Recent content on one mikro2nd
Personal Computing cannot exist in any walled garden. It has to exist in a rich, nurturing and vibrant ecosystem. A walled garden exists to serve, please and profit only its Gardener. It does not in any way serve the occasional visitor who just wants to smell the roses or take a look at the flower clock. A Corporate walled garden is even worse because its entire raison d’etre is profit for…
Many years ago I was assigned to work on a contract at a company that designed and built complex electronic systems. My employer had contracted to build the software for a DOS PC-based test-bench that they were to use in testing these systems under development. The developer who’d done the initial work had a deep bias toward over-complex solutions, a tendency he’d indulged to its…
kitten fillets wrapped in bunny ears, with a side of parsnip pudding, served on a bed of puke
I really should tell the story of the time Twice A Year Assessments came around at The Workplace. I’d somewhat recently put my CV out into the wild, just to see how the job market was looking, and, somehow, my People Manager had got wind of this. (At the time the company was frantically trying to hide the fact that there were simply too many “managers” on the payroll, with the…
While I’m not particularly invested in the End-User Computing scene, a thought around that did occur: When some end-user wants to customise (say) their car (house, furniture, clothes,…) they a. don’t usually start from scratch, and b. don’t usually fuck around with the low-level parts. They customise by swapping components, possibly fiddling with the settings/decorations…
Tall buildings are all awful. And the reason is, they’re built, not for the people who will inhabit or use them, but for the landlord who will rent out the space. They’re designed for a different set of needs and wants than the people who must occupy them, so they inevitably lack the Quality Without A Name. See also: airports, shopping malls. The same applies to multi-tennanted…
One of the big obstacles to “composing software out of small pieces” is that programming languages are so shit at interoperability. And this is a bit of a mystery to me. There’s an application for my desktop-of-choice (KDE) that I would use but for some missing or malappropriate functionality. Now, I’m nominally a “programmer”, so, in theory, capable of writing…
My note-making application of choice is Zim Desktop Wiki. I repeatedly find myself describing its key features and attractions to folk, so I thought I’d write it all down in one place so that I can stop repeating myself. Here’s a quick outline of what keeps me using Zim (six years and running) above all the newcomers and wannabes in the linked-up-notes space. I’ll also try to…
Everything is Cumulative “Consider that most projects do not work out as planned. It would be helpful if they proceeded in a way that allowed revision and learning, that is, in small reversible steps.” – paraphrasing Ursual le Guin Even more helpful if the half-built and half-baked pieces of work we discard along the way can somehow be repurposed, revised, cannibalised or otherwise…
Jack and Jill, Went up the hill To fetch a pail of water. Who goes up a hill to fetch a pail of water? Streams and wells are not generally found up a hill, and for a very simple reason: Water flows, seeps, trickles… down hills, into dales and hollows and fens, emerging from springs and wells and joining streams that become rivers that wend their way to the sea. You go down the hill to find…
I’m writing a wiki system. Have I lost my mind? Why, when there are already so many wiki platforms languishing out there…? First I have been looking for a good wiki platform to use for collaboration (I have an actual use-case with real people and genuine need), and not finding many I’d rate as suitable. Quite a number of the platforms out there are just way too complex, lacking…
WikiNature is found in linking. The very best wiki is one where pages cannot be created except by linking to the new, nonexistent page from an already-existing page. The newborn page is already linked, already has a relationship with other pages, just as a newborn babe comes into the world with relationships already in place. And if links are fundamental, then automated backlinks become an…
In an article I read, “It’s almost impossible to grow enough food to feed a family and be completely self-sufficient, and even if you could, you’d have to deal with countless people trying to steal your food or take over your homestead.” Now, the first part of that claim I can verify from personal experience. Even if you’re an experienced gardener and raiser of livestock,…
coming soon…
Take your joy from the process of whatever you’re doing rather than from the expectation, the end-goal. If your joy, your satisfaction, your feeling of accomplishment or self-worth comes only from the result, you inevitably set yourself up for failure and self-flagellation if you fail to achieve the result you were aiming for or expecting, or if that result is not up to the ideal you held in…
