one of the things I miss from Firefox (I use Chrome) is the option to search-as-you-type. But hitting Ctrl+F is not that much work. ···

Tom Waits on the difficulty of throwing a private listening party in this day and age. ···

Kingdom Rush (Flash game) is definitely not recommended visiting unless you want to lose the next few hours of your life. (via Kottke) ···

So I finally lost it and bought a Kindle. Sure I have blogged against Amazon’s stupid policies in the past, and the Kindle seems the nexus of such. But on the other hand, I did want an e-reader that doesn’t suck, and nowadays it’s indeed hard to find electronics/internet companies not behaving like assholes in some ways. It’s easy to choose some lesser evil over Apple (I also bought an Android phone recently, and intend to post some remarks soon), but in the e-reader landscape the choice seems between the proprietary and good, the (little more) open and expensive, and the cheap and utter rubbish. So I did order a Kindle 3, and I’m keeping backups just to be on the safe side.

 

Why the Kindle is the best device ever: the screen. It’s exactly like paper. After a while, you forget you’re holding electronics. It’s paper, even if a bit on the glossy side (but no worse than the stuff many magazines are printed on). It’s crisp, it’s easy on the eyes, it’s magical. Of course, it’s so much like paper you’ll need a light, but it’s okay: because it’s like paper. So good, I find myself turning it on and off and on and off again just to look at the gorgeous random ‘screensaver prints’ that come up when you turn it off. The refresh-only-on-demand paperlike screen also comes with another benefit: battery life. I charged the thing once when I got it two weeks ago, have been using it every day, and the battery indicator is only down one notch. Amazon claims one-fucking month of battery life, and they seem to be telling the truth. The Kindle also has decent WiFi connectivity (I didn’t go for the 3G version, and even though Amazon provides free 3G Internet worldwide, the browsing experience is so bad I don’t regret it — more on that later), which enables me to get stuff on the Kindle over the Internet. I’m already used to an automated daily Instapaper digest — the morning newspaper for the 21st century, and I doubt I’ll ever run out of stuff to read. The Kindle also comes preloaded with two dictionaries, and I love the nice touch of being able to navigate to any word in a text and having a definition pop up. Truly useful. And best of all, it all comes in a light package: the device along with the (by the way overpriced) cover weights less than an A5 Moleskine.

Why the Kindle is a piece of crap and deserves market death: The screen is too damn small. They say the Kindle is the size of a paperback, and they are right. But paperbacks don’t have oversized bezels and keyboards. In fact, the reading area is pocket-book sized. But still, there’s the larger Kindle DX, so I guess this one’s on me. The Kindle opens PDFs, but unless you format them for the small screen you’ll be scrolling a lot and zooming in a lot or reading really teeny tiny type. Perhaps the DX PDF experience is better, but then again, the PDF reader is so slow Adobe Reader in a malware-infested Pentium III feels zippy by comparison. Ditto for the Web browser. Even though it’s Webkit-based and capable of rendering modern websites pretty accurately, it’s an usability nightmare. And to make it worse, even though one wouldn’t actually expect tabbed browsing on a Kindle, a target=”_blank” link is all it takes to hit a brick wall, with a dreaded error message to the effect of “The Kindle browser doesn’t support opening multiple windows”; with no way to open the link in the same window. Amazon may have even put the browser under an ‘experimental’ menu (despite the fact many regular Kindle functions will automatically open the browser), and they may be worried about the cost of the whole “free worldwide 3G Internet” thing, but do they need to punish users connected via their home WiFi networks?

The Kindle is so full of ergonomical nonsense it’s ridiculous. The browser may be the worst of it, but usability WTFs are a Kindle staple. The menus and the navigation feel like an afterthought, as irritating as a MS-DOS productivity interface. The keyboard manages to be too big and small at the same time, and the relegation of numbers to the ‘symbol’ menu really made my day when I had to enter passwords, the ironic thing being cellphone QWERTY keyboards a quarter of the size are endlessly more pleasant to use. Not to mention the awkward position of the Menu, Home and Back buttons; and the way the D-pad is not only bad but seems placed wherever the designers found a place it would fit.

However, 95% of the time, you’ll be looking at the gorgeous-but-small paperlike screen, and using the big and rather well placed (in comparison with the ergonomical bankruptcy of the rest) page-flip buttons. And that’s what counts. If you look at the Kindle as electronics, it’s an infuriating piece of shit. But if you look at it as a reading medium, it’s quite swell. I’ve been taking mine with me every day.

Yesterday I attended an academic conference at the Future Places festival that’s happening right now right here in Porto. I normally tend to be wary of such conferences, having previously seen my fair share of the “I’m a genius who knows magic and you’re not” attitude, so I was very pleased by the “Just do it, things do get easy when broken down in small problems!” message that prevailed in today’s presentations, which included, among others, a very interesting and entertaining keynote presentation by Golan Levin. However, by that time I was already dumbstruck by the relatively small presentation by Zach Smith of Thingiverse and Makerbot, about the subject of 3D printing — that is, desktop factories.

For now (and probably for a few decades still), 3D printers only ‘print’ plastic, but still — I held objects that felt right out of the fucking Diamond Age. Need a plug for your bath? Print it! A toy train for your nephew? Print it! A coat hanger? Print it! In time, no doubt people will be sharing the 3D models that will allow you to print more complicated things. Right now, everything that is made of plastic can be ‘printed’ (wouldn’t ‘sculpted’ be a better word?) right there on your desktop. At the moment the Makerbot 3D printer is sold as a kit you have to assemble, but so did the MITS Altair in 1975, and it only took a couple of years after that for ready-to-use microcomputers to hit the retail shelves. I’m only wondering how much will HP ask for a plastic ‘refill’…