Dan W

2007 Called and Wants It’s Tweets Back

2013-03-11T23:17:00+00:00

A while back I collected the first 78 tweets on twitter that still exist. I quite like their style. No hashtags, no URLs, no replies, no stolen jokes. Just people answering “What are you doing?”. Stuff like:

wishing I had another sammich
— Biz Stone (@biz) March 21, 2006

lunch
— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006

That’s how I used twitter initially. Just ”pointless babble”. As Blaine said:

Once upon a time, Twitter was not full of links, and we had a thing called ambient intimacy. It was good. This is good, too, but different.
— Blaine (@blaine) March 8, 2011

So last year I tried posting in that style again for a week. 49 tweets in total. LARPing the internet of 2007. Here’s a few examples:

Eating a sandwich
— Dan Williams (@iamdanw) October 8, 2012

On a train
— Dan Williams (@iamdanw) October 8, 2012

Wearing my twitter shirt
— Dan Williams (@iamdanw) October 8, 2012

Buying a book
— Dan Williams (@iamdanw) October 9, 2012

It was amusing reading the reactions. Some were confused, some annoyed and a few joined in. Largely they found it boring. Which is the point. It’s like the shipping forecast. A dull predictable tempo.

As Warren Ellis recently said about Path:

“…I follow a couple of hundred people on Twitter and very few of them open their day’s Twitter use with “awake!” It’s probably actually only me, after being awake for an hour or so, who posts “good morning, [insert insult here],” and that’s only to fuck with people here in Britain who’ve been up for hours at that point. Kind of makes me wonder what Twitter would look like if people did use it as a log of the day.”

That usage pattern is gone from twitter. Pretending it’s still 2007 doesn’t quite work. There are too many tweets happening that conflict the atmosphere. A bit like playing street games, there needs to be more than one person doing it to allow a suspension of disbelief. Perhaps like what Joanne McNeil did when she role played herself alongside on friendster:

“So, for a laugh, I created a brand new profile. One as I would have created it a decade before. And I asked my friends — my new friends — to come join me there. These are people I didn’t know then. I got to share my history in an unusual way — show what I used to be like. I would post status updates complaining about my job as a waitress or bragging about reading Ursula LeGuin.”

Anyway, I’m writing a pointless blog post.

HSBC Archive Visit 2012

2013-02-20T19:34:00+00:00

There’s no phone signal. We’re in a big metal box, an accidental faraday cage, inside a standard looking warehouse on an industrial estate on the edge of London. The neighbouring units are delivery companies, double glazing, timber. The usual. Company signs that end in “and sons”. This warehouse however has no sign.

The big metal box is the new HSBC archive that Aden is showing us around. Historical documents about the company are stored in rolling stacks. Lots of paper. Letters, meeting minutes, press clippings, old ledgers. Not customer accounts but the history of the company.

We’re shown a nice selection of documents about the history of computers and calculators in the organisation.

There are also various oddities. Things that don’t fit in to the collection, but are too interesting to throw away. Ceremonial swords. Golden dragons.

Above photos by Aden Davies, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The big metal box is designed for keeping the collection safe and is full of sensors that monitor the environment, maintaining the correct temperature and humidity. It’s hooked up to an argon-nitrogen fire suppression system to protect it from fire. Best not to be inside when that is triggered.

Despite being a newly opened archive there isn’t much free shelf space. They anticipate most new archive material will be digital instead. The main challenge currently is figuring out how to preserve digital material. They’re building a system that will keep a copy of the original file in the original format whilst also keeping it’s contents in a form which can still be opened in the future, such as when they no longer have a working computer with the correct version of Office.

This is taking time. This kind of archive software does not exist yet so must be created from scratch and be designed to last. They estimate they’ve already missed a decade or so of material because the company went digital before the archive knew how to preserve the material. And this is only one company archive. I imagine there are many archives around the world with a similar ‘missing decade’ in their collections.

Why not print the digital material onto paper and preserve it that way? Seeing as they already know how to keep paper for a long time. We’re told by James, one of the archive team, that this wouldn’t be a valid preservation. They seek to keep the original artefact as it was used, even if the original item is some data on a hard drive somewhere.

It was a nice afternoon chatting with friendly archivists trying to grapple with digital preservation. If you would like to see more Aden has some photos on his flickr, as do I.

Shard to Shoreditch Walkshop

2013-01-16T19:40:00+00:00

Last weekend Justin Pickard arranged a little walk from The Shard through the City of London to Old Street Roundabout. We looked at things, stopped in pubs and took photos. It was cold. Fitbit says I took 23,139 footsteps.

