Procrastination

February 12th, 2015

You should read this today or maybe tomorrow. You’ll surely find time before next week. Whatever, doesn’t really matter when, you’ll totally get around to it soon.

Bad Assumptions

January 29th, 2015

…last quarter Apple’s revenue was downright decimated by the strengthening U.S. dollar; currency fluctuations reduced Apple’s revenue by 5% – a cool $3.73 billion dollars. That, though, is more than Google made in profit last quarter ($2.83 billion). Apple lost more money to currency fluctuations than Google makes in a quarter. And yet it’s Google that is feared, and Apple that is feared for.

Holy cow.

Time Stamps in iOS 7 Messages

October 7th, 2013

If you haven’t already discovered this by now, Koi Vinh shows how you can see individual time stamps for text messages in iOS 7.

Minimalism is Boring (and that’s ok)

September 11th, 2013

I Care if You Listen:

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that there is “no such thing as an uninteresting subject, only an uninterested person,” and minimal music has opened me to the truth in that statement. If I know that beauty can be found in 468 fourths, then perhaps it can be found in other places as well—my disinterest more and more gives way to curiosity.

One of the strengths of minimalism, like chance and indeterminate music before it, is that it embraces new approaches to listening. Much new music (or New Music) suffers from a failure to promote a manner to reach it.

Less Dorky than Glasses?

September 11th, 2013

Part of me wants to think this is kinda neato. The other part of me thinks that these guys saw Google Glass and thought it just wasn’t privacy violatey enough.

Via momupro.

Awww….

September 10th, 2013

America: Land of the Free and the Home of the Marginally Happy

September 10th, 2013

United Nations report: U.S. 17th happiest country in the world.

Via The Big Waah.

Game Over

September 9th, 2013

Horace Dediu gets to heart of the gaming device issue:

That is where mobile is the clear winner. More people will hire mobile devices for their primary gaming activity. And as mobile devices get inexorably better, they will be hired for use in the setting where consoles have been king: the living room.

Whether dedicated gaming machines are better for gaming is moot. There just may not be enough hardcore gamers to support the industry. Smartphones are nearly universal (in the markets that would matter to game companies, at any rate) so devices that can play games are already ubiquitous. Since a smartphone comes with gaming capabilities “for free,” more and more people are forgoing the dedicated device, as Dediu’s charts demonstrate.

Industry

August 17th, 2012

If Karlheinz Stockhausen had started his electronic work with Theremin instead of with Meyer-Eppler’s sinusoidal additive synthesis, then the synthesizer industry wouldn’t be so musically retarded these days.

– Michel Waisvisz (1990)

Burnin’ the Place Down

August 17th, 2012

A smart rant from Chris Randall over at his blog Analog Industries. In all the argument there has been over the past couple of decades about the value (monetary, of course) of recorded music, this is the smartest attitude to for an artist embrace:

As an artist, if you choose to fight this battle over monetary value, know this: you will lose. That is a foregone conclusion. In fact, you have already lost. All of that nonsense with numbers and who’s getting paid and whether life is fair or not is all inside baseball, and the average person (the one ultimately footing the bills, it must be said) couldn’t give two shits. To them, pieces of art are tied to memories and experiences; they are either trying to recapture the emotions they felt when they first experienced the art in a particular context, or trying to create new emotions to go with new contexts. They are willing to spend a certain amount of money, for altruism’s sake, if it’s convenient. (And “convenience” is something we’ll get to in a bit.) But ultimately, the art’s value to them is at a much more internalized place than the high-brain abstract world of monetary worth. 

I’ll go one step further, and say that the situation is not even worth grumbling about. In fact, it should be embraced whole-heartedly, and celebrated for the freedom gained. 

The takeaway is this:

It falls to you to be as convenient as possible to the Emily Whites of the world. Don’t treat her like a second-class citizen or a thief. She has no fucking idea what you’re going on about with this guilt trip. She just wants to hear that one song that she heard right after that thing happened. Give it to her. Make her FEEL. She’ll remember. Of that, you can be certain. 

And the resulting commandment:

Make art.
Put it in front of as many people as possible.
Engage the resulting audience.
Repeat.

It’s worth it to go read the whole thing. It a little like what Seth Godin might say if he were a musician, a potty mouth, and had a bizarre, out of proportion hatred for Cory Doctorow.

Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino

August 3rd, 2012

With less than $50 of off-the-shelf hardware and a little bit of programming, it’s possible for a hacker to gain instant, untraceable access to millions of key card-protected hotel rooms.

Where to Go from Here

August 1st, 2012

The Oatmeal’s illustration of cutting out the abusive middle men.

SJS-ONE Arduino-based Synth

July 30th, 2012

DSC_2957_gr

SJS-ONE is an open source 8-bit mono synthesizer from Devsound in Sweden that uses an Arduino as it’s brains. Looks to be nicely hackable (i.e. within the reach of the less geeky).

Cables!

July 29th, 2012

It’s only $8,450. And Amazon has 5 in stock! Order fast before they’re gone!