January 29, 2005  

Virtual flâneur

Amazon’s A9 search engine is impressive, offering smooth, dynamic filtering of results and nice integration with the store and affiliated sites, but I’ve never been able to use it exclusively. It is tough to go cold turkey from Google’s simplicity. Actually, some of A9 is powered by Google, so maybe the strategy is not to dominate, but to provide certain niche services or enhanced applications. If so, A9’s new Yellow Pages search fits that bill nicely.

Amazon sure doesn’t shy away from brute-effort labor-intensive data entry. A while ago they hired transcriptionists to enter the text from thousands of books so you could search “inside the book” for most of their titles. Now they’ve paid a phalanx of digital photogs to capture images block-by-block in major cities so that you can actually walk up and down streets virtually as you search for services, products, and the like. Is this screaming for a head-mounted display and GPS integration, or what?

January 23, 2005  

TivoToGo, VCR NoGo

Well, well, well. I woke to the long-awaited TiVo system update this morning so, naturally, I’ve been playing with the video extraction to PC all day. The interface, as you’d expect, is fairly elegant and pulling files down is simple, though painfully slow. When, oh when, will you not throttle all networking through a dinky USB 1.1 adaptor, TiVo? To my surprise, it is even fairly easy to circumvent the DRM so the video files will play anywhere and can be burnt to DVD without buying the special Sonic software. Best of all is that the TiVo box now includes a webserver (like my trusty Audiotron) which allows you to check your Now Playing queue and download video from any web browser. There’s even an XML version. This is all ripe for hacking; I can’t wait to see what projects sprout from this (undocumented!) feature. (I maintain that TiVo’s product launch was completely premature, though!)

The irony? In a project completely unrelated to TiVoToGo I spent way longer than I should have trying to dump a 7 minute DVD video to VHS for my grandmother. I couldn’t do it. The rewiring necessary to perform this seemingly simple operation was too daunting. It is like I have pushed off one end of the video technology spectrum with TiVo and can no longer get back to the other end. Ah, progress. Sorry, grandma.

January 7, 2005  

MediaLoom indeed!

Given my recent post on the connection between automated weaving and computing, I had to share this. The Consumer Electronics Show brings us the Brother Innov-is 4000D, one seriously geeked-out sewing machine. They should have named it the Stitchtron 9000 or the Weavebot or something, but this is still pretty cool. Input a digital image, output a sewn pattern. Jacquard would be so proud.

Via Gizmodo.

January 4, 2005  

Three technologies you need to invent

Yes, you.

iPod Album Art Remote
I don’t own an iPod photo, but if I did I’d want a headphone remote like the normal one but with a tiny LCD screen that displays album art so that when I affixed it to my jacket on the subway I’d be as cool as Japanese teenagers for sure.

WindowVNC
I would also very much like the ability to drag a window from one monitor to another on my desk. No, not like in a multiple monitor setup, but actually drag one app window — say, an instance of Mozilla — from one machine’s monitor seamlessly to another’s with all settings and states being maintained. Should work cross platform too, unless there is no application equivalent on the “recipient” machine. Some sort of funky VNC hack would do the trick, no?

True Dual SIM Phone
Lastly, I’d love a phone that accepts two SIM cards natively and can place/accept calls to/from either card. Without shutting the phone down to switch between the two or needing an adaptor to accommodate both cards. So, for example, I could receive calls overseas on a number local to where I am and on my number back in the States. For cripe’s sake, this should exist!

That’s all. No patents claimed or royalties owed. Just go ahead and build ’em. Be sure to shoot me an e-mail when you do. Thanks.

January 3, 2005  

No-go on TiVoToGo

Today TiVo announced the availability of TiVoToGo, a feature they first mentioned almost a year ago. TiVoToGo is supposed to allow you to copy recordings from your Tivo(s) to your local network for archiving and playback on your computer. Now, aside from the fact that MythTV and ReplayTV have been able to do this for some time, and ignoring the current unavailability of this feature for Mac, and setting aside the nasty DRM they’ve included, and temporarily accepting that the software that allows DVD’s to be created is neither part of the service fee nor even available yet, and trying not to focus on the annoying ability for a show to be desigated un-copyable by its owner, the fact is that TiVo isn’t ready for this rollout.

Sure, you can install the new desktop software, upgrade your MPEG2 codecs, get everything ready on your home network — but it still won’t work because TiVo has not rolled out the box-side software uprgade that enables the service! You can get on a “priority list” for the upgrade, but they are saying that could take weeks. There’s no surer way to piss off your best customers than to make available a product that doesn’t work yet. Why even release it? Why not roll out the set-top software upgrade first? I mean, why empower a user to download and configure their own system only to have to wait for more software that is out of the control of the user and, by the way, gives no easy notice that it has even been updated?

I’m annoyed.

