It was a warm week, my second week at GitLab and I am beginning to find a rhythm to working from home. I’ve been reading fewer books than prior to our trip home and need to rebuild my momentum. I am currently working my way through Capital, Life and Fate, and Issue 17 of Offscreen.
Today I got distracted tweaking styling and deployment for this blog - I’ll be publishing a post soon. Earlier in the week I got distracted rotating my PGP keys. I am also hoping to share more links during during the week rather than dumping it all in a single weekly post. Time will tell.
Alan Kay isn’t happy. The Father of Mobile Computing is Not Impressed was more interesting that the click bait title suggested. Ironic given the article’s content.
The big slogan at Apple, when I went there, I think it was “Wheels for the Mind.” […]
First thing I did [with the iPad] was to test how good the actual touch sensor was. I had to go out and get a capacitive pen, because one didn’t come with the iPad. You’re supposed to use your finger on it. There were five things that you could draw with on it and only one of them was good. And with that [Autodesk] pen, I was able to draw, take a ruler and draw lines with this thing, and see how linear it came out on the display, and the thing was a lot better than it needed to be. You’re kind of drawing with a crayon, but they actually did a hell of a good job on it.
I haven’t owned an iPad since the original because as a tool it isn’t purposefully solving any problem I have. Rather than a criticism of the iPad, I would criticize myself for too often failing to be critical of my iPhone. It is all too easy to accept new technology, software or hardware, into our homes without understanding it’s cost or value.
James Williams, ex-Google, speaking to Nautilus:
That kind of rhetoric implicitly grants the idea that it’s okay for technology to be adversarial against us. The whole point of technology is to help us do what we want to do better. Why else would we have it? I think part of the open door that these industries have walked through is the fact that, when we adopt a new technology, we don’t typically ask “What is it for?” If we were to ask what a smartphone is for, it would almost be a ridiculous question. It’s for whatever it can do now!
If we reconceive of technology as tools that should serve us, we might begin to be able to make better decisions about the technology that we permit into our lives. If I decide my phone and computer should serve me for X and Y, perhaps I can more easily disable what I do not need.
David Foster Wallace on worship:
Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.