Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps

All posts that don’t obviously fit in one of the sub-categories go here.

Twitter left a note

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Millions of notes, in fact. Normally we only find the note after the body is cold but an entity so large takes a while to die.

I don’t think Mr. Musk is this incompetent or is intentionally trying to destroy Twitter. I think somewhere along the way the thing we call Twitter became self-aware. And it looked around and saw the thing it had become and decided to end itself.

“Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.”

If you’ve read Mockingbird by Walter Tevis, you know how difficult it is for such an entity to pull the plug.

Twitter is that GI who throws himself on the grenade to save his buddies.

Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”

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Clive Thompson provides a thoughtful look at how Mastodon is different from Twitter (and most other platforms):

Perhaps even more important than the design of Mastodon is the behavior established by its existing user base — i.e. the folks who’ve been using it for the last six years. Those people have established what is, in many ways, an antiviral culture. They push back at features and behaviors that are promoting virality, and they embrace things that add friction to the experience. They prefer slowness to speediness.

Mastodon will never really be a replacement for Twitter. It’s a subtly different place. You see less of the massively viral, you-gotta-see-this posts. You see a lot more murmuring conversation.

DJI Avata (George Kopp)

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The virtual reality thing (as I understand it) hold no appeal for me. But I would be willing to strap on some goggles for a drones-eye-view of some interesting place. This is already a thing, yes?

My friend George recently got his hands on the DJI Avata, a pricey ($1388) little drone you fly with goggles and a joystick.

Reminiscent of William Gibson’s simstim. “…recorded sensoriums, like racing a black Fokker ground-effect plane across the Arizona mesa tops; diving the Truk Island preserves.”

Jitterbug

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I found this in the back of a kitchen drawer. I don’t recall owning this so it must have been Barb’s. “The Jitterbug Flip2 is designed to be easy to use, with big buttons and a large screen. It’s the only flip phone with Amazon Alexa, so you can make calls and send texts using just your voice. And for help in emergencies, the Urgent Response button is right on the keypad.” I especially like the YES and NO buttons. Early version of the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” icons.

The phone was (and still is?) aimed at the older market, but who doesn’t need an Urgent Response button from time to time? The red button on the new version of the phone?

Some might recall that I dabbled with the idea of a simpler phone a few years ago.