I’ve been back from the launch hoopla in China for a week now. Seems like forever. The silence* on the blog has you all wondering if I’ve retired, no doubt.
Not exactly. Beyond Space and Time continues to stretch us to the limits with its popularity as we close in on 175,000 activated users. At all hours of every day you’ll find hundreds of people ambling about, mostly chatting and taking tours in Chinese. It’s so much more gratifying even than the unbelievable coverage the project has generated.
Some have understandably been confused about whether the Virtual Forbidden City is part of Second Life. (Many people consider virtual worlds and Second Life the same thing.) The short answer is no. The VFC is a separate download. For those of you who are curious — just not maybe 200 MB curious, yet — you can get a taste of the project in Second Life at our little marketing outpost for the project. The island is called BeyondSpaceAndTime and, if you have Second Life installed, you can go directly.
* If you like your ramblings more frequent consider following my Twitter stream.
For starters you could talk to one of the over 93,000 people who have registered as visitors — or the several thousand others who have gone in simply as guests. Don’t believe the numbers? If you headed in right now you’d be with 717 other museum-goers from around the world. (At this hour, I hope your Mandarin is good.)
Feeling anti-social? I don’t blame you. It is the most visited museum in the world in real life. So have a wander off on your own. Use the map to find locations of interest. Filter by building, artifact, scene, tour, activity or even visitor name.
Still needing the alone time? Go to your scrapbook and enable Private Virtual Forbidden City. The madding crowd will disappear before your very eyes. The palace grounds are yours alone. (If only in real life, alas.)
What’s that? Eye Candy, you say? Click on nearly anything and get copious textual and photographic info. Think of it as a 3D interface to a textbook’s worth of material.
For the more visually-minded of you, the Virtual Forbidden City permits a kind of educational vandalism. Rip buildings and artifacts off their moorings for closer inspection. Zoom, rotate, love.
The vastness is wearying, I know. That’s part of the design. The architecture of the real Forbidden City is a psychological machine. By the time you make it to the emperor all you want to do is kowtow to relieve the aching of your feet. In the VFC you can encounter one of seven emperors (beyond space and time, see). These are called scenes and they present the city as a living thing.
Oh, you’re having fun now! Good for you. If you care to share, take a photo. Send it to a friend via e-mail or to one of your pals on Facebook. Or just save it to your scrapbook as quick placemarks for easy teleportation (no more walking!) whenever you like.
* And before you mail me, yes, I know the Chinese invented gunpowder. You can practice archery. How’s that?
Today, after many long years of work with a team I can only describe as better than the best, The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time was made public.
There is much to say and show, but for now I’ll give you a description, a video, and a link — and much appreciation for those of you who have followed, supported, or helped build this most amazing project.
The Virtual Forbidden City is a 3-dimensional virtual world where visitors from around the world can experience the Forbidden City in Beijing. You can explore the magnificient palace as it was during the Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644 until 1912, the end of the Imperial period in China.
Like recently when I was contemplating my annual purchase of firewood. Burning real wood in a fireplace is one of my great loves during long Chicago winters. I easily tear through a cord per winter, sometimes needing extra. And yet, that’s a lot of wood for what is largely aesthetic comfort (though our basement needs all the heat help it can get).
So this year I wanted to learn more about my options. Usually I get wood from one of any number of local, similar operations. A couple of laborers-for-hire pull up in a pickup, throw a bunch of wood in a pile in your garage, and then depart. God only knows where they get this wood from. Or if the company has any interest in the sustainability of the forests from which the wood comes.
So I turned to Ascent Stage’s resident guest restoration ecologist, Cory Ritterbusch, for his usual clarity of insight. I asked about places in northern Illinois where I might deal with a firewood vendor who thinks about his source as much as his sale. Cory noted:
Right now our firewood industry has not been hit by the same environmental stewardship programs that paper and building materials have. So there is nowhere to point to for sustainable, managed firewood processes locally.
