How Africa Works
How Africa Works
Armando Fox
Armando Fox's personal website: blog, reviews, screeds, advice, and more.
Latest posts
Amazon made me do it
If I’ve told you the password, enter it below. Otherwise, sayonara.
PSA: Batten down your hatches
I’m writing this as a public service announcement to my friends and colleagues, especially those who are less obsessively technology-oriented than I am.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, by William H. Whyte
The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul
I first read this book during high school, and it’s remained one of my favorites. It’s co-authored by my favorite philosopher of mind (yes, I have a favorite philosopher of mind), Daniel Dennett, and the author of my other favorite intellectual deep-dive book (Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid), Douglas Hofstadter.
AirBnB weekend from hell
Greetings. If you arrived here looking for the narrative of my AirBnB weekend experience from hell, you can find it here on Google Docs.
Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform
This entry in the Platform Studies series (which I’ve been enjoying quite a bit, mostly for its retro tech features) focuses less on the Kindle technology, which in itself is unremarkable, and more on the marketing of the product and how it’s affected readers, reading, publishing, etc. In this regard, I find the Kindle a bit like the iPod: the technology was already there, but someone had to get…
Machines that took away jobs but I think it’s OK
Not long ago I got into an…interesting…conversation about machines that took away jobs. That’s actually not the conversation I’d been planning to have: I had watched a cool video on how the US Postal Service handles envelopes whose destination address cannot be OCR’d, and in the process of explaining it to a friend, I pointed out (as the video taught me) that a single “human powered” center with…
Minitel: Welcome to the Internet
Minitel: Welcome To the Internet
An open letter to Heroku regarding the end of free micro-plans
To: Bob Wise, Heroku EVP