hello, my name is:
Marc Hummel. (Philadelphia.) Writer; coffee enthusiast; reader; computer/internet nerd; stationery geek; music fan; literacy advocate.
recent tunes:- Shearwater – You As You Were
- Shearwater – dread soverign
- Shearwater – Breaking The Yearlings
- Shearwater – Meridian
- Shearwater – Star Of The Age
- Shearwater – Believing Makes It Easy
- Shearwater – Pushing The River
- Shearwater – Run The Banner Down
- Shearwater – Open Your Houses
- Shearwater – Believing Makes It Easy
Category Archives: technology
A Look Inside an Apple Factory
A quick, fascinating look inside the Foxconn factories that assemble Apple products {nightline/abc news}.
Why Google will never have a successful social network
The first reason is competitive. It hit me while reading a Nick Carr piece from back in July, when Google had recently lost its deal with Twitter to provide real-time information in Google’s search results.
Of course Twitter didn’t renew their deal with Google. Google Plus is now treading on their own territory; they pissed off the wrong company. (Again.)
The second reason is personal. Google has enough of my information, thankyouverymuch, and as their sweeping new privacy policy reveals, they aren’t going to give me control over my data that they’ve collected if I still want to use their services. In other words, I can opt out of their new rules; but I can’t have a YouTube or Gmail account. (Android users face an even simpler choice: agree to Google’s new terms or buy a new phone.)
Which brings me back to my original point. I like that emails to my family and Facebook Likes are kept separate. If these companies have no requirement to disclose what information they’re keeping and for how long, at least I can make their job (selling my info to advertisers) a tad bit harder by diversifying my social holdings (if you’ll accept my mixed metaphor). If that’s the deal we have to accept as users of a free service, we can at least make it harder for them to consolidate the various compartments of our lives. And that’s what’s creepy evil about Google’s new policy.
Carr Cuts into Zuckerberg
Nick Carr serves it to Mark Zuckerberg in a piece criticizing the opening line of Facebook’s SEC filing, as the company prepares for its IPO later this month. Zuckerberg claims that Facebook wasn’t started as a way to generate revenue; it was started to fulfill a “social mission” of making the world a more “open and connected”.
Carr:
Just look at what Zuckerberg was doing, as a sophomore at Harvard, in the days just before he created Facebook. Working selflessly at his computer in his dorm, he created a site called Facemash. It pulled photos of Harvard undergrads from other campus sites, put two of the photos side by side on a web page, and allowed people to vote for which of the two was the “hottest.” It then tallied the votes to create lists ranking students by their looks. It’s hard to imagine a more altruistic project. What Zuckerberg had already realized is that, in order to create seamless online connections between people, you have to first turn them into objects.
From “Saint Zuck” {nick carr’s blog}
A Primer on 3D “Printing”
I’ve heard a lot about 3D printing over the past year, but I never really knew what it was or how it worked except that it’s cool is coming to the Free Library.
TED Talks to the rescue! I learned what 3D printing is, how it works, and that in the future when your vacuum breaks, you might be able to print out a replacement part from your home.
I still feel weird about the “printer” part of “3D printer,” since a seal for your vacuum can’t appear “in print,” and there’s no ink involved! But it does have a catchy ring to it…
Check out Lisa Harouni: a primer on 3D printing {ted}.
Apple Ambivalence
I’ve been a Mac user since about 2003. I was frustrated with my Windows machine, with the way nothing on it seemed to work based on intuition. Macs seemed (and are) simpler, more detail obsessed, and easier to use. After I switched, I wondered why Apple wasn’t more successful.
Fast forward to Q1 2012 {the verge}, and Apple is the world’s most valuable company. (Or at least they were for a little while today; Exxon has since taken the top spot again. But still, that’s Exxon.) It’s extraordinary. And I can’t help but be fascinated by their success, and weirdly proud of what they’ve accomplished.
And that bugs me. Why should I care how successful a ubiquitous, massive multinational corporation like Apple is, and one with a questionable dedication to fair labor practices to boot.
