Circuit Bending
I love the crossover between technology and the arts. Just when you think you found all the interesting stuff in life you discover another creative expression, Circuit Bending.
Wikipedia says “it’s the creative customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children’s toys and small digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators.”
I learned about this on ABC iView. Note, there’s only 10 days left to watch it.
Photo by Rosa Menkman
Momentum
The product of mass and velocity says a lot about your business model. When you raise a lot of capital you convert that capital into mass (intellectual property, assets and people) and velocity (market penetration).
Different investor types have different momentum tolerances. VC’s have the shortest (<1y) followed by IPO shareholders (<2y) and the patient money is in incumbent businesses buying new technology. When they buy a disruption business, it's a protection strategy. They don't like to cannibalise their old technology revenue streams, so they don't mind a slow change that they can control.
Chuck Norris Chipsets
You don’t Google chuck norris, he finds you. Intels prototype multi-core processors are a bit like this. 132 cores not just dual core changes the game. You won’t be waiting for power, you’ll just get it without asking for it. Recently an AMD 8 Core processor (admittedly cooled with liquid nitrogen) achieved 8.4GHz which is roughly 3 times as fast as your current top end computer.
Multi-threading multi-core chips. i.e. 100+ cores, are really going to change computing, yet again. I love nearly everything about technology except that it gets so old so quickly. #frustrating. However, the net needs speed. Humans hate lack of speed, they hate sluggish systems, so this is good news that we are going to see another performance leap.
Moved my blog to WordPress.com
I moved my personal blog to WordPress.com. I used to self host. Why did I change?
- To start to repay WordPress.org for their fantastic product which they have always made freely available (i’m paying them now).
- Outsource some aspects of security. It’s always better to have someone with thousands of customers and a lot to lose, thinking and acting on security for you. Self hosting is higher risk in my opinion.
- It’s one less thing I have to manage. I want to consume and produce content, not manage applications. While I self host you could call me a hypocrite, and fairly so! I’m always telling people to use software as a service or cloud services where you aren’t hosting your own software or applications.
- They have some really nice themes that take seconds to implement. I like to change themes regularly to give things a fresh makeover. Blogs who maintain the same look and feel get a bit stale, but that’s just me.
- People who do stuff for free are just plain cool in my book, they are better than me, much better, they are the selfless unsung heroes of the tech world that we will one day remember as the pioneers who took the risk, rebuffed the capitalist system and went in a direction others were too scared or too selfish to take. Yes they did build a financial model around community to make it viable, and that’s ok. I’d rather them do that and survive.
Split Tracks Problem in an iTunes Album
Have you loaded an Album into iTunes only to see it split into different Albums in iTunes because it has various track Artists? You can fix the problem really easily by adding and Album Artist entry in the Get Info area for each track. Here’s the steps.
1. Your Album will look split like this.
2. Two finger click (right click windows) to open the option menu and select Get Info -or- you can bulk edit by selecting all the songs you want to edit by highlighting them. Then load the Get Info window.
3. Add an Album Artist. This is the name that will bind all the tracks.
Steve Jobs on Design
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
Future Homes
Architecture is a bit of a family passion. While none of us are architects. My parents built architecturally designed houses and now I seem to have their interest. In my online travels I’ve collected lots of links and references in this space so just thought I’d share a few of my favourites…
The Huf-Haus
Huf-Haus became widely know when Grand Designs reported this German companies ability to build a very high quality home in just seven days on your block of land. As the shows host said “It was one of the most striking and efficient processes Grand Designs has ever seen.”
Boathouse
This boathouse near Munich in Germany goes for a box construction minimalist approach. You could say it’s a scaled up Monopoly house piece but beautifully detailed and designed. I think it’s elevation and sub lighting is what set it off. Hat tip to The Cool Hunter and a great photo by Roland Halbe.
Sommarnojen Summerhouse
I love it when architects place a building leaving the surrounding landscaping blended and unaffected. This swedish firm gets their structures to float which creates the feeling of lightness and unobtrusiveness.
The Transformer House
In a world of small spaces, high real estate costs and overpopulation this tiny transformer house addresses these big issues with small space storage design. I also really like the surley yellow window tint in this design.
Tumbleweed Houses
Jay Shafer creates tiny hand built houses because he wants to reduce the impact a larger house would have on the environment, and because he wanted low maintenance. Jay says “My houses have met all of my domestic needs without demanding much in return. The simple, slower lifestyle my homes have afforded is a luxury for which I am continually grateful.”
Info vs Shock Graphics
Great infographics have been produced by Edward Tufte, Megan Jaegerman (above graphic) and others. However, as infographics grow in popularity as a method of communication we are seeing shockgraphics evolve that are really just agenda based design. They are identifiable by the lack of scientific approach, big fonts, oversized icons or reliance on 3D. Generally they are politically or marketing motivated.
The recent spate of shockgraphics are designed to elicit an emotional response. Instead Tufte and Jaegerman display information in an enjoyable and educative way. They achieve this by helping people make unemotional judgement, making it interesting and also visually appealing all in one. Data should always be relative and clear of chartjunk. Without relativity there is no benchmark or position of judgement.
Here’s an example of a shockgraphic based on the US unfunded debt.
Instead, if I said that this debt is a big as all of the molecules on the surface of a pin head -or- that it’s the equivalent of a debt repayable until retirement of $25 per week per US citizen then it’s not quite as scary or interesting. This isn’t to say the US doesn’t have a debt problem, it does.
By not providing the reader with relative information to allow you to benchmark their conclusive representation it becomes a misleading graphic. It just becomes a FUD graphic.
Good infographics should give data a powerful voice and not an emotive one that shouts at you.
Will Smith
Will Smith is one of the people I’ve always looked to as an example of how to lead your life. Hat tip @hollingsworth.
The Future of The Grid
This time three years ago I jotted down my thoughts on where the web would be in 3 years. Here’s the list which I shared with a work collegue at the time:
- Increasing use of AI
- Geo spatial on many devices
- Social mapping
- More data format standardisation
- Less players in the industry
I also put down what I thought web interfaces would be doing:
- More user definition of application components
- More skinning/themes
- Freemium, free and paid model continues
- Colour rich or minimilist UI designs. A bar-belling of design complexity.
I think I did ok on most of these but I think the two that didn’t eventuate are “less players in the industry”. I was referring here to online invoicing/accounting systems. There are a lot more now but i’d argue it’s a long tail and many don’t trade while still having their apps in maintenance mode.
The second which is appearing more an more, but far from prolific, even in our own application Saasu, is user definition of application components. It’s still in the domain of Salesforce via the Force.com platform. It’s also evident in Saasu’s programmable “Themes” feature used to define templates and the ability to lightly customise the dashboard. I think where I got this wrong was that core components are still being added. It’s taken a lot longer for the industry to webify accounting software than we all expected.