We wondered about the boundaries between public and private space.

And got lost in the Barbican.

I’d just watched these films from the 1960s on the Barbican the day before, after Phil liked it on YouTube.

The City is still quiet on weekend. Cats & caretakers. The buildings are much taller now.

After a few hours we ended up in the middle of Old Street roundabout.

Photo by Justin Pickard, CC BY-SA 2.0.

A pleasant walk. I have a some photos on flickr, as do Justin and Tobias.

Yearnote 2012

2013-01-01T18:57:00+00:00

2012, in four parts.

Working

Magna Mysteria, Playable City, Give Me Back My Broken Night, The Ivory Bangle Lady & Polyrhythmia.

Making

Advent Locker, Little Emma, Nick Clegg Looking Algorithmically Sad, Not A Proper Book & Instapaper Placebo.

Speaking

Ignite Bath and Ignite Bristol 7 on the topic of Epcot (video). Ignite Cardiff 8 on the physical infrastructure of the internet. Skillswap Brighton on magic, shenzhen, lasers, Nick Clegg and face recognition (audio).

Visiting

The Olympics, A Room For London, Down The Drones, Brighton Digital Festival, Hovershow 2012, hovercraft racing, DIY crazy golf, Porthcurno Telegraph Museum, the Black Mountain, Playful, HSBC Archive, robot olympics, watching helicopters fly through Tower Bridge & Jonty carrying the Olympic torch.

Lots of bunting, eating chocolate Wenlocks and drinking my first whisky. Onwards.

Nick Clegg Looking Algorithmically Sad

2012-10-09T20:31:00+01:00

There’s a tumblr called Nick Clegg Looking Sad. There are emotion recognition algorithms. I’ve put one into the other to make Nick Clegg Looking Algorithmically Sad*.

Nick Clegg Looking Sad posts photos of Nick Clegg with captions of why he might be sad. It’s quite popular, to the extent that it’s the first autocomplete suggestion on Google for the Deputy Prime Minister.

Recently I played with SHORE. It can detect faces in a video or image, along with their age, gender and emotion. But when playing with it I could never get it to detect my face as being sad. So to test it I thought I’d run a corpus of photos through it. What better than a set of images on tumblr widely recognised as sad?

You can see the photographic results at http://nickclegglookingalgosad.tumblr.com/.

In summary:

Number of Nick Clegg Looking Sad photos: 64
Photos containing detected faces: 54
Detected Nick Clegg faces: 51
Gender of Nick Clegg: 88% Male
Happy Nick Cleggs: 10
Angry Nick Cleggs: 5
Surprised Nick Cleggs: 1
Nick Cleggs looking algorithmically sad: 1

One out of 64. Not bad, for a machine.

* The name comes from some tweets between @deplorableword and @revdancatt

Happy Birthday Baxter

2012-09-19T19:35:00+01:00

Baxter is a new industrial robot. It has two arms, a name and a face. Sticking a face on it is the gamification equivalent of the robotics world.

You program Baxter by moving the arms through the motions you want to do. The worker can program their own replacement robot. Personifying the robot is perhaps an attempt to make it appear unthreatening:

Brooks has attended some of the field tests to see how potential customers interact with the robots. He says that when they bring Baxter onto a factory floor, some workers look puzzled, while others just laugh at the machine. But after they use Baxter for a while, people realize how the robot can help them. “And then something interesting happens,” Brooks says, his eyebrows rising. “People sort of personify the robot. They say, ‘It’s my buddy!’ ”

To me the face seems a bit off however. Shifty. Hungover.

And the thing that immediately comes to mind watching the intro video is David.

I’m sure Baxter is harmless. It even likes hugs.

IEEE Spectrum have more information about Baxter.

Brighton Digital Festival 2012

2012-09-14T22:19:00+01:00

I went to Brighton Digital Festival and posted the exact same photos to Instagram as everyone else

At Improving Reality..

..and Brighton SF..

..and at dConstruct.

I wonder if one could write a script to use the screen angle to guess where the person is sat?

Trying to generate a 3D model using the instagrams and 123D Catch was not very successful.

That’s Not a Proper Book

2012-08-22T21:58:00+01:00

I made a book. Or rather, I printed out a web page as a book.

In the December 1996 issue of Wired there was an article by Neal Stephenson called Mother Earth, Mother Board. It’s about the construction of a single fibre optic cable from the UK to Japan. It’s a good article. Possibly the greatest magazine article ever. But most notably it’s long. Very Long.

