My blog is currently not blocked by the Great Firewall of China, according to this test. How disappointing. I will be sure in future to say more subversive things about Falun Gong, Taiwan, Tibet and the Chinese government’s many, many human rights abuses.
Archive for the ‘techno-wankery’ Category
Adventures in TV repair
22 Jul 2008Came home the other night to find the TV on and the house unusually warm. Suspected burglary, but nothing seemed to be missing. Figured the TV had caught a random cosmic ray and switched itself on, and it puts out a fair amount of heat.
Things got weirder on Sunday night. TV kept turning the volume up to 100 by itself. Suspected poltergeist with hearing difficulties.
Process of elimination: remove batteries from remote - still happening. Cover infrared port on TV, in case of random radiation source in the room - seemed to work at first, then didn’t. Twiddle with buttons in case one of them got stuck - non-sticky electronic buttons don’t appear to get stuck or to be capable of unsticking.
Evaluate options: take TV to repair shop, stop watching TV, dismantle TV and poke around the insides, call exorcist. TV is weird LCD thing from Chinese manufacturer nobody’s ever heard of, Konka. Possibly similar to Sorny or Magnetbox.
Pfft. I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it.
Likelihood of parts availability: minimal. TV addiction too entrenched to consider breaking on a Sunday night before work. Don’t believe in ghosts.
Leaving option 3.
Unplug all cables from TV, lie it flat on dining table, unscrew 25 screws, remove back cover. As expected, button assembly is a discrete component connected to the rest of the TV with a small ribbon cable. Twiddle with ribbon cable connector, appears sound. Unscrew button assembly from frame, pull away from TV with loud glue-unsticking noises. Muck around with button area, twiddle with two additional ribbon cable connectors. Stick button assembly back in place, screw back into frame, twiddle with connectors again. Replace cover, screw in 25 screws, connect power cable to TV. Volume levels remain at preset level.
Plug cables back into TV, realise I’ve missed Dr Who. Watch 5 minutes of Foyle’s War before deciding I’m not in the mood for twee period drama, and besides, Honeysuckle Weeks has a weird name. Read book, retire to bed early.
How much user generated content can one user generate?
3 Jul 2008Things have again been a bit quiet on this blog. I must now divide my attention between this, my work blog, Facebook, Twitter and all the content I can aggregate on Google Reader. And the dozens of random links people send me on instant messenger.
What troubles me is that I know plenty of people for whom this is a fairly lightweight regime. There are people who blog several times a day and Twitter endlessly. And it’s not as though they get paid for it, as far as I can work out. How do they manage?
Enough, fanbois
17 Jun 2008SMH’s story on aspiring model Isobella Jade, who perfected the art of freeloading by coming into the New York Apple store every day for 18 months to check her email, should be headlined:
Apple perfects the art of freeloading off fanboi journos for publicity
Here’s a picture of Isobella Jade topless. I get more hits this way.
And here’s a picture of Ms Jade from Mac Directory magazine, where the SMH stole adapted the story from.
I mean, seriously, the two hottest stories in the Aussie tech media lately are:
I can’t imagine there ever being two stories with a stronger public interest angle.
It’s fine to be a fan of a particular brand or product, sure. But when you let your religious devotion to the Cult of Steve cloud your editorial judgment, you’re doing your readers a disservice and discrediting your publication as a click-chasing whore.
tl;dr
11 Jun 2008Nicholas Carr writes in The Atlantic how the internet (not just Google, despite the title) is sapping our ability to read in depth long passages of text. On the intertubes we tend to skim and sample, looking for the quick win; the nugget of information that means we can stop reading. However, Carr finds this behaviour is spilling over into his non-web reading.
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
A colourful metaphor, to be certain. But was it a deliberate irony to publish all 4,100 words of this lengthy essay on the web without so much as a subheading? It’s almost as if Carr invites us to blanch at the vast slabs of text - too long; didn’t read.
Slightly faster broadband
3 Mar 2008Minister for Broadband Stephen Conroy yesterday delivered the exciting news that the government’s planned $4.7 billion broadband network would deliver speeds “up to 100 times faster than what is currently available”. Sounds great!