Kinds of Complexity I identify three kinds of complexity in systems: Inherent Complexity Incidental Complexity Induced Complexity This last one — induced complexity — can be further broken down into Accidentally Induced Complexity, and Intentionally Induced Complexity Inherent Complexity Some systems are just complex. I observe that, for the most part, it’s natural systems that display a…
We’ve had this fridge for several years, now. My original desire when I bought it was for maximum energy efficiency. tl;dr: It disappoints. Badly. Just finding actual energy efficiency ratings more precise than the stock “A+” or “B” — actual numbers in other words — is a fool’s errand. Some manufacturers simply won’t give any numbers at all and you have to…
So it’s worth talking a little bit about How Computers Are… (I speak, of course, of our PCs and similar devices, not about how things are on Big Backend Iron.) Cast your mind back to the first time you used a PC. I’m willing to wager Solid Swiss Money that one of the very first features you encountered were some of the “folders” — “places” for you to…
A laundry list of features and attributes of a more personal, thinking-centric computing environment. Individually they’re quite simple. Put them together, and I’m willing to bet that synergistic effects emerge, bringing a more powerful way to use computation as a cognitive aid. As a wishlist, it’s not trying to be exhaustive. From time to time I think of some new Desirable…
425 (Too Early)
*Take a look at my girlfriend.* *She's the only one I got.* *Not much of a girlfriend,* *Never seem to get a lot...* – Supertramp Take a look at my filesystem. It's the only one we got. Not much of a filesystem. Never seem to get a lot... Organising Our Stuff Take a look at my (your) computer’s file system. Directory (folder) hierarchies and files with names like…
As well as being a Web Gardener here in BitWorld, I am a long-time gardener in AtomWorld too. And a thing I’ve long observed in my veggie garden is this: if I allow weeds to grow up in the paths between the beds, I’ll walk those paths less often. That means the beds served by the weedy path will get less attention, and less attention means I’ll be slower to notice problems and…
CATS :: Computer-Aided Thinking Systems GOATS :: Group-Oriented Assistive Thinking Systems Add features on to a PersonalComputer to push it across a (blurry, ill-defined) greyzone from a device that simply keeps your Contacts Database, Chats&Email, Calendar and (still mostly manually managed) Reminders, and transform it into something that actively helps you to think better, helps you to manage…
A stub page. Come back later. (Or use the RSS, Luke!)
A guided tour that has yet to be written. In the meantime, About This WebGarden is the closest thing I can offer.
This page is a placeholder. The idea is freely borrowed from author Charlie Stross, and the gist of it is/will be, “We’ve been living with AIs for centuries already. They’re called Corporations.” Mr Stross has probably already covered the ground better than I can.
Choices have consequences. Not making a choice is also a way to choose.
Here’s a wish for a Clock app on Android… It should have a way for some outside application to send a message (probably as a push-notification) to the Clock to set an alarm (or cancel one, I guess). Securing this is an immediate concern, but should not be difficult — a keypair exchanged out of band or something. It wouldn’t solve very much right now since most desktop apps…
We keep using the acronym “PC”, which, I’ll remind the crowd, stands for “Personal Computer”. It recently dawned on me that the thing we so glibly call a PC is not, for the most part, “Personal”, and is scarcely a “Computer” in the sense of Turing-machine/Universal computing device. Allow me to unpack that: “Personal” is the pair of…
I work (as time allows) researching software systems and interfaces that support and enhance human thinking and creativity. I (along with many others!) believe that computing and computational thinking are the “next” (actually current!) leap in cognition-enhancing technologies. I think we’ve all felt this since the earliest days of electronic computers, but the computing…
Life would be so much nicer if my notebook (I’ve been using Zim-Wiki for some years) could link to emails archived in my email application (Thunderbird)… Linking in the other direction would, of course, be too much to ask! Now Zim-Wiki is somewhat scriptable in the sense that I could write a plugin that gets some configuration telling it where to find my email archives and that…
In which I speculate about some of the attributes I’d want to see in a Personal Computer that takes seriously its job of uplifting my ability to think, understand, explore and organise information. An Upsight: When it comes to taking notes during meetings and reviews I reach for pencil and paper. Not the keyboard (though others seem comfortable doing so). Is it just that other folk are more…