Most green thinkers choose their firewood by species to reduce the risk. Oak and Hickory are the preferred woods to burn in the fireplace, but that is done at the detriment of cutting very important slow-growing specimens.
Environmentalists will ask for Red Elm or “Elm” as they are usually standing dead trees having died due to Dutch Elm Disease. It is also a great burning wood offering high temperature, little ash and easy split-ability.
Didn’t know that. Did you?
The smell of burning firewood was constant in Ghana. In the morning, stepping out of my room to the call of the roosters; in the daytime walking down a crowded Kumasi street; at night when the smoke of a thousand dinners ascended and mixed above the town. The tang of wood on fire is for me essential Ghana. I came to love it.
But the wreckage it has caused! The denuded countryside, once rainforest, strikes you like returning to a loved home without any furniture in it. The same space, but not the same place. The soil, suddenly chemically-bereft of sustaining anything but what just got ripped out, is no longer landscape but ecological cul-de-sac. Redwood-sized trunks lashed to wheels and an engine barrel down dirt roads one after the other. it is stark cause-and-effect, easier to see than in the West with our complex chains of supply.
This is what Africa has done to me. Not a blinding moment of enlightenment, but many small moments that creep up without real thought. The things I saw there will be with me forever, ineradicable viruses of the imagination.
This past Monday, IBM and the Office of Digital Humanities of the NEH convened a bunch of smart folks to talk about what humanities scholars would do with access to a supercomputer, real or distributed. I had been looking forward to this discussion for months, if not years in the abstract. It was a wonderful convergence of two of my life interests.
We had a broad representation of disciplines — a librarian, a historian, a few English profs, an Afro-American studies professor, some freakishly accomplished computer scientists, and a bunch of “general unclassifiable” folks who perfectly straddle the worlds of technology and culture.
The Library of Trinity College, Dublin
The topic was how to get scholars thinking in terms of problems that require high performance computing to solve. The NEH is out front on this, partnering with the Department of Energy (of all places) who run most of the world’s fastest machines (modeling nuclear blasts, etc) and who have graciously and enthusiastically offered time on their monster boxes to humanist scholars. IBM is in the mix too (besides being the maker of said monster boxes, e.g. Blue Gene) with our World Community Grid project, a distributed “virtual” supercomputer.
The grid has about a million devices on it and packs some serious processing power, but to date the only projects that have run on it have been in the life sciences. We were trying to think beyond that yesterday.
My job was to pose some questions to help form problems — mostly because, outside the sciences, researchers just don’t think in terms of issues that need high performance computing. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It’s funny how our tools limit how we even conceptualize problems.
On the other hand you might argue that this is a hammer in search of a nail. OK, fine. But have you seen this hammer?
Here’s some of what I asked:
Are there long-standing problems or disputes in the humanities that are unresolved because of an inability to adequately analyze (rather than interpret)?
Where are the massive data sets in the humanities? Are they digital?
Can we think of arts and culture more broadly than typical: across millennia, language, or discipline?
Is large-scale simulation valuable to humanistic disciplines?
What are some disciplinary intersections that have not been explored for lack of suitable starting points of commonality?
Where is pattern-discovery most valuable?
How do we formulate large problems with non-textual media?
I also offered some pie-in-the-sky ideas to jumpstart discussion, all completely personal fantasy projects. What if we …
Perform an analysis of the entire English literary canon looking for rivers of influence and pools of plagiarism. (Literary forensics on steroids.)
Map global linguistic “mutation” and migration to our knowledge of genetic variation and dispersal. (That’s right, get all language geek on the Genographic project!)
Analyze all French paintings ever made for commonalities of approach, color, subject, object sizes.
Map all the paintings in a given collection (or country) to their real world inspirations (Giverny, etc.) and provided ways to slice that up over time.
Analyze imagery from of satellite photos of the jungles of southeast Asia to try to discover ancient structures covered by overgrowth.