December 20, 2004  

E-mailing Richard Powers

The e-lit blogs are abuzz about “They Come in a Steady Stream Now,” a new online piece by Richard Powers, the much-lauded author who consistently joins themes of technology and art in his novels. The general tenor of the comments on the new piece (with exceptions) seems to be mild disappointment that such an esteemed author didn’t create a masterpiece with his first foray in digital lit. I disagree, but not because “They Come in a Steady Stream Now” is exceptional — it isn’t, though it is very good indeed.

Thing is, Richard Powers is already an e-lit author. I saw Powers speak at the Chicago Humanities Festival a few years ago. It was the first time I’d heard him after years of knowing him through the written word alone. Perhaps that explains what happened to me. Powers delivered a reading of what came to be called “Literary Devices” at the CHF. This gets a bit convoluted so follow me here. In the listening “Literary Devices” seemed like a straightforward recounting of an e-mail exchange that Powers was involved in after delivering a real paper called “Being and Seeming” (“real” because I Googled it right after the talk — still online here). I was completely captivated by the conversation which, in a nutshell, revolves around a system called DIALOGOS, a next-generation ELIZA that convincingly writes fiction and sucks Powers into an ongoing exchange. It was only after the session ended on my way home did I realize that I had been completely duped. The CHF had not invited him to deliver a paper — it was total fiction, just sittin’-around-the-campfire storytellin’. And I had given myself to it utterly. I was the test subject who couldn’t distinguish the human from Turing’s machine.

Now, granted, this wasn’t electronic literature. Hell, it wasn’t printed literature. (Only much later did Salon publish the story, since removed, but available for purchase now.) This was oral literature in its most primitive form. Yet, in its colloquial, fast-paced, almost stream-of-consciousness delivery it really did evoke an e-mail exchange: call it performance e-lit. I was so amazed at how taken I was with this story I e-mailed Powers as soon as I got home. Like the now-fictional correspondent from the talk, I was the audience member who was striking up a real dialogue with the author, effectively continuining the narrative by e-mail — my own personal electronic appendix to the story.

All of this is an elliptical way of making the point that I consider the reading of “Literary Devices” to be Powers’ first jump into electronic literature, though it had none of the trappings of typical e-lit. No links, no point-and-click interactivity. But in its is-this-real-or-am-I-witnessing-artifice way it was the perfect Turing test and one that spawned at least one (though probably more) personalized narratives via other channels. The experience of the story, rather than the words on the page, was akin to some of the best e-lit experiences I’ve had and that’s why I consider “Literary Devices” an exemplar of the form.

“They Come in a Steady Stream Now” is certainly worth reading — Powers as always plumbs the human depths of technology — but it is more run-of-the-mill electronic literature and that, in the end, is why it is, well, run-of-the-mill.

UPDATE: Powers joins the conversation at Grandtextauto. An 8th e-mail, so to speak.

December 20, 2004  

Accessing a book like a hard drive

If there’s a book that I remember more vividly than most from my childhood it has to be Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan. The story is kicked off by the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human skeleton in a spacesuit on the moon. The ancient astronaut also had some effects with him, including a book. The scientists use a scanner that can read the book without opening its very brittle, damaged pages, basically peering into and reconstructing the sheets at variable depths. I always thought that was so cool.

Turns out this is no longer a fictional technology. Researchers at the University of Kentucky have figured out how to do it. Imagine being able to scan like this on a bookshelf- or library-wide scale, gulping down petabytes of data without cracking into the books themselves. (Via MGK. Thanks Matt!)

November 25, 2004  

The tech support generation calls the help desk

I call my parents’ house the Museum of Technological Dereliction so I naturally chuckled when I read this piece about the “tech support generation” — people who return to their parents at the holidays and whose time is mostly occupied with debugging technology issues. Until I showed up at my in-laws, that is. Not funny anymore. It isn’t that I’m asked to fix things, but that I am incapable of not doing so. For example I can’t not intervene when my father-in-law is cursing his all-in-one remote because its interface complexity rivals a CAD program. Similarly I can’t sit by idly while my in-laws watch a standard-def football game on their 61″ High-Def LCOS TV completely oblivious to the fact that a perfectly good high-def version of the same show is on another channel. This isn’t their fault.

I have a specific suggestion on this point. Why not build HD receivers/televisions such that they can alert the viewer when standard-def programming is being watched that also is currently being broadcast in high-def? All the data is there; cable and satellite high-def receivers obviously have all the programming information stored. And most people don’t know when a show has a high-def counterpart. In addition, it would be great if high-def televisions automatically sensed the type of input — DVD, high-def, or standard-def — and changed the aspect ratio accordingly. It pains me to see my in-laws watching standard-def programming warped all over the screen in order to fill it. This is an easy technical problem to solve, it seems to me. Perhaps it has been?

Happy Thanksgiving, America.

Newer Posts »