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Some good stuff in here – a clear articulation of why the language of skepticism does not get through to the people it most needs to, and how we can do something about that.
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One to write about later. Short version: I have used Google's mantra of "don't be evil" as a yardstick that I feel they often fail to live up to, mostly through lack of thought. This document, and the changes it proposes are not that. They are active "evil", a very sign of corporations laying the groundwork to maximise their own revenues at the expense of their customers. Whatever Google's founding principles may have been, they are just another corporation now, and worse, they're one who have decided to throw their very considerable weight behind practices that will make life less fair for the consumer. I really, really hope the FCC steps in to stop this – essentially what they doing is saying that "the public internet" should be neutral, and then not properly defining "the public internet" thereby leaving them free to define "the private internet" as anything they want.
Author: Alasdair
Links For Monday 9th August 2010
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I believe that this will be relevant to the interests of a number of my friends.
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This one's been doing the rounds, so you may have seen it. Contemplating getting one.
Puppini Sisters, London, Wednesday
The Puppini Sisters “hits from the Blitz” is on on Wednesday the week at Cadogan Hall.
I know of two tickets going spare, and am trying to help shift them.
Anyone interested?
I like to keep it classy
Yes, this is a real poster for a real movie. Supply your own jokes. Prizes awarded for the funniest.
Links For Tuesday 3rd August 2010
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I'm not paying for it now, because as this review makes clear, it's not quite yet fit-for-purpose, but I want to check back in on this one later.
Mail Filtering
This will make no practical difference to any of you, but I’m posting it partly so I’ve got a record of what I’ve set up and partly because the odds are, I’ve forgotten something obvious, and I’m hoping that one of you will say something like “Alasdair, you idiot, if you keep doing it that way, it’s going to fuck up like this….”. (And partly because I’m feeling a little impressed with my own cleverness right now, which is usually a bad sign.)
OK, so up until today, my email was managed like this:
I had an inbox folder that contained about 250 messages. Anything over that 250 threshold that was also over a month old got moved into an “old messages” folder. That was basically it. I used to have a few rules for thing like LJ comment notifications, and some mailinglists, that shunted those into their own folders, but I found that that meant they rarely got read.
Instead, I had an inbox and a massive and unwieldy “old messages” folder that was half-clogged with unread messages and undeleted spam, that was taking an increasingly ludicrous amount of time to search when I want to refer back to something. This was not, by anyone’s definition a winning organisational strategy. So here are my new rules.
I have compiled a database of every email address I have replied to in the last three and a half years. (New addresses that I reply to will automatically get added to this database.)
Emails from these addresses that are over a week old get sorted into folders by year and month. As do emails with any of the following keywords in the subject : “order” “payment” “receipt” and “confirm”.
Anything else at all gets deleted after a week, unless I have flagged it, in which case, it will remain in my inbox until I un-flag it, at which time it will get deleted. (Unread messages will also remain until I have read them.)
That’s it.
So my question is this: can anyone see any sort of email that might get deleted, when it probably shouldn’t (assume that I will, at some point, forget to flag something important)? Should I add some other keywords to my auto-archive filter? Is there any reason why seven days is too short a time? What have I not thought of, when designing these rules?
Links For Friday 30th July 2010
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The next film by the guy behind Helevtica and Objectified.
Links For Thursday 29th July 2010
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Dubstep remixes of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds.
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Ever wondered just how much Google is learning about you? Turn this on, and see. I'm not posting this as a dig at Google, but rather just in a "be informed about what information about you goes where".
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Requires an iPad and 2 iPhones to play. Suspect that it's not going to be set-the-world-on-fire exciting, but it's worth a look, I think, if nothing else than because it's a reasonable innovative idea that is bound to have other applications.
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I've been Instapapering stuff ever since I got my iPad for weeks now, and not quite finding the time to get it all read – to the point that when I'm done with my current book, I'll probably spend a week or two's commuting time catching up on them, rather than picking up another book. So obviously, what I need to make my backlog truly huge is a trove of excellent instapaper fodder. (If you are an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad user who isn't making use of Instapaper, you're missing out on one of the best things about them.)
Links For Wednesday 28th July 2010
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My boss turned this up on a routine vanity search for our company name (Aardvark Media), and immediately ordered a couple of the posters, from of all this, a Tea room in St Leonards-on-Sea. I am quite tempted to order one of them for myself for home as well. Any manifesto which begins "Kill your TV" and includes "Make Stuff", "Drink Tea", "Bake Cake", "Grow You Community" and "Champion the Underdog" is kind of tailor made for me, and, I would imagine, a number of other people reading this.
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I bookmarked Gruber's previous efforts on this front, and I will move to using this improved pattern in the future.
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A comparison of Apple's iMac website with the websites for Dell and HP's primary desktop machines. I'm genuinely not posting this to cheerlead for Apple, I'm actually posting it as a reminder to self in a "what not to do" kind of way, because I suspect a lot og my work falls closer to HP and Dell than Apple.
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My brain hurts. Of possibly it will hurt in the future, and the quantum-level changes have moved back in time. In any event, I eagerly await being given a quantum supercomputer to play with.
Links For Monday 26th July 2010
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Horrifyingly addictive little game – I downloaded it, and then when I looked up, it was hours later.
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I'm actually more optimistic about what "Big Society" can potentially achieve than most people I know, but I recognise that actually, most of what it can achieve is (significant) optimisation of already-funded and already-managed programs that are set up with the correct social tools. Which is why I found this such interesting ready: Charlie Stross, in the course of wondering about how many people you'd need to send to Mars, ably demonstrates why society is already far too large and complex for "Big Society" to ever work past a certain limit.