The Problem Digital works, completely divorced from a physical medium and transferable between devices, now lack one of the key ways we’ve given value to these cultural products in the past: their physical size. Another problem: in a hypothetical future where all music and books are available solely as digital downloads (and I hope that […]
Stephen Ramsey has written a series of articles about the advantages of typed interfaces, that is those programs which you use from the command line by typing instructions rather than clicking on ‘buttons’ with a mouse. His argument is that it’s a lot more convoluted to click, click, click, click, drag, click than to simply […]
The death of the desktop PC, and soon the laptop, has been widely reported in the media recently. Tablets, phones and a myriad of other embedded devices will make the power of fixed computers unnecessary for all except the video editors and 3D renderers amongst us. Alongside this, the phrase ‘Year of Linux on the […]
The most recent edition of Fortean Times (FT279) and an article on the Neuroanthropology Blog highlight a review from a mid 2010 issue of Brain and Behavioural Sciences. The review suggests that many psychological studies done over the past century are severely flawed, in that the test subjects were almost all Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich […]
Or what happens to a room full of journalism students when you start handing out typewriters. All on Paper was a project at Florida Atlantic University, and it involved a handful of 20-something trainee journalists turning off their iMacs and getting out the typewriters, TippEx, and photo-developing chemicals. This was technology older than they were, […]
So, an introduction is necessary. What is Unconvenient all about? Getting closer to the action The modern world is full of wonder: we have machines which can do almost anything for us, including wash our clothes, cook our food (then wash up), help us go to sleep, to wake up, to find our way around, […]
Ebooks are not books. They’re not ‘electronic’ books. In the same way that MP3s are not vinyl and Second Life isn’t real life (who’da thunk?). The book industry is not moving to ebooks. The publishing industry is expanding from paper to electronic screens. The losers will be those who think they are moving to electronic […]
All this ‘shopping shifting’ – from physical goods to electronic goods, and shopping in physical spaces to shopping from ‘wherever you are’ (i.e. via mobile phone web/app) – will further reduce the quality of the stuff we can buy. Of course there are many advantages to replacing a bookcase with something equivalent and yet which […]
I want an operating system that doesn’t define me. Or perhaps, one that defines me better. In a sense this is why I use Linux. I can make all manner of choices with it which reflect my personality when it comes to computer use. However, I don’t think it does it well enough. Default Definitions […]
Writers should be thirsty for all the assistance offered to them. Hell, everyone who works daily to improve a skill should. And there are plenty of formulae, methods and structures out there for the writer (and I don’t mean that in any negative sense). Larry Brooks’ Six Core Competencies is one of my favourites. You […]