It took a lazy New Years Day afternoon to read the entire thing. Reading it in instapaper I had no idea how long it would be. Online articles have little to indicate their length. It’s not the same as being able to see the thickness of a book.

So I printed it. The wired website has a printable version (as well as a no longer working ‘fax me this article’ link). It comes out as 53 A4 pages. Closer to a book than a typical magazine article.

But instead of printing on A4, I reformatted the printable version down to a paperback size and sent it to Lulu. Lulu do print on demand books. They’re laser printed in the same way an office printer would, only the pages are also glued together and guillotined down to paperback size. And the printer isn’t in my house.

Inside it’s just the webpage. There’s no table of contents, index, page numbers, edition notice or any other front & back matter. None of the usual stuff you find in a book padding the content.

I did give it a cover. The cover lacks title, author, ISBN, description, etc. It’s an Azimuthal equidistant map projection of the Earth showing the path of the FLAG cable the article describes. Made using D3.js, the path data for the cable comes from Greg’s Cable Map. I’ve yet to figure out the consequences of putting data released under GPL v3 into a book cover.

There’s only one copy of it, unlike a proper print run. Technically all I’ve done is printed one copy of the web page for personal use. But it feels odd. Books are usually mass produced. With a few clicks I could print off as many copies as I want with no additional work. Scaling atoms like you scale software. And it baffles the author when you ask them to sign it.

Anyway, to answer my initial curiosity, when printed it’s 120 pages long.

BERG Little Printer Hackday

2012-07-01T17:27:00+01:00

Yesterday BERG had a ‘practice’ hackday for Little Printer, to test out an early version of their API and to try running a hackday. 30 odd people spent 6 hours seeing what they could do with small bits of thermal paper.

API Overview

I missed the intro talk because I was nerdily riding the new Thames Cable Car, so I might have got some of this wrong. Additionally, the API is still being built so things might change.

Little Printer is an internet connected printer. You subscribe to publications and schedule them to be printed at times during the day. Perhaps Guardian news headlines at breakfast time on weekdays or a list of upcoming birthdays every Sunday evening.

The API allows anyone to make publications that users can subscribe to. Publications are made in HTML and served on your own server. When the publication needs to be printed LP hits your server to ask for the latest relevant version, then renders & prints. It was satisfyingly easy to get up and running with the sample code and start printing placekittens.

The Printer

These were not the final production printers. They were nice though. Satisfyingly chunky. The soft glowing alert light, pressing the button to print and tearing the paper off on the metal cutting edge didn’t get old or tedious even after a day of non-stop printing.

The printer is configured and controlled by an app for setting up subscriptions. Printers can be shared among multiple people, and the app can control multiple printers. I was sending test publications to Harry Plotter and Thermal & Louise, each of which was being shared by multiple people.

The Hacks

There were 18 presented hacks.

Nick & Kass made ASCII Meteogram, an ASCII art weather forecast.
Chris H., James S. & James W. made Localondon, a London exhibition guide.
Adrian made some buttons for a fridge door that you can press when you need more milk, and then a shopping list gets printed.
Tom A. made a Tower Bridge opening/closing times list, but with pictures and facts, like a little I-Spy book.
Another James W. made an Exquisite Tweets thing, so you can get a daily printout of interesting twitter conversations.
Tom T. made a Low Flying Rocks list of upcoming asteroid near misses.
Roo made a google calendar printout.
Devin & Ben made cute little origami animals.
Simon, Nat D. & Tom I. made a little Lanyrd document, with maps and event times.
Louise made a printout of the night sky, that could be backlight and projected.
Matt B. made This Week On Twitter, a summary of what happened on twitter.
Matt W. made a Conway’s Game of Life that printed out a new iteration every day.
Richard made a google calendar, but one that uses icons instead of words.
Chris A. made Little Printnik, a sort of ‘word of the day’ game to expand vocabulary.
Natalia made Catgrindr, which prints out photos of cute cats near you.

Little Emma

I built Little Emma which shows the current location of the Emma Maersk on a map.

I buy stuff from places like Tesco and Amazon. And I know that stuff is made elsewhere in places like Shenzhen but I have no understanding of what happens in-between. By printing the current location of the world’s biggest container ship every day I might slowly get an understanding of global supply chains, of places like Yantian and Tanjung Pelepas, that I depend on but don’t know it.