David Heinemeier Hansson, nailed it today, and made me feel a little less crazy. An excerpt:
Still, financial results of the likes Apple delivered yesterday serve as an affirmation of all that energy spent telling their story. Believing in the underdog. Like your favorite home team who couldn’t get into premier league while growing up just won the Superbowl, the Stanley Cup, and the World Series all together for the 10th time in a row — and you were the only one to believe in them. It’s an immensely satisfying feeling.
Read the rest: Watching Apple Win the World {37 signals blog; via daring fireball}.
I Wish Steve Jobs Changed Capitalism, too
Just found a depressing but important article about the working conditions in Apple factories, as well as a cultural explication of Apple’s recent success. Mike Daisey, quoted below, put forward these arguments in a live performance last Fall entitled The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. From Outsourcing Jobs {n+1 blog; via truth dig}:
Apple’s massive growth in the last eight years to becoming the single most valuable publicly traded company in the world is not entirely explained by the thesis that Apple products are great, or that the company was early to take advantage of wireless broadband, or that Apple’s time had come when we all began to see computers as lifestyle accessories. For every era gets the companies it deserves. A brand of cleanness and simplicity, of chipperly trading control for efficiency, seems particularly well suited for a time when people have lost faith in an incompetent, messy, gridlocked, shallow democracy and in our fragilely recovering economy. Better an iPhone than Il Duce, of course, to make the trains run on time—or at least to tell you how to get to Penn Station—but totalitarian shadows probably should not fall over the products we crave, in how they are made or why we love them. Nor should the manufacture and the appeal of our most desired products reach the same conclusion: that people are much less than our machines.
UPDATE 1/9: This week’s episode of This American Life features a made-for-radio version of his performance. It’s incredibly moving. Listen to it here: Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.
That Ain’t Smart, That’s Creepy: Bad Habit Edition
It’s time for another installment of That Ain’t Smart, That’s Creepy — my semi-monthly report from the land of smartphone.
This week’s topic is an app that allows the user to create a façade of productivity at the office. Simply set the length of nap, select the kind of work you want to mimic (keyboard taps, paper shuffling, etc.), and iNap@work {itunes} takes care of the rest, using your iDevice’s built-in speaker {via on the media}.
Posted in technology
Tagged apps, don't try this at work, iphone, nap, Office, technology, that aint smart thats creepy
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Callin’ Oates
Love this:
If you pick up your phone and call 719-26-OATES — at least as of this writing — you’ll get a computerized woman’s voice telling you what numbers to press to hear one of four Hall & Oates songs.
It’s a promo project for a San Fran-based tech company {via npr}.
Polaroid Lives!
I had no idea Urban Outfitters partnered with the Impossible Project to make Polaroid film you can actually buy right now.
The film is crazy expensive ($3/photo), but awesome news for all the sentimental photographers out there.
See also: Posts tagged Polaroid on this blog.
Posted in technology
Tagged old stuff, polaroid, sentimentality, technology, vintage
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Reading on the Web
My three main devices for reading are my laptop, my not-iPhone and paper. I’m pretty good at reading on paper, unless not-iPhone is nearby and/or I had too much coffee to drink. Laptop is a pretty crappy reading experience, and the not-iPhone is just a tad too small to enjoy reading for great lengths of time.
I always thought it was my fault. That I’m too easily distracted, not engaged in the subject enough, etc. Or that I’ve been conditioned to think without depth — what Nicholas Carr was saying in The Shallows.
But a few stories making their way around blogland recently has allowed me to pause, relax, and scan the contents of their articles for information.
The first, How Crappy Advertising is Destroying the Web, seems to be about the distracting, ill-placed ads that focus on distracting you from the content you’re allegedly enjoying.
The hopeful second, The Readable Future, envisions a world where publications acknowledge the trend of readers going to third-party services like Instapaper for a good reading experience — a trend publishers can counter by fixing their crappy sites.
The third, Please Let This Not be the Future of Reading on the Web, is a more general call for more reader-centric copy.
I couldn’t agree with this sentiment more. It’s (at least partly) why I avoid sites like the Huffington Post (and to a lesser extent Salon). But at the end of the day, writers and their publishers need to get paid somehow. I worry about the day that obtrusiveness is traded for more blatant paid product placements or similar evil scheme.
