“My job used to be finding good singers. Now I just have to find good-looking singers.”
A music producer talking to the inventor of Auto-tune. Seventeen years of cheating or a creative tool.
“My job used to…
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Tag Archives: Technology
Freeze Dried Scribblings From Defunct Cupboards
I finally got around to backing up my old Posterous blog contents in advance of their closure at the end of the month. It was fun while it lasted but I’ll probably integrate the contents into this blog eventually. Goodbye Posterous. You took the money and ran. That seems to be all it’s about these days.
Mind you it’s a salutary reminder not to rely too heavily on services that can all too easily be withdrawn whether it’s for email, blogs or online storage.
Still at least they made the download available. So many services just assume all our content belongs to them.
I’ll put the contents in the fridge for now.
A Life Set In Stone And Shared Accordingly
The news (OK churnalistic press release reported as news) that Google has released a tool that enables users to determine what happens to their online data in the event of their death again reminds me of a titbit of news I read decades ago.
Back in the 80s I can recall reading a snippet about a service in the United States that allowed the embedding of a small TV monitor in a burial headstone that could be activated to play a piece of video that told the tombstone curious about the life of the deceased. No doubt an unwieldy and costly service back then when screens were not flat and storage media was tape or a bespoke laserdisc.
Now it strikes me that narcissism can outlive death as our digital footprints leave their indentation on the beach of online data where they are gradually eroded by the continual tidal impact on new daily information or preserved by loved ones left behind. A family legacy that can’t be hauled along to the Antiques Roadshow for valuation- “I found this in the attic but have no idea what it is”…”I believe these were called memory sticks and people once saved their private information on them”…”private information? Gosh. How quaint”.
Surely a modern equivalent to the TV-in-a-headstone would be a url or better still a QR code engraved into the headstone.
Either way our inconsequential thoughts live on long after our physical presence has withered away.
Image by Karthic R via this creative commons licence
Another One Bites The Dust
I awake to find that Google (cue my dastardly mock American pronunciation: Gugurl) is retiring Google reader, their RSS feed aggregator in July of this year. Luckily my use of Feedly will transition out of it smoothly but I am reminded that I really need to ‘roll my own’ even more than I already do. Got to break that Google habit before it breaks me or at least leads me up some blind alley.
Bright Bauble Browser Loyalty
I’m a little dilettantish when it comes to my choice for surfing the net on a desktop. Browser loyalty is skittish at best. The paradox of choice writ large.
Keyboard to Mouse To Fingers To Voice To Theramin Gestures
This demo of a possible gesture based controller for computers looks more like the delicate art of playing a Theramin.
Me I want to be able to control my computer by wildly gesticulating in ways that, from afar, look like I’m about to dance the funky chicken or feel like chicken tonight. The World’s cubicle workers are going to need more elbow room.
All Change On The Small Desktop
I’ve just added Gnome 3 shell to my Mint XFCE desktop. How messed up am I? A status update for fellow geeks there.