Printing is Hard

Whilst using the developer API was easy, designing for LP was surprisingly hard. What works on a web page or a mobile app doesn’t translate to small pieces of black & white paper. Graphic design rather than web design

Most of my time was spent playing with map styles to find something that was legible on thermal paper. Stamen’s Toner was nice and Chris H. pointed out that London A-Z maps worked great for street level. The Google static maps API supports the custom styles of the v3 maps API which is very handy.

What was quite nice is seeing the piles of paper at the end of the day. It’s very visible that Work Has Been Done Here. The sawdust, as Bridle points out, that’s missing from software development. You get to see the failed experiments and the changing versions printed throughout the day which would normally be hidden away in git.

Anyway, it was a nice day. Certainly this was a good room to be in when building stuff and getting stuck. Hopefully there’ll be another.

Thanks BERG. Therg.

Photos: berghackday tag on Flickr
Tweets: Tweets collected by @jwheare; Tweets collected by @iamdanw
Blog Posts: Alice B’s post on the BERG Cloud blog; Simon W’s post on the Lanyrd blog

Call To Action

2012-05-21T22:41:00+01:00

This is from the touchscreen inside a photo booth in Cabot Circus, Bristol.

This is the outside of the photo booth that caught my attention

It’s got a camera and a screen, acting as a mirror. Which makes me think you don’t need the inside of the booth. If the outside had a Kinect-style depth camera it could isolate the person and place them over a digital white background. It could fit in a digital poster form factor. At least, this would work for utilitarian passport photos. So long as you’re ok with everyone watching you pose.

For that use case there’s this marvel from the Post Office that comes complete with an old man watching you.

Hovershow 2012

2012-05-02T22:41:00+01:00

Last weekend was Hovershow 2012 at the Hovercraft Museum. The only hovercraft museum in the world. So we went on a London Hackspace trip.

Hovercraft are a peculiar thing. One of those technologies that were going to be The Future but now largely unseen. Like the Concorde, monorails or Space Shuttles. I have vague memories of them being excitedly shown off on Tomorrow’s World or Blue Peter as a kid. Or possibly it was on Thunderbirds.

The museum is only open a few days a year or by appointment. There are hovercraft scattered everywhere in various states of rusting and disrepair. Quite a lot of hovercraft.

The staff sell entrance tickets from the back of a shipping container dressed in Hoverspeed steward & stewardess uniforms. The site is dominated by the two Hoverspeed branded giant SR.N4s, the Princess Margaret and Princess Anne. They’re so big that exhibits and trade stalls are set up inside their car holds. There’s a harrier jump jet inside the hovercraft.

There’s a hover mini.

Heathrow fire service hovercraft.

Pedal powered hovercraft.

Hover ice cream van.

Hoverrides.

And a nice beach to skim stones on.

The rest of my photos are on flickr. There’s another open day coming up later this summer and there are various photos and videos on the hackspace wiki page for the trip.

Instapaper Placebo

2012-03-07T20:20:00+00:00

Last week Instapaper released a new bookmarklet. It’s nice. It saves articles that have been split across multiple pages.

However it doesn’t work in the way I want the Instapaper bookmarklet to. So I’ve made my own. It’s above. You put it in your bookmarks. When you find an article or web page you want to read later, you click it. And it saves it for later.

There’s one difference. Mine doesn’t save the page, it just pretends to. And that’s good enough.

I use instapaper a lot. I think it’s a fantastic service. No longer do I have a hundred tabs open to web pages I intend to read at some point before closing the browser. I can push them to instapaper and read them on my commute instead in a calm stripped down format. It works great.

But I find far more things that look interesting than I have time to read. Currently I have 4051 unread links. I had to write some code to find that out because instapaper doesn’t have an unread count anywhere. That lack of unread count is the best feature.

I’ve built instapaper placebo because instapaper itself is too complex for what I need. I don’t need a nice mobile app for reading. I don’t need a way to remove all the clutter from the page. I don’t need an online cross-platform bookmark syncing service. I just need a way of offloading all my good intentions. A way to stop hoarding links. And with less stuff to read I can make more stuff instead. Productive stuff. Like instapaper placebo.

Oh. Never mind.

Yearnote 2011

2012-02-26T23:09:00+00:00

2011, in brief.

Work

Sculpting With Scent, We Are Forests, Indoor Positioning, Bristol Stories Map, The Unicorn, Theatre Jukebox & Sky Orchestra.

Side projects:

A bot, a map, another map, a graph, a glanceable, a book, an observer & a projection.

