- Laptops designed by 7-9 year-olds
- “Both heartwarmingly personal and frighteningly tied to pop culture. A close study reveals keyboard buttons assigned to ‘Barbie.com,’ ‘best friends’ next to ‘friends,’ ‘HP [Harry Potter] trivia,’ and ‘werd games’ as well as ‘rily werd games.’”
- How to write magnetic headlines
- “On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of the headline, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece. The better the headline, the better your odds of beating the averages and getting what you’ve written read by a larger percentage of people. The Magnetic Headlines series will provide you with concrete guidance that will have you writing better headlines in no time.”
- New Scientist: Top 10 bizarre experiments
- “Here are 10 of the bizarrest experiments of all time – which, it must be said, mostly fall closer to madness than to genius.” #1: Elephants on acid.
- Why I hate Twitter
- “There’s more of a chance that my dog will type Ulysses than that I’ll get an intelligent Twitter message… Why? Because WRITING IS THINKING. Good writing reflects good thinking. It’s why we go through multiple drafts of anything… to get to what we REALLY want to say. (And, for many writers, to discover what it is they really want to say… most of us don’t know what we think until we start writing.)” [via zk]
- Getting started with IMAP for Gmail
- “IMAP offers a more stable experience overall. Whereas POP is prone to losing messages or downloading the same messages multiple times, IMAP avoids this through its two-way syncing capabilities between your mail clients and your web Gmail. If you’re trying to decide between using POP and using IMAP with your Gmail account, we recommend IMAP.”
- The case against hyperblogging
- “Words have relative values. Someone who talks a lot has less value to their words than someone who rarely speaks. But when that quiet person speaks, people listen. When you publish 20 posts a day, your individual posts lose value. And when you finally do have something important to say, it gets lost among the clutter. Your signal to noise ratio is too low.”
- Interview with James Victore from "How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer"
- “The Internet is changing things in the same way that the invention of ink on paper did. And there is this wonderful, funny question that people like to ask all the time: ‘Are posters dead?’ It’s like asking Twyla Tharp, ‘Is dance dead?’ People try to reorganize and rename things and change them and qualify and quantify them. I just want the spirit of design to remain. I feel now the way Tibor did: People have not fucked with the printed page as much as we still can. I want those opportunities. But I think those opportunities get fewer and fewer. And there’s too many of us. But there aren’t not enough crackpots and artists in the business—they’re all MBAs.”
- Workday game plans
- “Use your first hour at work to concentrate on a high-priority task. That will help you begin the day with a clear head. Free of mental debris from the start, you set a good precedent for the rest of the day.”
- New from the Elsewares team: Supermarket
- “Supermarket is a curated collection of awesome design products.”
- Why do we work on things that don't matter?
- “When it comes to software, no wins are ever as quick as we think they’re going to be. And, when it comes to everything, we’re never going to get as much done as we think. So it’s important, especially early on, that the entire team knows what your biggest bottleneck is at any given time so they can be focused on that”.
- Nabaztag wi-fi rabbit
- “A Wi-Fi-enabled toy rabbit from France that changes color and moves its ears to provide real-time information about weather, traffic, stock price movements or incoming e-mail.”
Luke Redpath
on 30 Nov 07The Nabaztag rabbit is pretty cool; we use it here at Reevoo to announce build breakages and more recently, deployments (using a capistrano hook). We use the Nabaztag Ruby library written by my colleague Paul.
The only downside is that messages have to be sent to the rabbit via their own servers so there can be lag sometimes.
Guillaume Esquevin
on 30 Nov 07The Nabaztag is trully great. Mine tells me each morning which files where downloaded during the night, it feels so great =)
riki
on 30 Nov 07Very spooky. I was sitting in a cafe today with a copy of NewScientist reading that same article “The Whacko Files” and “Quantum Untanglement”.
Joe H
on 30 Nov 07I’ve used the Nabaztag rabbit before like Luke is using his.
Going through their servers was so terrible when I tried it that I had to give up on it after a few weeks of trying. They had said that they were having some scaling issues, but all date estimates on their fixes were making that wonderful “whoosh” sound as they flew by with the service getting worse and worse.
There was some talk of allowing people to send messages directly over the network, but I haven’t heard anything new on that in a while either.
engtech
on 30 Nov 07I’ve had a nabaztag for two years… DON’T BUY ONE. It made me stop reading sites like Gizmodo because it highlighted the striking difference between what the product spec/press release says and what the actual user experience is.
What kills it for me is that everything has to go through their servers in France. Sure it can play MP3s, but it can’t stream MP3s from the computer that is literally a foot away from it—you have to upload music clips to their site.
It boils down to a glorified $200 alarm clock that you can send messages to and it’ll speak them aloud.
Tom G.
on 30 Nov 07OK, I admit it.
The headline indeed did make me read this.
I am now sad for the elephant.
carlivar
on 30 Nov 07IMAP is better than POP, wow that’s news. In other news, HTTP is better than Gopher.
James Wheare
on 01 Dec 07I don’t understand the tone of people who complain about Twitter and Tumblr. No one’s seriously arguing that they’re high brow or the future of online content. They’re just a different medium, and if you don’t care, don’t pay attention. Or if you care about keeping up with your friends, accept that battling junk food on the web is just as futile as boycotting McDonald’s, or just learn to skim!
There’s no need to see all forms of online expression as “publishing”
Mark
on 01 Dec 07“WRITING IS THINKING …” Um, most of what comes across Twitter reflects thinking too. Picture taking, socializing, choice making, etc. all involve thinking. That’s what cool about Twitter – you get to see clues of peoples’ mental states in a more broadly sampled way. However, I agree that the odds are low that it reflects “good thinking” – thats not what its for, as James says.
Tim
on 03 Dec 07Regarding Twitter, Tumblr, hyperberblogging et al – they’re just modern facilitators of an unfortunate reality:
Most of us are just screaming monkeys.
You know that scene in 2001 where the chimp works out how to use a bone as a tool and all the rest run around just screaming and making a lot of noise? That’s what people are like. Generally the ones doing the thinking and innovating aren’t the ones making the most noise (or Twittering their friends about what they’re having for lunch).
Don’t believe me? Make a list of 10 people who are clearly making a serious contribution. Some candidates – Steve Jobs, Burt Rutan, Bill Gates, Craig Ventor. Notice how many blog. Few and then only rarely. The rest of us (blog commenters included) are mostly just jumping up and down and screaching.
This discussion is closed.