Against all expectation, I got a job. Sort of. I’m working with a non-profit org, We Think Code, that teaches software development skills (not just programming!) to people new-to-programming who likely might not otherwise have access to such opportunity. My role is in curriculum development, where I work (async, remote) as a small part of a stellar team, helping to write lessons that…
Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that some sort of interstellar civilisation comes about. This is SF. The question that good SF wants to ask is, “What does this mean for people?” Or, put another way, what sort of society seems likely given a bunch of star-systems infested inhabited by humans. Ground Rules My starting assumptions are: No sapient aliens. This get complicated…
SFF In the Country of the Blind - Michael Flynn Anything by Catherine Valente A Memory of Empire - Arkady Martine Blindsight - Peter Watts Douglas Adams - Evil Machines Aliette de Bodard - Seven of Infinities Embers of War - Gareth Powell Ann Leckie - Translation State Ted Chiang - The Lifecycle of Software Objects Charles Stross - Singularity Sky, Empire Games trilogy Darwin Among the Machines -…
We talk of “Nature” as though it exists, but it doesn’t. It’s a fiction brought into being by human conversation, a figment of the human collective consciousness. There is no “Nature”, only the totality, the cosmos. What happens on Ganymede or on Mercury or on some anonymous and unidentified lump of ice out in the Oort Cloud or on a White Dwarf in some distant…
Plum Tree Cottage The cottage nestles among the trees — plums of several varieties, lemon, apricot and indigenous trees and bushes in wild profusion — well away from the main house, in cosy seclusion and peace. Perfect for nature lovers who enjoy a quiet, simple life. The main part of the cottage consists of a bedroom (double bed, cupboards), en suite toilet/shower and a kitchen/lounge…
I have eaten the cookies that were in your browser and which you were probably saving for facebook thank me! they were toxic: spyware and invasive
A comment the other day on HackerNews, only very lightly edited for brevity: whenever they (a multinational appliance maker) do the big presentations on their Vision For The Future it’s all IoT [internet of things]. That every little shit in your home from your blender to your dishwasher to your drill will be internet connected and have software updates and upgrades and tracked servicing and…
Back in the ’90s we’d all have to dismantle our computer mouse every few days to scratch accumulated lint and gunk off its rollers and ball. Thankfully those mechanical mice have long since been replaced by optical mice with no moving parts (aside from the switches) and now we can go a week or two between bouts of scratching lint and gunk off the little plastic feet of the mouse.
The Backstory On the 17th of February, in the early hours of the morning (or, perhaps, the witching hours of the night) a gang of robbers swung through Bibbey’s Hoek. They sent some spry, young lad up a telephone pole at the corner of the road to tie a rope to the telephone line, and, securing the other end to their vehicle, pulled down a thousand metres of telephone cable, snapping a couple…
Who the hell decided on four? Why four beeps? That tinny, high-pitched electronic squeak that grates on the nerves like the gravel tearing at your knee that time you came off your bike. Two beeps would have been plenty. Hell, one would be enough. What does it take for the microwave to say, “I’m done. Your food is hot”. Hottish anyway. Hot around the edges but never in the middle.…
Our days on this Earth are limited. Death is coming for us all. (Except maybe Bezos who is planning to upload his mind to AWS.) It behooves us, therefore, to spend what time we have on the things that: matter interest us we are able to affect we have (or can attain) competence in Importance. Significance. Influence. Competence. Needless to say there is a large dollop of subjectivity in judging…
One of the most potent signs of a disintegrating state is the rise of independent militias and the ruling government’s inability/unwillingness to eliminate them. Now read today’s DM lead article: Radical document by ‘retired generals’ spurs Gwede Mantashe into action. Huh. Who woulda thunk. Retired generals want to stage a military coup. Supplize. We already have a variety…
One of the sources of ill we experience with social media is this constant pressure to be exellent. To be sparkly and witty and clever. To be a Special Snowflake. Among the myriad flora and fauna inhabiting social networks, there’s that Long Tail of us who have little to say beyond chatter to our friends and acquaintances. That’s fine. It’s what we came for in the first place.…