Determine the exact order of Plato’s dialogues by analyzing all the translations and “originals” for patterns of language use.
(Due credit for the last four of these go to Don Turnbull, a moonlighting humanist and fully-accredited nerd.)
Discussion swirled around but landed on two major topics both having to do with the relative unavailability of ready-to-process data in the humanities (compared to that in the sciences). Some noted that their own data sets were, at maximum, a few dozen gigabytes. Not exactly something you need a supercomputer for. The question I posed — where is the data? — was always in service of another goal, doing something with it.
But we soon realized that we were getting ahead of ourselves. Perhaps the very problem that massive processing power could solve was getting the data into a usable form in the first place.
The Great Library of the Jedi, Coruscant
At present it seems to me — I don’t speak for IBM here — that the biggest single problem we can solve with the grid in the humanities isn’t discipline-specific (yet), but is in taking digital-but-unstructured data and making it useful. OCR is one way, musical notation recognition and semantic tagging of visual art are others — basically any form of un-described data that can be given structure through analysis is promising. If the scope were large enough this would be a stunning contribution to scholars and ultimately to humanitiy.
The possibilities make me giddy. Supercomputer-grade OCR married to 400,000 volunteer humans (the owners/users of the million devices hooked to the grid) who might be enjoined to correct OCR errors, reCAPTCHA-style. Wetware meets hardware, falls in love, discuses poetry.
The other topic generating much discussion was grid-as-a-service. That is, using the grid not for a single project but for a bunch of smaller, humanities-related projects, divorcing the code that runs a project from the content that a scholar could load into it. You’d still need some sort of vetting process for the data that got loaded onto people’s machines, but individual scholars would not have to worry about whether their project was supercomputer-caliber or what program they would need to run. In a word, a service.
Who knows if either of these will happen. It’s time now to noodle on things. As always, if you have ideas for how you might use a humanitarian grid to solve a problem in arts or culture, drop a line. We’re open to anything at this point.
A few months ago Wired proclaimed The End of Theory, basically noting that more and more science is not being done in the classical hypothesize-model-test mode. This they claim is because we now have access to such large data sets and such powerful tools for recognizing patterns that there’s no need to form models beforehand.
This has not happened in arts and culture (and you can argue that Wired overstated the magnitude of the shift even in the sciences). But I have to believe that access to high performance computing will change the way insight is derived in the study of the humanities.
So, iTunes Genius feature, it’s just you and me. Face-to-face. Gloves off. You think you know what I like? OK, you get one track to prove yourself.
No, no, that’s not fair. I’ll give you something really juicy to crunch on. How about you take a playlist that I described a while back as My Music Genome, the very seed (in my human algorithm-based estimation) of the majority of what I listen to now? Musical eugenics.
Oh, you don’t make playlists from other playlists? Only single tracks? Sucks. Fine, let me do this one-by-one. 12 tracks in the list; 25 recommendations per track. Let’s start being genius … Go!
Wait, what’s that? You can only identify 10 of 12 songs in my genome? You’re telling me that you have never heard of Orbital’s Impact or Vapourspace’s magnum opus? You have the Orbital track in your music store, for god’s sake!
OK, fine, go for it with the remaining 10. I’ll wait.
There are plenty of ways I could slice this data — Last.fm tags, AllMusic moods, BPM, waveforms — and I just might. But right now what jumps out at me are the duplicates. That is, the recommendations that come from two or more “source” songs from my genome. This might mean something.
The duplicates are important because they narrow the tree back down. They’re the inbred family members, points where multiple threads of interest converge. (In the image above, Hyped-Up Plus Tax by Dabrye, for instance, is a recommendation generated from both Plaid’s Squance and Kraftwerk’s The Robots.)
The overlaps are few, but meaningful.
