firecat

A meme

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 10:11:33 GMT

'If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared today, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them?'

This is a strange meme. I know plenty of people who were alive during the 1950s. If they are any indication, the most difficult thing to explain is how to use a modern cell phone or smart phone to make a phone call while not accidentally doing anything else with it.

(I recently got my dad what was advertised as a basic, unsmart cell phone. Every time I picked it up, I managed to trigger the voice recognition function.)

I think the other most difficult thing to explain would be certain kinds of humor that have come about since the 50s. I'm not sure how to explain which kinds, though.

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I miss the Newton.

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 23:41:26 GMT

I worked at Apple through most of the uncool non-Steve-Jobs years.* One thing I worked on was the Newton.

A few days ago, someone bought a mint Newton off eBay and reviewed it.

http://techland.time.com/2012/06/01/newton-reconsidered/

20/20 hindsight may make the MessagePad’s screen look worse than it seemed in 1993; its battery life, however, benefits from a couple of decades of diminished expectations. Back in the 1990s, people squawked that the MessagePad H1000 drained its four AAA batteries too quickly. I found, however, that I could go for a couple of weeks on a set. In an age of smartphones that conk out after less than one day, that was more than enough to keep me happy.

Its legendarily awful handwriting recognition actually worked pretty well for me.

Now, about that handwriting recognition. (It was, incidentally, developed by a team of Russian computer scientists who later went on to create Evernote, the gem of a note-taking app for the iPhone and other devices.)

(Which makes the icon for this post inaccurate, but it's the only Apple-related icon I have.)

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Pew survey on how people use ebook services at libraries

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 21:45:57 GMT

http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/06/22/libraries-patrons-and-e-books/

My local library system changes how it offers ebooks and what ebooks it offers approximately every five minutes. I see it's not the only one.

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