Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
January 15, 2009
One of my first posts on this blog was about the rather sudden and unexpected shutdown of two web services, Stikkit and Sandy, and the anger that shutdown prompted against the services’ providers. We’re going to be hearing many more such stories, I think, during the recession/depression. Sites that have been funded by VCs while their...
January 14, 2009
Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, “correcting” your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The...
January 14, 2009
“Use the right tool for the job,” Walter Koehler says in response to this post, where I complain about having to use too many communications applications. That’s great advice for carpentry and auto repair, but I don’t think it’s always applicable to life on our computers. There are a lot of highly specialized software...
January 14, 2009
If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word, so what. I looked them up. I had nowhere important to be. My father was unavailable, and my mother looked like she was about to break, and not into blossom, every time I spoke. My favorite was the Iliad. True, I had trouble pronouncing the names, but when was I going to pronounce them, and...
January 13, 2009
Yesterday Jack Shafer had a weirdly grumpy column in which he rags on the Kindle for, among other things, not doing video. Why a book-reading device should do video is not a question he answers, or even mentions. Ditto with his complaint that it doesn’t have a touchscreen. Shafer wants the Kindle to be a PC and thinks every PC...
January 13, 2009
Take a look at this. Beautiful, no? I mean, this is web design — color, layout, typography — at something close to its best. Except for the spelling errors and the missing word, in about fifty words of text. I mean, as they say on ESPN, Come on, man! They tell me they’re fixing it, so by the time you see it the errors may be gone,...
January 12, 2009
History reading, Camiroi and galactic, basic and geological. Decadent comedy. Simple geometry and trigonometry, hand and machine. Track and field. Shaggy people jokes and hirsute logic. Simple obscenity. Simple mysticism. Patterns of falsification. Trapeze work. Intermediate electronics. Human dissection. Soon after this they will begin...
January 12, 2009
In related news, Megan McArdle worries that she’s not reading enough books, or, to put it more specifically, that she doesn’t read fast enough to read as many books as she’s like to read. To Megan and to all others who have similar concerns I recommend a story by one of the all-time great weirdos of American literature, R. A....
January 12, 2009
In relation to an earlier post of mine on David Frum’s belief that literary culture is in decline, some news: After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has...
January 9, 2009
One of my favorite and most-used Mac applications is called Growl: it’s a utility that works with many different applications to give me notifications. I use it with many different applications, but primarily with three: Google Notifier for Gmail, Adium for messaging, and Twitterrific for Twitter. What this means is that when someone...