Aftermath – Tricky
Children Talking – AFX
Chime – Orbital
The Curse of Ka’zar – Lemon Jelly
Dominator [Joey Beltram Mix] – Human Resource
A Forest [Tree Mix] – The Cure
Future Proof – Massive Attack
Gone Forever – Ulrich Schnauss
Hyped-Up Plus Tax – Dabrye
Laughable Butane Bob – AFX
Little Fluffy Clouds – The Orb
Me? I Disconnect From You – Gary Numan + Tubeway Army
Mindphaser – Front Line Assembly
Monkey Gone to Heaven – Pixies
Paris – MSTRKRFT
Satellite Anthem Icarus (apocryphal) – Boards of Canada
Stars – Ulrich Schnauss
We Are Glass – Gary Numan
A few identifiable strains emerge from this new “evolved” playlist. (These characteristics don’t necessarily reflect the dominant style of the artists themselves, just the tracks, which is more precise anyway.)
shoe-gazy, downtempo: The Cure, Ulrich Schnauss, Boards of Canada, Dabrye
hard-edged: AFX (aka Aphex Twin), Human Resource, Front Line Assembly, Pixies, MSTRKKRFT
genre-benders: Tricky, Lemon Jelly, The Orb
(Not sure where Gary Numan fits in that typology, but he deserves to be in every list as far as I am concerned.)
Wow, John, that’s amazing, you’re thinking. You’ve managed to waste countless hours compiling data to tell yourself that you like soft music, hard music, and music that mixes the two. Such insight!
Actually it is interesting because the artists in this new playlist are some of my most-played. Lemon Jelly, Ulrich Schnauss, and Boards of Canada have been on heavy rotation for years. Clearly they are the fruit of stylistic seeds planted long ago. And now we have something approaching empirical proof. Truth is, most of what I listen to is either ambient or hard-edged or some outlying miscegenation. And there’s plenty of music that doesn’t fall into those categories.
The most interesting data point is that Satellite Anthem Icarus by Boards of Canada is the song that the iTunes Genius most thinks defines my music listening. It is part of multiple playlists generated from the source playlist.
Satellite Anthem Icarus – Boards of Canada
But here’s the crazy thing. That particular track is not the actual Boards of Canada track by the same name. It was included in a partially-bogus torrent download just prior to the official album being released. But I did actually fall in love with it. It is one of my favorite of their tracks. Except that it isn’t theirs. (Full story of this odd situation here.)
So, according to iTunes, the song that most represents the evolution of my musical taste is one that it should by all rights not even know about.
Now this gets to the heart of the mystery surrounding the Genius functionality itself. What exactly is it doing? It recommended this fake song to me which is neither named precisely what the real track is (in my library I have “(apocryphal)” in the title) nor is it the same length. And if by some crazy chance Apple is doing waveform analysis, it sounds nothing like the real version. So how could Genius recommend something that’s iTMS obviously doesn’t have in its library? Related, why would Genius not recognize the Orbital track in my library when I renamed it precisely as it is named in iTMS?
UPDATE: Commenter Pedro helpfully notes that this “fake” is actually Up the Coast by Freescha. Which makes this whole experiment really interesting. I agree with Apple that this song is extremely emblematic of my distilled music tastes, yet as noted above none of the metadata I had would have informed Apple to that. Is it possible that Apple is actually doing music analysis in the manner of Amazon’s text analysis? I really can’t believe that if for no other reason than that the initial Genius scan (when you run 8.0 for the first time) would take forever, which it did not. Still I want to believe. This is the way recommendations should happen.
I really don’t know how the recommendations are being generated, but I do think it is based on something more than store purchase data. Consider the jump from Ministry’s Stigmata to TMBG’s Ana Ng.
Stigmata – Ministry
Ana Ng – They Might Be Giants
There’s pretty much nothing similar between industrial music and irony-laden pop. But these two songs are definitely related when you consider their respective “hooks”: both use heavily-produced, effected, and clipped guitar noises as their main musical trope. Coincidence? Maybe, but why else would they be connected? Not music store data, methinks. Obviously Apple’s exact algorithm is a secret, but I’d love to know more.
