Membranophonist’s Ramblings

Interaction and interface design, technology, politics, music, and random thoughts…

12/11/2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
0 comments

TMI

So, what we’re seeing isn’t the expansion of our social network; it’s the shrinking of what and who we care about. My Facebook feed is full of what friends are listening to, what friends are reading, etc. And frankly, I don’t give a damn. I would care if they told me personally; I’d even care if they used a medium as semi-personal as Twitter. The effort required to tweet tells me that someone thought it was important. And I do care about that. I will care much less if Spotify and Rdio integrate with Twitter. I already don’t care about the blizzard of automated tweets from FourSquare.

—Mike Loukides: The end of social

I’ve been happy to see fewer and fewer friends using foursquare. Now if I could just hide the Spotify autoposts…

12/9/2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
0 comments

Put On a Sweater

If we’ve got the Kyoto treaty driving us towards a zero carbon house, how can we possibly expect consumers to manage those homes efficiently if we’ve got all these different systems and they’re not integrated[?]

…

This one device that controls 50% of your home's energy wasn't being innovated at all. It seemed like it was stuck in the ’80s.

—Colin Calder (Passiv Systems) and Tony Faddell (Nest) on their smart thermostat projects

12/4/2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
1 Comment

Our Cloudy Future

The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.

—Jonathan Zittrain: The personal computer is dead

How much computing freedom and personal privacy are we willing to give up for convenience? I’m less and less comfortable with the balance being struck.

11/29/2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
0 comments

Cookstop

I had an idea today for a stove that turns off burners if no weight is atop. Yes, I left the burner on one night when I went out. Necessity is the mother of invention, so perhaps forgetfulness is a distant cousin.

There is already a patent on file, but I can’t find a manufacturer that has put it into production.

11/11/2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
0 comments

End Task

That the Windows 8 Task Manager in simple view is very similar to the Mac OS X Force Quit window is not surprising. What’s interesting is that Microsoft apparently arrived at this design via telemetry data and user observation. I doubt Apple used mountains of data to come up with what seems like an obvious design.

To the Windows 8 team’s credit, the expanded view’s resource consumption heatmap and contextual command to search the web for a process name are nice additions that I’d be happy to see Apple steal for the Activity Monitor on OS X.

11/5/2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
0 comments

Solar Us

If humanity could capture one tenth of one percent of the solar energy striking the earth – one part in one thousand – we would have access to six times as much energy as we consume in all forms today, with almost no greenhouse gas emissions.

—Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore’s law apply to solar cells?

…humble, behind-the-scenes “process innovations” will continue to increase the efficiency and drive down the costs of manufacturing the technologies we already know work.

—The Coolest New Solar Manufacturing Technology You’ve Never Heard Of