Author: shacker

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Serious Games

So much more goes on in kids’ heads than meets the eye. Steven Berlin Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You) on Serious Games for IT Conversations — relates an anecdote about demonstrating Sim City to his 7-yr-old nephew, giving a fairly superficial tour. “This is the house where the mayor lives, and these are the ports where the boats tie up. These are my factories, but I’m having trouble with them. The workers aren’t happy, and I just can’t seem to make the factories profitable. See how the workers are all covered in soot?”

The nephew, who had until now been listening in silence: “I think you should try lowering your industrial taxes.”

Music: Prince Far I :: Shine Eye Gal
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Ration Stamps

Ration6 A little Memorial Day contribution — found a book of 1943 war ration stamps in a box belonging to a passed relative. The name written on the book does not belong to my relative, so I’m not sure how they came into the family. Trying to imagine today’s war getting to the point where consumer goods were in a state of similar scarcity, or of Americans today tolerating having their bread, sugar, and gas dribbled out in thin streams by the Feds. But what really bakes my noodle is trying to imagine today’s government printing a tagline on any literature like “Be guided by the rule, ‘If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.'” Or that the U.S. Government once had an “Office of Price Administration.” The actual stamps are quite small – check the high-res versions on Flickr to see them in full glory.

Music: Bunny Wailer :: Bide
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Play Pump

Historically, villagers in water-starved areas have worked hard to manually pump contaminated water up from shallow water tables for drinking – water they then have to carry in buckets back to their homes. People spending their time as beasts of burden.

Inventor Trevor Field is bringing clean, fresh drinking water from deep underground to villagers across Africa with the Play Pump, which harnesses the limitless energy of kids. In place of the traditional hand-cranked pump, Field’s team installs a merry-go-round connected to a deep well pump on school playgrounds. The kids, who often have virtually no access to playground equipment, love it.

The Play Pump can be installed in a few hours for just $7,000, and can bring drinking water to more than 2,500 people — water that’s cleaner than what came from the hand pumps it replaces, since it comes from deeper underground.

Field then sells ad space on the pump’s reservoir to finance pump maintenance — and reserves one ad panel for AIDS awareness campaigns: “We’ve got to get the message through to them before they become sexually active,” he says. “It seems to be working.”

According to comments on the Frontline story, other companies are using similar solutions to generate electricity.

Music: Robert Wyatt :: Tubab
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Passwords Graveyard

Meebo is a service that integrates AIM, YIM, Jabber, and MSN chat through a web-based interface. From a Meebo blog entry on their reliance on statistical analysis to drive development iterations:

Our intuition is often off. Two releases ago, we considered eliminating the “New user?” and “Forgot your password?” links on the front meebo login page. Before doing so, we decided to track how many users clicked on the links. Good thing we didn’t eliminate them – turns out that 11,000+ meebo users depend upon these links daily!

I’ve seen this over and over again. No matter how many times you encourage users to think of passwords as if they were their ATM PINs, people have too many of them, and too many that they don’t use often enough to remain committed to memory. There are a wealth of password management tools on the market, but those aren’t going to be used by the non-geeks who need them the most.

This is a huge untapped market, but the nature of the problem dictates that it be solved by OS vendors, not shareware vendors. Apple’s made a start of it with the Keychain utility, but the interface is overwhelming to average users. Prediction: The next releases of OS X and Windows will include simple (and hopefully very secure) mass-password-management services.

via Searchblog

Music: Nipper :: Ukulele Dub
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Flowers From a Dung Heap

Hot on the heels of Hercules’ recent victory over Wal-Mart, Mark Morford on the intended greening of “this most voracious and powerful of low-end, trashy retailers.”

Wal-Mart has already committed to selling 100-percent sustainable fish in its food markets. They are already experimenting with green roofs, corn-based plastics and green energy (which is now used to power four Canadian stores, for a total of 39,000 megawatts, amounting to what some estimate is the single biggest purchase of renewable energy in Canadian history). Is this remarkable? Groundbreaking? Utterly confounding? Well, yes and no.

The motive may ultimately be profit rather than a genuine interest in eco-health, and their move to sell organic food may undermine the critical “small and local” ethos, and there may still be a dozen other reasons to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart, but you gotta admit there’s something very wonderful in this, “like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes.”

Music: spot :: ray’s new sunglasses
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MS Fonts and Formats

If Microsoft has its way (and when don’t they?), their own WMP image compression format will eventually replace JPEG. MS claims to be able to cut file size in half at the same quality levels, and to sit up and do tricks like rotating an image without decoding/encoding. And yes, the format will be available to non-Windows platforms and devices, though there will be a licensing hook (that’s the part that gives me the willies).