Visiting:

Redsands Maunsell Forts, Colney Heath, dConstruct, Bletchley Park & SXSW.

Speaking:

Future Everything & OpenMIC.

Not a story, just one damn thing after another.

Do The Other Things

2011-12-29T23:52:00+00:00

I was watching “NASA’s Greatest Missions” on TV over Christmas. There’s this clip of a Kennedy speech they repeat:

We choose to go to the moon… we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

What are the “Other things”, apart from going to the moon? A quick search didn’t bring up good answers. Yahoo Answers claimed the other things were Marilyn Monroe. Some forum posts argued it was a reference to an earlier part of the speech:

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

I’m not convinced. I then found an earlier speech that this could be a reference to:

I therefore ask the Congress, above and beyond the increases I have earlier requested for space activities, to provide the funds which are needed to meet the following national goals:

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth

He goes on to give three more goals:

Secondly, an additional 23 million dollars, together with 7 million dollars already available, will accelerate development of the Rover nuclear rocket. This gives promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself.

I haven’t heard of Project Rover before. As wikipedia describes:

A nuclear engine was considered for some time as a replacement for the J-2 used on the S-II and S-IVB stages on the Saturn V and Saturn I rockets. Originally “drop-in” replacements were considered for higher performance, but a larger replacement for the S-IVB stage was later studied for missions to Mars and other high-load profiles, known as the S-N. Nuclear thermal space “tugs” were planned as part of the Space Transportation System to take payloads from a propellant depot in Low Earth Orbit to higher orbits, the Moon, and other planets.”

Neat. But it didn’t get anywhere.

Third, an additional 50 million dollars will make the most of our present leadership, by accelerating the use of space satellites for world-wide communications.

Fourth, an additional 75 million dollars–of which 53 million dollars is for the Weather Bureau–will help give us at the earliest possible time a satellite system for world-wide weather observation.

I wonder if satellite development would have progressed the same without this funding. It seems to have had more practical impact than flying to the moon. What if the satellites could have been funded without the moon trip? Or is the big audacious moon goal needed to sell the boring bits to the public?

Reminded me of this article on airport security:

Security theater, from this perspective, is an attempt to convey a message: “We are doing everything possible to protect you.” When 9/11 shattered the public’s confidence in flying, Slovic says, the handful of anti-terror measures that actually work—hardening the cockpit door, positive baggage matching, more-effective intelligence—would not have addressed the public’s dread, because the measures can’t really be seen. Relying on them would have been the equivalent of saying, “Have confidence in Uncle Sam,” when the problem was the very loss of confidence. So a certain amount of theater made sense.

Does that make the TSA our generations equivalent of going to the moon? The annual 8.1 billion USD budget seems comparable to the total 25.4 billion USD cost of Apollo.

As an aside in my searching I found out that Apollo reaching the moon was mentioned in a Star Trek episode broadcast in 1968, before it happened. I bet there’s a whole branch of moon conspiracy theory material dedicated to that.

Arrivals for Foursquare

2011-11-23T20:03:00+00:00

Arrivals is a simple list of where your foursquare friends currently are. It is intended to be displayed on a spare second screen such as a tablet or phone without intrusively drawing attention.

Where’s Dad?

Arrivals is based on a concept by Toby Barnes. Where’s Dad is a small glanceable display built for Toby’s son for use on a spare old iPhone. Whilst Toby is travelling his son asks him during phone calls where he currently is. This display constantly shows his current location, city and country based on his foursquare checkins. A simple piece of situated software with an user base of one person. See Toby’s blog for more details of his thinking behind it.

Arrivals is a generalised version of this, using the same style but showing your friends locations instead.

Broadcast

There are many different ways to use foursquare. I check-in mainly to keep a personal log of where I’ve been. I rarely use it to view where my friends are. I find the iPhone push notifications too intrusive whilst I only launch the app to check in.

This leaves my usage unbalanced, friends are broadcasting but I’m not listening. I’m more likely to notice a friend is nearby from twitter or instagram than from foursquare.

Arrivals fixes this by making a screen unobtrusive enough to be left open. The screen only updates when a location changes. The animated flicker in the corner of the eye draws the attention but does not interrupt. As a result it gives a constant awareness of location and daily rhythms, with a cascade of checkins at lunchtime and after work.

Public/Private

One difficulty in creating Arrivals is the balance between a public display on a second screen visible to all showing information that is private and only intended for foursquare friends.