——–
Some procedural notes. It helped that I already had a short playlist of stuff I considered influential. (Though I find it a lamentable shortcoming that Genius can’t generate a playlist from a playlist. It would have to infer commonality first then generate a new list. How tasty would that be?)
I then just set Genius to create a new playlist per track. Various recombinations of the playlists yielded a clean list which I flipped into a spreadsheet using the very handy Export Selected Song List AppleScript.
From the spreadsheet data I experimented with and aborted a bunch of different visualization ideas. At one point I had a monstrously large 10-headed Venn diagram in Illustrator that hurt to look at.
Eventually I created the network diagram in the screenshot at the top of this post using the wonderful Many Eyes social visualization site. (Yes, Many Eyes is IBM. Disclose that!)
A fuller, more interactive version of this visualization is available (Safari recommended, if you are on a Mac). Also the source data is there for the playing. I am sure there are other ways to massage it.
Enjoy this level of music nerdery? Dive into the Ascent Stage back catalog:
The street level outer wall of Tribune Tower in Chicago has all kinds of masonry and architectural adornment embedded in it from famous places around the world. A bit of the Taj Mahal, a sliver of the Parthenon, a brick or two from The Alamo, a chunk of the Berlin Wall, etc. It’s historical bricolage, literally. And a little odd, too — a sidewalk cabinet of curiosities composed of loot from Tribune reporters on foreign assignments.
I get it, though. Make the foreign and faraway more accessible, touchable. A proxy for tourism.
Now get ready, dear readers, for this is where I make the jump between two seemingly unrelated topics and in doing so stun you momentarily into forgetting how ham-handed the juxtaposition is.
There’s a better way. On October 10, IBM and the Palace Museum will launch The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time, a multi-user, immersive, three-dimensional virtual world recreation of China’s imperial palace. It won’t give you the feel of cold rock (or the microbial film of a thousand tourist fingers), but it is very much related to the desire to reach out and encounter the exotic in an embodied way.
If you prefer old-fashioned coach potato-variety virtual tourism, consider tuning in to the History Channel this Sunday, Sept. 21* for the premiere of its documentary on the Beyond Space and Time project. The show is the parallel story of the building of the palace and its virtual re-building, the latter explicating the former. It’s an interesting lens through which to look at a place: architecture as socio-history.
Plus, I’m in it. So there’s bound to be unintentional humor, if not outright farce.
Forbidden City: Revealed
History Channel
Sunday, Sept. 21
7:00 PM ET
* This airdate is US only. History International will broadcast the show at 9:00 PM ET on Wednesday, Sept. 24. Other international airdates to follow.
I’ve been home from Africa just under a month. Thought I’d compile a list of things I miss and things I don’t.
Things I Miss:
The Ghanaian handshake – Slap your hands together loudly (not a high five, just an aggressive bringing together of the hands for a normal handshake), hold until its a little awkward, then pull apart with a snap. I never quite got it and always felt horribly unhip trying to pull it off. But it was cool to be greeted like that.
Laundered shoelaces – There was no laundromat nearby so we had some sketchy service that would come into our rooms and look for anything dirty. Before I figured this racket out they actually unlaced my running shoes (reddened by clay from dirt roads) and washed them separately. Anything for the upcharge, I suppose, though it was nice to have such gleaming white laces.
Having taxis hail me – You never have to wave a cab down in Ghana, especially if you’re white. No matter where you are or how little you look like you need a ride, dozens of taxis will beep-beep beep-beep until you demonstrably tell them to go away.
Saying “Ougadougou choo choo” – Ougadougou (wah·gah·DOO·goo) is the capital of Burkina Faso, the country to Ghana’s north. It is also the world capital with the most vowels in it. (Take that, Bosnia!) The nickname of the train service in and out of the capital is perhaps the most fun thing to say since I learned “trabajaba” in high school Spanish.
