Recent articles

• Proposed neologism: "loginscreen project"

  June 9, 2007

  4:56 - (the daniel) but a good programming exercise and a cute conceit, to have your own robot butler 4:57 - (Brian Kerr) yeah, that's great, always fun to do something a little more ... algorithmic and a little less login screen 5:00 - (the daniel) (i like that as a euphemism for project with necessary web ui crap attached) 5:00 - (the daniel) loginscreen project

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• note to self: cannot exceed c!

  May 22, 2007

  This morning Rob mentioned "the new world where everything is temporary".

  Remember Einstein - when your frame of reference is accelerating enough relative to 'everything'...

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• Gadget Magic

  July 21, 2006

  Author's note: I have found it difficult to write anything of substance lately. The absurdity of national politics in my home country, increasing pressures related to my career, the desperate sadness of the Middle East, my girlfriend's trip abroad, and some unfortunate financial stresses have left me little interested in writing about the structure of information, Style, and/or things with LEDs that blink. After all, who cares about breathless futurism when the present is such a fucking mess? After some weeks of struggling with fading inspiration, I decided that no matter how inconsequential it feels compared with ...

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• 2D barcodes

  June 4, 2006

  (image courtesy of B-Log Cabin TPJ) For some reason, matrix codes/2D barcodes have been infringing the borders of my attention these weeks. A few different friends of both the techie and non-techie varieties have brought up the topic in conversation. The most familiar 2D barcode, at least to folks who are familiar with tech in Japan, is the QR code. These can contain quite a bit of information - up to about 3KB of data. One could imagine a sort of super-durable storage in the form of a huge array of QR codes laser-etched into some tough surface. Today they ...

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• Spwone not Spime

  May 25, 2006

  We were moving our desks and things around the office yesterday, and I realized that every piece of office decoration corresponded to a document on my hard drive - I could recycle all my tattered posters and papercraft and simply reprint them upstairs. It struck me that this was the real, today version of what C. Sven writes about - physical objects like desks and catamarans reduced to files describing their structure, to be printed and destroyed and reconstructed at convenience. It also felt like a Bruce Sterling moment, so I thought I'd pay tribute to his awesome speeches by recording ...

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• Wiivolution in the Metaverse

  May 12, 2006

  The Nintendo Wii, with its novel control scheme, had its coming out party this week at E3. Response from journalists ranged from giddily impressed to underwhelmed. However, one common comment was that the Wiimote (popular term for the TV-remote-style controller) was particularly intuitive for playing Metroid, a first person shooter. Rotate the Wiimote to turn, point to aim, and take care of the rest of the steering with the left thumb on the joystick of the attached "nunchaku" controller. From blogs.nytimes.com:

  I only got to play the new Metroid on the Wii for about 10 minutes, but I ...

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