Experience, design & technology.

Archive for January, 2012

Touch me

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Posted on January 31st, 2012

I’ve noticed this strange quirk happening lately, most noticeably when I’m on my laptop at work. I’ll glance up at the laptop screen, spot a link in a web page (perhaps one I’ve launched using a keyboard shortcut), and reach up to touch it. Not reach for the mouse, not reach for the trackpad (which is already halfway between my hand and the screen), but reach up for the screen itself. My brain is telling me that the right thing to do is to touch it. I’d written off the concept of touch screens on laptops, after all, who wants to spend their time hovering an arm above a screen, won’t we all suffer from gorilla arm or stress injuries? Well perhaps not. I’d…

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On format

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Posted on January 30th, 2012

Printing Press, by Thomas Hawk I’ve been thinking lately, about the plethora of new book distribution formats (be that electronic, audio, print-on-demand) and one thing occurred to me that I just can’t shake. How will we look back on todays written word, in generations to come? I don’t mean through the lens of nostalgia, rather I mean how will we retrieve, access, read and learn from this moment in time – when a staggeringly huge amount of it is locked up in proprietary formats and in many ways destined to decay along with their creators. I’m reasonably certain that the standards-based web (HTML, CSS, JS) will be with us for a long time, but what of other book formats and their makers? The ePub…

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Running out of ink

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Posted on January 28th, 2012

Excited by the pirate bay’s physible concept, you know, the one about 3d printing your footwear? Well here’s a counter argument, made by Nick Cernis, aka the modern nerd. I do not wish to be told that my 3D printer is out of nanocyan when it’s doing the tricky bits around the laces. I do not dream of discarding twelve pairs of half-printed, mangled, almost shoes in order to get one wearable pair of sort-of-looks-like-shoes-if-you-stand-here-and-squint-a-bit. I have some experience with 3d printing, having used a 3d printer to mock up the design for social firefly (amongst other architectural models), and I agree that the medium is primarily designed for quick, cheap and cheerful models to help you along your way. Perhaps footwear is the…

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Download your sneakers

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Posted on January 27th, 2012

Fascinating to catch the pirate-eye view on the physical/digital overlap. Today most data is born digitally. It’s not about the transition from analog to digital anymore. We don’t talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things. Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere. But we’re physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well! We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the…

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1% of 1%

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Posted on January 22nd, 2012

My colleague Jo McKiernan on QR codes, and internet access in general. I think that we are experiencing is possibly analogous to what we saw when the web went mainstream. When first we started seeing urls appearing on stuff – adverts particularly – I remember having a conversation that went something along the lines of “yeah, but no one is ever going to use them, AND you need an internet connection!”. Now, access to the internet is a fundamental human right, and if we can’t follow our favourite brands on Twitter or like them on Facebook we feel somehow cheated. I can see what Jo’s point is, however it does strike me as something that shies well away from crossing a widely yawning digital…

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Starting today

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Posted on January 22nd, 2012

Marco makes his point about SOPA crystal clear: It’s also worth reconsidering our support of the MPAA. The MPAA is a hate-sink, a front to protect its members from negative PR. But unlike the similarly purposed Lodsys (and many others), it’s easy to see who the MPAA represents: Disney, Sony Pictures, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers. (Essentially, all of the major movie studios.) The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us. Yet when we watch their movies, we support them. Even…

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We can remember it for you

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Posted on January 22nd, 2012

Apparently there’s a remake in the works for Total Recall. At first glance it looks to have a decent cast, with Colin Firth filling Arnie’s immensely cavernous shoes as Doug Quaid.  Other notable notables include Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad really has done wonders for his film career), Kate Beckinsale, Bill Nighy and Ethan Hawke.  A cursory browse through flickr will reveal that the project is well under way and looks like it’ll be quite faithful to the 90′s sci-fi action flick. Total Recall is rather loosely based on one of Philip K Dick’s short stories, one called We can remember it for you wholesale.  It’s quite a liberal interpretation, embellishing some of the details and inventing an action / adventure plot line that isn’t…

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Stop SOPA

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Posted on January 18th, 2012

Apologies to all of you who’ll soon visit jasonmcdermott.net in search of interesting things. Tomorrow will be one day where this site is unavailable. I’m joining the stop SOPA movement, you will instead find information about why this proposed (American) legislation is bad for the Internet and not only in the US. The ire this bill has raised in the online communities is nothing short of remarkable. Very notable websites are also getting involved, you can see their efforts ring loud and clear.

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Use your voice

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Posted on January 16th, 2012

Now isn’t this interesting. Apparently the way we talk to Siri is changing the way we talk to one another. Person teased by friend for ordering cheeseburger with exaggerated clarity. “Now that I use Siri, I enunciate everything.” #newaesthetic It’s not the first time this has been suggested, back in November Adam noted the significant distinction between thinking of Siri as a better human-computer-interaction device, and the effects it is having on human-human-interaction. You learn quickly that Siri has certain expectations, certain limitations, and must be spoken to with a certain cadence reflecting a certain pattern of thought. Speaking to Siri is a lot like speaking to someone whose English isn’t so strong. It works better if you naturally pre-diagram your sentences and order…

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