Rear window car signage and business names – For reasons I still don’t completely understand Ghanaians are obsessed with naming their cars and shops with unintentionally humorous phrases from the bible. Or from something that sounds scriptural. Or not. “Be Holy Electrical Works”, “Dr. Jesus”, “I came naked”, “It wasn’t me”.
Our prison economy – There were 10 of us at the guest house and we had only what we shlepped from home. Inevitably people forgot things and/or had items to swap. Though the Ghanaian markets offered lots of goods, there were certain things (meds, amenities, candy) that we had to barter amongst ourselves. It became a prison economy where mosquito wipes and vodka, rather than smokes, served as coins-of-the-realm.
Dial-a-proverb – Emerson said “language is fossil poetry” which is a pretty accurate description of how laden the Twi language is with poeticisms and figures of speech. In fact, formal conversation consists of little but such turns of phrase. My interest in this characteristic of Twi became a game with my friend Yaw who would take any situation I gave him, call his pal who’s a master of Ghanaian proverbs, and come back with an appropriate phrase for the occasion.
Things I Do Not Miss:
Restaurant service – No matter where we went, city or village, Italian, Chinese, Lebanese or Ghanaian, all meals took at least two hours. Even when we thought we were being sly by calling in our orders, the service was atrocious. We think this was because of limited staff and the fact that everything was made basically from scratch as soon as it was ordered. There were never enough menus to cover the table and food was never brought to us even near the same time. Often people were served thirty minutes after others. The food, however, was almost always exceptional.
The Ghanaian noise for getting one’s attention – I understand that this is a perfect example of clashing cultural habits, but the staccato hiss that Ghanaian’s use to hail someone is just poison to Western ears. It sounds like a curse or worse, though admittedly it does get your attention.
Lack of currency – Last year Ghana re-denominated its currency such that 10,000 old cedis would be equal to one new cedi. There were many reasons for this, but most signage has not caught up. That’s a surmountable, calculable inconvenience, but the reality is that no one ever has change. Hacking off four zeros means no one has the sub-cedi currency known as the pesewa. Merchants can’t break even small bills. I can’t tell you how many times I simply walked away either without the good I wanted or having given the merchant a sizable “tip”.
Instant coffee – ’nuff said.
Compact fluorescent bulbs – Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of CFL’s, but Ghana has adopted them in a huge way. I don’t think I saw an incandescent the whole time I was there — which itself is fine, but CFL’s have indiscriminately and nakedly replaced every bulb everywhere. There’s nothing less comforting that a bright, uncovered fluorescent bulb. To make the switch, in my opinion, requires not just environmental consciousness but also some stylistic consideration.
Racist South Africans – I met three white South Africans while I was in Ghana. The first was a racist drunk at a local Internet cafe who obsessively gambled online while smoking a hookah pipe. One night he was too drunk to realize that a shisha coal had fallen onto his laptop power supply. BOOM! It was like someone detonated a small firework. But he kept gambling on battery power. The second was a chatty guy at a hotel I was staying at in Accra. He would not take any hint that we did not want to talk to him at breakfast and insisted on letting us know his impressions of Ghanaians, this being his first visit. Let’s just say he used the word “savage” frequently. The third was a very pleasant, younger guy on his own on a business trip who made it clear that not all white South Africans harbor such deep-seated racism. I’m glad I met him.
Dirt roads – My ass and nerves will never be the same. See the first part of this post.
Diet Coke false advertising – Called Coke Light in Ghana, Diet Coke is obviously the focus of a massive marketing campaign. Billboards and signage are everywhere. And yet, no one ever has it in stock. It is a mythical elixir, something promoted but never distributed. My colleagues made fun of me for continuing to ask for it after a dozen failures, but by then it was a matter of principle.