What I’ve never understood is why the the open source world missed the boat with PNG, which is free of licensing restrictions and also does neat tricks, but lacks lossy compression and is therefore totally unsuitable for photographic work on the web (and also lacks the ability to store EXIF data). Yes, PNG was designed primarily as an alternative to GIF, but since they had the opportunity to build a format from the ground up, why didn’t they take the opportunity to tackle the two things we use images for the most (digital photography and photos on the web)? By not doing so, PNG left the door open for yet another proprietary format to take hold.

MS also has half a dozen excellent new fonts in the hopper – the six Cs. I could see myself growing to love Calibri.

Music: Seu Jorge :: Convite para vida

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Patch Bay

Amy catches Miles jamming a pencil into the 1/4″ headphone jack on the tape deck I’ve had attached to my Mac for the past few weeks, just in time to watch the tip of the pencil snap off inside the hole.

Amy: “Miles, what are you trying to do?”

Miles: “I’m just trying to hook into the internet.”

Well, can’t fault him for trying.

Music: The Aggrovators :: A Crabbit Version
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Crawling With ‘Em

Spending the week with mid-career journalists from around the country, doing multimedia training and webcasting their panel discussions. 4:00 yesterday get a call from Amy that a power transformer has blown near our house, and that a fire ran along the lines for many blocks. Outage affects 21,000 people. Finally get home at 10:30 to find our power just restored, but neighboring blocks still out. Walk to inspect the damage and find news crews all over the hood, lights trained on piles of charred power cable sheathing along the ground.

Stop to watch a Hispanic news team in the midst of a street-corner shoot. They stop to ask me what happened and I tell them what I know.

Me: “… but I’m just a guy who heard some things, so don’t quote me.”

Reporter: “Yeah yeah yeah, OK.” [Says some stuff in Spanish to cameraman, then] “OK, I got it.” Camera rolls and she reels off her live report in Spanish.” I shake my head and return home.

15 minutes later wifey and I are watching the (amazing) 60 Minutes special on the career of Mike Wallace, when there’s a knock at the window. Peel back the drapes to see smiling face of another female reporter, who shows her ABC press badge. “Great, now they want to interview US,” I think. I open the door. “Hi, I’m from ABC News and can I use your bathroom? It’s urgent.” LOL, of course.

Music: Duke Of Uke :: Search And Destroy
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While My Uke Gently Weeps

Sudden interest in the grace of the ukulele after seeing a master player rendering Sonny & Cher and Tony Orlando songs at a preschool marshmallow roast the other night. Then baald, who recently lent me his own uke so I can learn a few White Stripes songs to play for Miles, sends me this Jake Shimabukuro piece:

… which makes me weep. Get that idea that the ukulele is an instrument for strumming in the back of a canoe out your head.

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Editors -> Algorithms

Some talk over the past few months about how Digg has overcome Slashdot in popularity (Kottke has a few charts from last January, but the numbers continue to rise). Aside from the obvious fact that Slashdot’s audience is technical while Digg’s is general interest, there’s another point I find fascinating:

Slashdot = A team of editors but no authors
Digg = No editors or authors

Digg’s model relies on UGC just like Slashdot, but replaces the editorial staff with algorithms supporting community. A very pure model, maximizing the internet’s collaborative potential.

Now, look at the number of comments on virtually any Digg or /. story — they absolutely eclipse the number of comments on any story at [name your favorite mainstream media (MSM) publication] (for those that even allow comments on normal stories). What is it about the community sites that engenders so much more discussion than traditionally journalistic sites that also happen to offer discussion features? Something about Digg and Slashdot makes readers feel like they’re part of something, in a way that virtually no MSM pub has been able to do.

If MSM really wants to tap into the juicy power of community, they need to somehow cultivate not just discussion, but collaboration and real participation. Part of it is technology, but it’s also about vibe. As long as they present themselves traditionally, with the air of stuffy authority, they’re not going to win the eyeballs of a generation that expects the internet to be a two-way discussion. There’s no reason you shouldn’t see the level of participation on Wall St. Journal or New York Times stories that you see on Digg stories.

It’s going to take a massive mindset shift at the old battleships. If they fail to make that kind of shift, the existing audience will move into nursing homes and be replaced by… no one.

MSM can’t just stand back and hand the store over to software services like Digg has, but they certainly have lessons to learn about how to tap into the bee hive.

Yes, I’ve been listening to Bob Cauthorn again.

Music: Spizzenergi :: Work

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