It will achieve this by running fibre-optic connections to the telecommunications pillar mushrooms on street corners then using VDSL (very fast digital something something else) to deliver speeds of up to 25Mbps to homes.
Call me a pedant if you must, but that’s not 100 times faster than what’s currently available. I may be decaf soy latte drinking inner city elite, but I get around 19Mbps using ADSL2 and living about a kilometre from my phone exchange. I’m no maths genius, but I’m pretty sure 25Mbps is not 100 times faster than 19Mpbs. In fact I’d say it something closer to 1.3 times faster.
But Senator Conroy’s calculation is based on the claim that “most broadband users currently receive only 256 kilobits per second”. Which is
- A lie - statistics more than a year old show two-thirds of broadband users on faster than 256Kbps and
- A damning criticism of how Conroy’s predecessors let Telstra and the rest of the internet industry deliberately retard broadband access and make obscene profits.
Seems like when it comes to technology, the new federal government is as pompous and incompetent as the last.
Barack the Builder - can we fix it?
8 Feb 2008During the recent Australian federal election campaign, Herald columnist Annabel Crabb lamented that both party leaders were helping police with their inquiries into the death of political oratory.
I may the last person in the world to have noticed, but the same can not be said for the US elections. A prime example is Barack Obama’s rousing words in New Hampshire last month . . .
We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.
We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.
Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.
And so, tomorrow, as we take the campaign south and west, as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas, that the hopes of the little girl who goes to the crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A., we will remember that there is something happening in America, that we are not as divided as our politics suggest, that we are one people, we are one nation.
And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can.
Or if you have a short attention span, you can watch the Black Eyed Peas’ celebrity-studded music video of the speech. No, for real. And while you’re at it, read the 2,500-odd illiterate, pigheaded, uneducated, self-important ejaculations from the American public in the comments section. Viva Web 2.0!
Are you a man or a woman?
24 Sep 2007Confused? Just take something you’ve written - longer than 500 words preferable - and bung in in this.
It’s based on an algorithm developed by some Israeli scientists working from the assumption that men tend to identify, determine or quantify things whereas women tend to talk about relationships between them. It analyses how frequently an author uses words that are more ‘male’ or ‘female’ and gives an overall weighted score. Thus it turns out ‘with’, ‘if’ and ‘not’ are the girliest words while ‘around’, ‘what’ and ‘more’ are decidedly blokey. Down the lower end of the scale it tends to get a bit sillier, for instance ‘the’ is masculine and ‘and’ is feminine.
I ran a few of my own posts through and it turns out I am a man, most of the time.
Democratic triumph
15 Sep 2007The democratising brilliance of Web 2.0 is that it has allowed one billion global citizens to post “OMG, me too!”, “LOL” and “This is so fucking gay” next to every single item published on the web, 24 hours a day, 100,000 times a minute.
Can anyone doubt that if we had not developed this ability, just in time, the terrorists would already have won?
Facewha?
13 Jul 2007Isn’t it curious that the chaps at The Oz seem to be giving a lot more airtime to MySpace than Facebook? Especially when MySpace is pretty much old hat in the journosphere, whereas the mainstream media currently can’t get enough stories about Facebook.
In today’s Australian, we discover that Kevin Rudd has started a MySpace profile and has friends such as Naughty Amelia Jane, a 19-year-old law student from Melbourne (from the ‘whenever a story is boring, put a teenage girl in it’ school of journalism). But Big Kev has been on Facebook for more than a month, which The Oz mysteriously never covered. Yesterday, The Australian told us that although Facebook is growing quickly, it is “light-years behind MySpace’s 3.8 million Australian profiles” with only 141,000 Aussies signed up.
We can’t help but notice that Big Rupert recently spent a few hundred of his millions acquiring MySpace, whereas Facebook is still owned by its founder Mark Zuckerberg (who has refused to sell despite reported offers of up to US$2.3 billion). Not that we would ever accuse our colleagues at chez News of allowing their master’s interests to cloud their journalistic objectivity.