Under-table space management – We often ate out in relatively large groups. This required restaurants to push tables together. Inevitably seats would be placed right at the junction of two tables where no two legs could ever go. We saw this everywhere. It was almost as if the ability to arrange a table with chairs around it were more important than actually seating people there.
And yet, those cons are not nearly enough to make me not want to get back as soon as possible.
Seems like there are more first-time visitors to my humble blog than there used to be. This might be a function of my linking Twitter updates to Facebook status, which if you do the math means that a lot of non-geek acquaintances are now alighting on Ascent Stage without a clue in the world what the hell is going on. Welcome, dearest friends!
Thought I’d take a brief moment to explain the name of the blog, something I’ve never rightly done.
You get some hilarious pronunciations and questions, especially when trying to give out the URL over the phone in an interview, say. “A cent, as in one penny?” “Ascent’s ‘tage, like Hermitage?” “Nascent Stage, you mean like an infant?” “ASS-ent stage, what is this porn?”
Simply, an ascent stage is the part of the rocket that goes up as opposed to being the one that breaks for going down. Sadly, in the post-Apollo era this has mostly been the only stage a rocket has. We ain’t landing anywhere with a rocket as long as we have a Shuttle.
Ascent stage refers usually to the upper half of the lunar modules that we put on the moon. The descent stage landed the astronauts (counteracting the moon’s weak gravity); the ascent stage put them back up to link with the Service Module whose rocket would take them home. Simple enough.
But why the name? What I’ve always liked about the concept of an ascent stage (in addition to the space dorkiness) is that it implies progress, upward motion, forward movement. But also a discrete point in time, or phase. There’s also something very slightly sad about it too, because to ascend means you descended at some point and you’re leaving something behind. (In the Apollo case this was the descent stage itself.)
There’s a classic image from the last Apollo mission where they left a camera specifically poised to capture the ascent back up to the orbiting command module — something which had not been done on previous missions. Not sure what it is but there’s something eerie and solemn about the footage that was captured. Two guys in a rickety polygon blasting off from a much more stable looking bottom half, which is now left to decay on the moon forever.
So, that’s kinda the rationale or feeling behind the name itself: progress, ascendancy, upward motion … tinged with mystery, loss, even desolation. My blog.
By the way, I’m considering a redesign. Input welcome. Via CAPCOM, naturally.
The iPhone 3G and firmware 2.0 were released hours after my plane departed for Africa. It was source of great consternation for me, but it did force a kind of critical distance that I rarely have from new technology releases. What did I learn? I learned that I don’t care for critical distance from new technology releases.
I did eventually get to update the firmware on my original iPhone while I was over there, though there was virtually nothing I could do with new apps without good network access. Read: all the battery-sucking issues, none of the benefits. Since I have been back I’ve gotten a 3G, ceding the original phone to my wife who really needed it.
Here’s a list of apps that I’m liking a great deal.
AirMe – Takes photos and uploads them automatically to Flickr with geo info (and weather tags, if you want). Works with Facebook too. Here’s a sample photo.
Last.fm – Last.fm has always been great, but conceptually is so well-suited to a mobile device. No background apps on the iPhone means it won’t play while you do other stuff (ala the iPod), but them’s the breaks with Apple.
MLB.com At Bat – Recently updated to include field and batter infographic overviews. Very well-designed and pretty timely video clip access make this indispensable, even when you’re at the game (especially so at Jumbotron-less Wrigley).
Remote – Possibly the most useful app out there, which is probably why Apple got to it first. Creates a slick remote interface for iTunes and Apple TV’s on your LAN.
Shazam – Too-good-to-be-true app that identifies the title and artist of a currently-playing music source (like the jukebox at a bar). Pretty damn accurate and it offers instant links to buy the track. Great party trick potential trying to stump it.
Simplify Media – Sets up a server on your machine that allows streaming access to your iTunes library wherever you (or anyone you permit) happen to be. This was cool when it was computer-to-computer, but the ability to stream anything from home to your iPhone is game-changing. Points to a day when the iPod has no storage at all and is just a thin network interface to your cloud of media. Highly recommended.
