"Why My iPhone Is Better as a Dumbphone"

Why My iPhone Is Better as a Dumbphone, article. 

How hard were those seven days? You can probably guess where this is headed: Not as hard as I had expected. I didn't even notice when I hit day seven, because I was already loving my new incapable iPhone.

I still impulsively reached for it when I got momentarily bored – in fact I still do, months later. But without an infinite supply of anything, I just put it back in my pocket.

Being bored turned out to be, well, sort of pleasant.

This is not some technophobe, this guy was a developer on Gmail. 

We've had this subject up before, I find it very interesting. 

Years ago when I heard "Net addiction", I got irritated. How could something so useful, so wonderful, be seen as an "addiction"? Well, the thing is, it can be both. It is powerful communication, and therefore can be powerfully good. But nothing is so good that it can't also be bad, or at the very least an addiction as well. Work can be addictive, exercise can be addictive, education can be addictive. 

The problem is not in the subjects themselves, the problem is in us. Even hard drugs would not be a problem if we did not all of us have inner pains and conflicts which are so difficult that we try to run away from them, and that is just what an addiction is. A distraction. Or a pleasantry to cover some unpleasantness. 

For sure

[Thanks to Bert]

From McSweeneys. 

Evil Dead

For my sins, I have just watched Evil Dead.

This movie is regarded as a classic in the splatter genre, and has very high reviews both on Amazon and Rotten Tomatoes, I mean really high reviews.
But I can't figure out by what measures this is a great movie, or even a good one. To me it seems it has a mediocre story, mediocre effects and makeup, mediocre acting, mediocre directing.

4.5 stars over 682 reviews!

Is it so perhaps that the fanbase is so small for splatter than big-budget movies are not made, big talent is not attracted, and so fans have to judge the movies not be general movie standards, but only to others in the same genre, and so some movies have to come out on top?

Has nobody made a splatter movie with a decent budget, good actors, a solid story, etc?

Personal entrepreneurs no longer welcome on the web

Thoughts Prompted by Google Reader’s Demise, TidBITS article.

This trend of companies moving from tools to platforms isn’t surprising, and makes sense for both users and providers. Platforms provide coherent user experiences, [...] 
But the loss of tools is disturbing, for the same reasons it would be disturbing if there were no more tools available for carpenters to build houses, just pre-fab structures trucked in and plopped down. Tools enable creative people to build things that no one else can even imagine, and just as a hammer and saw can be used for far more than building a house, so too can digital tools be used in ways that were never intended initially. 

Exactly. I find it more than just a little bit disturbing that it is fast becoming impossible to get a WYSIWIG html editor (for Mac). I am told that today people are either programmers who want to look at the code directly, or they use cloud platforms like Wordpress to make their sites. People like me who make a web site like we make a word processor document are dinosaurs.
I hate the idea of, at my age, to have to go through a huge new learning process, with all the new bugs it inevitably has. Plus this smacks of new dollops of loss of control. Fresh hell.

In the nineties and part of the noughties, the web was a golden land of opportunity for the Little Man (even if he's 6.4 like me) to make a splash, perhaps even a living, on the web, all of his own. But now, this is pretty much crushed. The big companies are those who can handle the complexities of the new web landscape. And little men are put at the Childrens Table, FaceBook, to talk smalltalk.

When David Bowie joined in a band, Tin Machine, for a couple of years in the early nineties, ostensibly on equal footing with the other members, there was great scepticism. And the band did not take over the world. But I liked some of their stuff, particularly on vol One. They had just the clean dirty hard rock sound they'd been aiming for. Bowie said in an interview that they'd been messing around in digital to get the right digital dirty sound, and it occurred to them that some people still got that by just playing with the right, ole-time, dirty sounding rock equipment...






Stateside, below, is the one track on the second album I really liked. Funny enough a track not written or sung by Bowie, but by Hunt Sales.



"Where the suffering comes easy on a blonde with no brain..." 

Jeff Birchill stone art II

I've posted Jeff's art before. He makes really good stone art.
He now has a Gallery on FB.

But oddly it seems that I have to log into facebook in order to view the photos. This seems odd to me, and counterproductive, and not what Jeff believes should happen, so can you tell me please, do you have a different experience with his site according to if you're logged in or not? (Maybe you can use a different browser for one of those.)

(Uhm, that's not Jeff though.)

The Crankerator

The Crankerator

I'm not sure it can be made to work with camera batteries/chargers, since they don't use USB cables. But for phones/tablets, it's kewl.
You can charge it up before hand, but if happens to be empty: raw muscle-power saves the day! Viola.



Buy the The Crankerator at the Photojojo Store!

Video: water appears frozen in sine wave

Bert found this really fun video.

I really wonder what it looked like to the eye...?

Update:
A. gave this link with explanation.

Hemlock Sholmes

There's a recent version, film or TV, of Sherlock Holmes, which has everybody all a-twitter (probably literally too). Is that the one with Bob Downey Jr.? 'Cuz I just tried that, and it left me lukewarm.

Religion and blood

I quoted:

Are Muslim vampires repulsed by the Koran?

===

Bert reparted with: 

Apple, Amazon get patents to offer ‘used’ digital goods

Apple, Amazon get patents to offer ‘used’ digital goods, article.

Wow, what can of worms is opened here? Amazon may have a de facto monopoly on the reselling of "used" digital goods? That sounds like a licence to tax the air. What a gig if you can get it.

Another worm is that presumably the author/copyright holder only gets paid the first time, while Amazon gets a bit of the pie every time a file is re-sold. Technically a similar thing is true for used physical items, but there, there's a natural friction from the physicality, and physical goods get worn, unlike digital ones. A digital file can get resold dozens of times, with Amazon getting a bite each time, and still be in pristine mint condition.

"Fast camera" iPhone app

Lets you take ten pictures per second (or slower), full resolution, up to 1000 of them. Then you can save the good ones, or even make a timelapse video. Kewl.

Fast Camera from i4software on Vimeo.