safari and pngs

Apple interdubs internet technology

Developing a new public site for interdubs. I am almost done. I needed a png file. Of course they looked different in Safari and Firefox. Actually, to be precise, they looked wrong in Safari. There is problem some academic reason why safari displays them with all that fancy color information rendered in. I don’t care, they are still wrong to me: I want all people to see the same image. this describes the problem I think; as I said, I am making a new site for Interdubs, I don’t have time for another science project. That site however recommends pngcrush. Problem is, that one is a real bitch to compile or install on OS X and linux. Again, I am just trying to have the same image look the same in the two most popular browsers under OS X. I can figure out which libraries to install etc etc. Just that I don’t want to. Finally I found the solutions, and it works awesom: Gamma Slamma might have an odd name, it might have a trendy logo, but it certainly works like a charm.

time design

art technology

Yet another way of reading time

Which got me looking and I found, that Yugo Nakamura is still writing down time.

Of course he is cheating, while Roman Opalka is not.

In Germany this device got some attention 30 years ago.

40 years

art

Sgt Pepper forty years.

Listened to it 3 times in a row at 2am on deck of some dodgy vessel in the middle of the mediterian in August 1993. Portable CD player. Hard to forget.

technology

hundreds of visualsations

I wish I had the time to look at them.

links

misc

couple of misc links. Curtesy BlogsNow:

Pixelmator is a future Mac Photo edit app, slated to use GPU and cost 59,- they say
drops of liquid aka coffee in milk on steroids
youTube Apple-tv to use h.264 interesting how iPhone vs. Flash will play out. Yesterday we saw already that Apple-TV is not so great

the best code: no code at all I do agree. Having added some 150 lines of code earlier today to interdubs I feel somehow dirty.
It’s official Summer since Nessy is back

morph

art internet media

morphing had been around for a while.
All of these images as well. Still needed youTube to get this out:

I am not a fan of this implementation. The idea itself is great. A bit more understand of art history would have been helpful. The track I can mute, the jumps in time and obvious omissions are harder to fade out. Maybe this time the rip-off in a commercial (bank, insurance, dove soap?) will be better than the you-tube-inspiration?

technological advanced

history not existing yet technology

A comparison of a twenty year old computer with a recent one. And it does support what I felt all along. But this is only half of the story: Computers became what they are because we wanted them that way. People kept buying more Mhz, and decided for the OS with more features. But while what’s called a ‘PC’ ballooned in it’s technical specs there was maybe a gap left below that nobody seems to care about. What about a machine that does web browsing, text editing and digital photo management really well. I would argue that the hardware would cost not more than 100 to 150 US$. Getting the apps right and the OS out of the way is a little bit harder. But it’s possible. “One-Upping” this imaginary concept by one notch and it seems even to be more attractive: Don’t sell the machine. give it to people that sign up for an internet connection with you. Lot’s of ISPs want to get more clients, but are unable themselves to get such a concept working. Really working means to make it work like the iPod worked. The machines are cheap, people would sign up to have them technically monitored remotely. Lot’s of things can be done. There are ample possibilities from here: Sell people computers that are locked down so that their kids can use them. Sell people media access, like music or videos, if that should be a market. This might be the right personal computer for real life persons. The other stuff didn’t really work for many people.

you owe

history politics

yikes,

Supposedly USA Today printed

this

Inlcuding a sentence like:

That amount is equal to $516,348 for every U.S. household. By comparison, U.S. households owe an average of $112,043 for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and all other debt combined.

miscrosoft ‘inovates’

history technology

Microsoft presents a new‘product’. Probably as much of a product as that data watch from them. Of course it has been there before: the mulitouch interface then there seems to be elements reminiscent of this

User interfaces are an interesting topic. Not much has happened since God (or was it Xerox or maybe even Apple?) gave us the mouse.

It will be decades before Microsoft can start copying really innovative work like this study by C. Woebken

cognitive bias

history

Looking at this is list of things that get into the way of objective assertion it feels surprising how we managed to get to skyscrapers and novocaine after all. Actually that list would be really worth looking at, one by one and day by day. But of course there are not only cognitive biases but also much more mundane hassles preventing efficiency: Like forgetting things. Of coure I found this list on BlogsNow. Amazing that I could live for 90 days without it.