Tetris – Slower to start than the free knock-off (now removed) Tris, but still mesmerizingly addictive. Takes a while to get used to manipulating blocks by finger flick.
Twitterific – Not sure I’d even use Twitter if not for the desktop app Twitterific. The iPhone version is just as scrumptious, adding in some location features to boot.
There are a few apps I want to like, but just don’t. NetNewsWire is everything I want in an offline feedreader (with desktop and web synching!), but it is just dog-slow. Takes forever to load my feeds. AIM works fine, but instant messaging just doesn’t work with the no background app paradigm. You can’t give all your focus to chat.
And here are the apps I wish existed.
Backpack – I know 37Signals is all about lightweight web apps, but what I would love is actual offline access with synch.
SMS over IP – We can make phone calls with VOIP, but why not SMS? This may exist and I don’t know it, but with AT&T’s ridiculous messaging fees, why put anything over the voice network you don’t have to?
MarsEdit – On-the-go blog composition. Synching with desktop drafts would be yummy.
A native NPR app.
Google Earth – Why not? The video capabilities are clearly adequate and with the iPhone location abilities seems like a natural.
A great e-reader app. Kindle-screen quality with iTunes store breadth of access? Sign me up.
A stickie note app that synchs at least to a desktop app, preferably to a web app too. Most text pad apps for iPhone do too little (see all the to do list apps in the App Store) or too much (like Evernote, which I tried desperately to like). All I need is stickie notes. ShifD is promising, but right now you can only get it on your phone as a web app. Not ideal at all. If you know of something along these lines, please let me know!
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In other news, I’ve been using Flickr a ton lately. The more I use Flickr the more I love it, but it has prompted some critical observations:
Video on Flickr is fantastic, but none of the video metadata comes over. This may not be Flickr’s fault, but it breaks the videos-are-just-long-photos thing organizationally.
There is a “Replace this photo” option for stills that is very handy when uploading high-res versions of low-res originals. But this function does not exist for video. You have to delete and re-upload, losing all metadata and comments. Boo.
Speaking of replacing, it would be great if there were a bulk replace function. Having to do it photo by photo is so … unFlickr.
Flickr slideshows do not include video. C’mon!
FlickrExport for iPhoto is indispensable, but it does not allow permission-setting (CC, etc). This is a very correctible limitation, it seems to me. (There’s a Facebook export from iPhoto that works just as smoothly).
Speaking of iPhoto, why will it not copy video seen from a shared library like it will photos? Annoying!
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
My partner and I regularly have to pass this street next to an abandoned bank. There’s no sidewalk, yet cars zoom around the corner all the time. Creepy and dangerous! This past year, my partner Dakota and I have been making an effort to walk to the nearest grocery store, rather than drive there.
Thank you to Brilliant for sponsoring this video! To try out STEM courses for free, visit https://brilliant.org/PhysicsfortheBirds/. The first 200 subscribers will get 20% off of an annual premium subscription.
How many things are there of each size in the universe? Are there more sun-sized obje
If you're like us, you enjoy a good meal. Doubly so in the company of friends. The atmosphere, the food, and the conversation all add up to a great time. Not every meal goes as planned, though. There's the noisy business-bro two tables over. Or that case of food poisoning.
The Olympics are a celebration of athletic prowess, an event that incidentally highlights the diversity of the human body. Take height for example. Simone Biles, the GOAT, hurtled herself through her Paris 2024 floor routine at 4’8”.
“‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us.” – Mary Shelley, Introduction to Frankenstein. Wow, Mary! Wow. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. I can’t imagine anything more chilling.
The US Federal Trade Commission is taking action against subscriptions that are difficult to get rid of. On Wednesday, it adopted a final “click-to-cancel” rule requiring businesses to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up.