I’ve tried to solve this by showing the minimum amount of information on the screen. No timestamp, no city or country of venue and no name of the person checking in. To view any of this information one must use the foursquare website or mobile app. As a compromise the profile picture of the person checking in is shown on the display, as otherwise one needs to open foursquare far too frequently just to see who is where. The lack of a timestamp allows deniability in the case of recognition.

Animation

Animation is provided using CSS3 transforms and only happens when a location changes. An unintended effect of this is that some new users sit and intently watch the Arrivals display waiting for a checkin as they wish to see the flip animation.

Restraint

The hardest part of designing a glanceable is restraint. It’s technically very easy to add extra information and features to the display. Adding the airport code of the nearest city to a checkin, colour coding the text with the Dopplr city colour, clicking a checking to flip it over and show details. Each feature addition would detract from the purpose, to do less than the existing sites & apps.

Perhaps next time I should make a physical display device instead. It’s easier to resist scope creep in atoms than in bits.

Anyway, feel free to try Arrivals, read Toby’s write up or let me know what you think.

URL: http://arrivals.iamdanw.com/
Created: 2011-09-17; Cardiff, UK; Foursquare Global Hackathon
Collaborators: Toby Barnes (Concept & design direction); Richard Birkin (Sound Design)
Role: Software Development
Technologies: Sinatra; Heroku; Foursquare API
Screenshots & Videos: Flickr; Vimeo
Coverage: Foursquare Blog; The Next Web; PSFK (twice); Mashable

What is the best Disney animated film that most people haven’t seen?

2011-11-15T12:00:00+00:00

On Quara someone asked ”What is the best Disney animated film that most people haven’t seen?”. I answered Victory Through Air Power (1943):

It’s the most bizarre Disney film I’ve watched. Made during WWII, it is an adaptation of a book by Alexander P. de Seversky advocating the use of long range aircraft in warfare. The film begins with a humorous animated history of flight before alternating between lecture sequences from Seversky and animated depictions of his warfare plans.

It was understandably not a huge success when released to theatres. Churchill is claimed to have made Roosevelt watch the film, changing Americas approach to the war. After the war the film was rarely shown until released on DVD in 2004. There are occasional screenings at places like the Walt Disney Family Museum.

Probably not the most family friendly or entertaining of Disney animated films, but certainly one most people haven’t seen

Awkward Shopping

2011-11-07T01:35:00+00:00

Sam Machin showed me the Pizza Express app. It’s like most retail apps. Vouchers and a store locator, clumsily implemented. But it also allows paying the restaurant bill with PayPal.

Type in a code printed at the bottom of the receipt, apply any vouchers and then log in to paypal. The trouble is the next step is uncertain. The bill is paid, but the waiting staff don’t know this. Do you just walk out? Or do you first explain what you’ve done? You’ve not placed a card or money on the table either, so the staff don’t walk up to your table to help.

Likewise, Apple are rumoured to be launching the ability to pay for in store purchases through an iPhone app:

The other major feature coming in Apple’s new app? Customer self check-out at retail stores. This is a huge deal and Apple is the first to be able to put it together. Here is how this will work: after you find the item you want to buy, like an accessory, you launch the Apple Store app on your iOS device and there will be an option to buy a product in the store. You scan the product with the camera on your device in the app, click purchase, and it will charge whatever credit card is associated to your Apple ID. You then just walk out of the store. Yes, we have been told that Apple will not be checking purchases which seems hard to believe, but this self check-out option will launch Thursday worldwide at all Apple retail stores

RFID credit cards are similar. You produce your credit card to pay and then have to explain you don’t want to use the usual chip and pin machine but to do the wavey thing that has no colloquial name yet. Using chip & pin would be quicker than having the conversation.

We lack the necessary vocabulary and rituals for these new forms of payment.

Retreat Into The Future

2011-11-06T12:00:00+00:00

A few weeks ago Justin Pickard linked me to Jonathan Meades’ Remember The Future. I’ve just gotten around to watching it.

It’s a sort of spoken essay about the techno-utopian vision of the future from the 60s & 70s. An appropriate companion to Playful 2011 which was full of men raised in the 60s & 70s disappointed that their promised future didn’t happen.

Which reminds me of John Gruber’s complaints about technology concept videos:

I’m not arguing that making concept videos directly leads to a lack of traction in the current market. I’m arguing that making concept videos is a sign of a company that has a lack of institutional focus on the present and near-present. Can you imagine a sports team in the midst of a present-day losing season that makes a video imagining a future championship 10 years out?

More Retreat Into The Future than Occupy The Future