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
Tag Archives: technology
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}
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 Think I Have the Right to Grow
Author Eric Klinenberg has a new book about the rise of living alone in the U.S. and elsewhere. In an interview with the Smithsonian, he highlights some of the research (in Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and Chicago 35-45% of people live alone), and suggests that technology makes it possible, desirable even, to be connected while alone:
The next thing, I would say, is that we live today in a culture of hyperconnection, or overconnection. If we once worried about isolation, today, more and more critics are concerned that we’re overconnected. So in a moment like this, living alone is one way to get a kind of restorative solitude, a solitude that can be productive, because your home can be an oasis from the constant chatter and overwhelming stimulation of the digital urban existence.
I’m wary of suggesting that something like Facebook enables genuine human connection, but I’ll grant that we’re better off with it than without it.
Get the book: Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone
{via andrew sullivan}
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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
On Louis C.K. & Direct-to-web Distribution
I have yet to purchase Louis C.K.’s new direct-to-web performance, Live at the Beacon Theater {official site}, but that won’t stop me from pontificating. (I’m not completely without my C.K. bona fides however; I listened to and enjoyed his “appearances” on WTF and Fresh Air.)
Anyway, as you probably know by now, the comedian decided to release his show direct to fans, bypassing the traditional studio model where they pay for the shooting of the video, have control over the distribution, and eventually send the performer a cut. C.K. simply paid for everything (a $250,000 investment according to the Times), and made it available on his website direct-to-fans for $five.
It’s reminiscent of Radiohead’s web release of In Rainbows {wikipedia} via a pay-what-you-can scheme.
C.K.’s experiment has already been dubbed a success, earning him $750,000 pure profit (again, according to the Times). The temptation here is to make too big a fuss about this, pointing to this new model as the future of the web and entertainment. No one would be giving Louis C.K. five¢ if it weren’t for his appearances on shows produced by established media empires, a point David Carr {NY Times} should be given credit for acknowledging:
In fact, I wouldn’t know anything about Louis C. K. if it weren’t for cable. I DVR’d his freakishly hilarious series “Louie” on FX, which is owned by News Corporation, and I saw his last two comedy specials on cable. The people who helped build the brand of Louis C.K. might wonder about his decision to go native (digitally), but hey, it’s the Internet: it’s every man, woman, producer, consumer, company and cable outfit for itself!
In other words, it’s great work if you can get it. But we’re a far cry from the day when artist an can support themselves on the web by selling their shows directly to fans. But if there has to be a middleman, I suppose one like Etsy or Threadless is a step up from NBC or Viacom.
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.
What Our Routers Say About Us
I’ve always been intrigued by the social phenomenon of the names people give to their Wi-Fi routers. Right now sitting in my apartment I can see a few notable ones:
- The patriotically Philly “ballz franklin”
- The simple yet informative “blondies”
- The self-loathing yet astute “necessary evil”
- The studious “PSAT”
- The blithely lazy “linksys”
- The misleading — as no such establishment exists within Wi-Fi range — “citywidecafe”
- And the territorial “Sandra’s Network”.
Lauren Collins explores the wild west of wi-fi with a piece about wireless network enthusiast Alexandra Janelli, in The Tao of Wifi {new yorker}. The inspiration for the site came in 2009…
…in a bar on the Lower East Side, [while she was] fiddling with her iPhone. A window popped up asking if she’d like to join a wireless network called Alcoholics Shut In. “[She] was, like, well, that’s really odd… I’m not a huge techie, but I thought to myself, There must be other funny names out there.”
The fruits of her curiosity culminated in this entertaining site, WTFwifi, a compendium of user-submitted Wi-Fi names.
Posted in essays, technology
Tagged internet, new yorker, technology, wi-fi, wireless
Leave a comment
Please Don’t Use This Site on This Site
A yet-to-be-released browser plugin created by MIT researcher and fellow east PA-er Dan Schultz promises to do for the web what Fox News will never do for its on-air hosts.
Pants on fire fox?
From NPR:
CORNISH: Of course, the joke about beer goggles is they make people or potential dates look more attractive then they really are. Schultz’s Truth Goggles are meant to do the opposite. With this software, your potential [presidential] candidate might not look so hot anymore, once the program has searched and flagged their statements as dubious. Then it would link you to the research of fact-checking websites like PolitiFact.
SCHULTZ: The inspiration behind this project goes back to my freshman year, when I took a course about “The War of the Worlds” broadcast that happened in – I think it was 1938.
SCHULTZ: I would like to help keep people from believing that aliens are invading the planet. I want to use this tool to trigger their critical abilities, to get them to think a little bit harder about what they are seeing.
Posted in technology, things i like
Tagged cool stuff, fact not fiction, journalism, technology
Leave a comment
A yet-to-be-released browser plugin created by MIT researcher and fellow east PA-er Dan Schultz promises to do for the web what Fox News will never do for its on-air hosts.
Pants on fire fox?
From NPR:
CORNISH: Of course, the joke about beer goggles is they make people or potential dates look more attractive then they really are. Schultz’s Truth Goggles are meant to do the opposite. With this software, your potential [presidential] candidate might not look so hot anymore, once the program has searched and flagged their statements as dubious. Then it would link you to the research of fact-checking websites like PolitiFact.
SCHULTZ: The inspiration behind this project goes back to my freshman year, when I took a course about “The War of the Worlds” broadcast that happened in – I think it was 1938.
SCHULTZ: I would like to help keep people from believing that aliens are invading the planet. I want to use this tool to trigger their critical abilities, to get them to think a little bit harder about what they are seeing.
