Computer – Irishperson in Exile

Trouble Down t’Mill

I just did a guest post for ReadMill on how all the choice we’re given around ebooks boils down to no choice at all.

If you haven’t heard of ReadMill, their software tries to turn ebook reading into a kind of virtual reading group with shared highlighting, commenting, and conversations centred around your reading. Although the reader is only available for iPad, there are ways to use the site with Android and iPhone applications and your Kindle highlights.

I’ve found it invaluable for cataloguing noted during my psychology MSc and it’s fun to see what other people highlight as important. At the very least, it’ll estimate for how many hours you’ll have to endure that statistics textbook.

The Tell-tale Heart

: Image by Damien Ryan via Flickr

One hour…

Seventeen expletives…

Two cut fingers and

A hundred dust-bunnies later.

I have replaced my PC’s power supply.

You have 500 Million Friends

: Image by whipsmart via Flickr

Everyone’s on Facebook, right? Poking, messaging, friend requests, liking, and other every day words take on their own meanings on this website. A website that has a population equal to the whole EU, has overtaken email, texting, and the telephone as a means of communication and still manages to grow despite a small (but extremely vocal) community of detractors that think it needs to be shut down.

Sorkin and Fincher’s movie, based on The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, doesn’t touch on the minutiae of the privacy activists concerns, but rather delivers a tight precis of the Facebook’s birth pangs and subsequent legal fallout.

More sympathetic to Zuckerberg than I would have imagined, the movie seems to be the beginning of a narative that portrays the Facebook co-founder as a misunderstood genius (possibly with Asperger’s) that just wants to be loved. Sorkin is at his best when allowed to write fast paced dialogue and interweaving the various legal issues with the Facebook story stopped the movie from grinding to a halt or becoming a spiritual sequel to A Few Good Men.

Love it or hate it Facebook is here and most people will continue to use the site until they finally get bored with talking to each other. Open source initiatives like Diaspora may gain some currency with a certain type of user, but they won’t ever be as cool, and as Zukerberg’s character says in the movie, Facebook is nothing if it’s not cool.

Start spreading the news / I’m leaving today

Roger Ebert might think games can never be considered art, but it seems that as Hollywood gets more two-dimensional and derivative, video games are becoming more interesting and cinematic.

I’d much rather see this trailer made into a movie than Tom Cruise‘s latest effort.

[via Sarcastic Gamer]

The Original Sims

988834146-00 — Image by Damien Ryan via Flickr

Alter Ego was a video game released by Activision in 1986. The brainchild of psychologist Dr. John Favero it allowed players to play out an entire lifetime as if it were a Choose Your Own Adventure novel by playing out events based on hundreds of interviews conducted with people about their lives.

Now you can play a very faithful reproduction online.

Update: For $5 you can get a version for mobile phones using the Android operating system in the Android Market

A Screen that Ships without a Mouse Ships Broken

Image via Wikipedia

Clay
Shirky’s talk from O’Reilly’s 2008 Web
Expo points out just how much free time we actually have to “waste”
on social participation projects. The next time you roll your eyes at
someone for editing Wikipedia or Musicbrainz, at least they’re doing
something rather than contributing to the billions
of hours of free time spent in front of the latest reality show.

Movies don’t depict reality: News at eleven.

11. Not all computers are made by the Apple corporation.