The latest Word Press release (are they still naming them after jazz musicians?) contains this gem. You've spent ten years typing blog posts into a white box and ignoring everything outside the typing field and suddenly some genius UX types decide you need to be free of these distractions. So they distract you with a popup telling you about distraction-free writing.
Update: Also note that the "tooltip" is out of alignment with the icon it's supposedly pointing to (hat tip ryz).
A purchaser of the Home Electro for Fun and Profit LP received his complimentary audio cassette version and sent this photo of the cassette being played. Classy -- the Nakamichi 600 was an audiophile cassette player of the '70s-'80s and still pops up on eBay. In fact eBay has its own consumer reviews page where it talks about Nakamichi decks as if this were still the '70s. This is a strange historical moment, where one wing of the capitalist bloodsucking machine is telling us our gear is obsolete and we need to have the latest hard rectangle in our pants pocket if we are to be anyone, while another wing is extracting the last drop of value out of superseded state of the art devices, making it possible for something like a cassette underground to continue to exist.
As mentioned earlier, cassettes are still being manufactured, and Sam Ash, B&H Photo and other retailers are still selling the Tascam brand of cassette recorder, so this subculture is not based entirely on recycled media and electronics (yet).
[Vimeo]
Video loop, 17 inch LCD screen, portable media player, SD card (installation view)
Notes: Thinking back to the "square screen" discussion, here is a screen with a 4:3 ratio, which is the only viable way to show this particular GIF-to-mp4 conversion in fullscreen. The irony is that to document it, you have to use 16:9 because that's what all the video hosting services are using now. The above GIF is a turducken of nested media: the frames started out as screen art, printed out, then photographed. The photos were combined into an animated GIF. The GIF was converted to mp4 so it could play accurately on the portable media player (at least I don't have to burn a DVD anymore). Then the looping video was shot with a mini-HD cam and converted to mp4 for upload to Vimeo. All this for a simple punk rock gesture.
Here is a 16:9 scrunched to 4:3 version of the same video [4.4 MB .mp4] with a permanent loop.
If you saw the mini-series True Detective (first installment), you might remember Matthew McConnaughey spouting weird, dark philosophy and Woody Harrelson responding with something like "Don't tell anybody else this but me, OK?"
Some of the ideas were loosely based on the above book, by horror fiction writer Thomas Ligotti. In a nutshell, it's the case for anti-natalism, that is, that humans should just stop having children, and thereby, ultimately, quietly remove our species from the planet. Not because we're an ecosystem-unbalancing viral plague, although there's that, but rather that we have an "excess of consciousness," beyond our capacity needed for survival on Earth, and it generates so much suffering it's got to be a mistake of nature.
The McConnaughey character was still "doing good things" while espousing dark shit but Ligotti would probably say that's his choice, as long as he wasn't breeding. Ligotti writes persuasively and well (and with great humor), and I recommend a few rounds with this book to help you polish your counter-arguments. He has anticipated most of them and they will sound like feeble apologetics, I'll warn you right now.
firefox design team, 2004-2014
We've been tracking Firefox changes-for-the-sake-of-change that occur with its new accelerated update schedule. The latest is de-improved search. Before, you could select which engine you wanted to use before you began typing in the search bar. Now you don't get the engine dropdown until you type something, and once you've typed a few letters, if it's a search you've done before, the browser provides you a list of search terms with those letters. If you choose any of those terms, you must go wherever your default search engine takes you.
Thus, if your default search engine is Google, let's say you type the letters "re," and the word "renoise" comes up on the list of previous searches. If you choose "renoise" from that list you are automatically taken to Google. If you want Wikipedia, tough luck, you have to go to Google first. But if you type out the entire word "renoise" you are then given a selection of other providers' icons to choose from.
It worked fine before -- why do this? (Apologies to the innate smarts of chimpanzees.)
Update: Sorry, had to pull this post briefly and rewrite while I figured out the sophisticated awfulness of the new search and how to describe it.
