Jessica Alba, riding a police hover drone.
Among tech journalists, BlackBerry is considered to be “old-fashioned, lame, commoditized technology,” as Mike Butcher, the blogger and digital adviser in London puts it. But BBM is private, decentralized, blindingly fast, and—most important—ubiquitous. My colleague Robert Capps has called this phenomenon the Good Enough Revolution (issue 17.09), though I doubt he [continued...]
Bill Wasik, Wired magazine, December 2011, #Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You
LinklogCities are public backlots. Cities aren’t galleries and museums, they house the physical locations of stories. And while many find the tales of history compelling, I’ll confess that it’s the city’s fictional narritives I find more attractive. Paris, in my imagination, is shaped by movies like Diva, Nikita, and Amélie. I’ve recently made a few [...]
“There’s a tram coming towards you. Get on it.” - Bourne, The Bourne Supremacy. It’s odd when you see a realistic depiction of computer interfaces in fiction. We’ve been primed to expect one of two different types. The first is overly simple. Only things pertinent to the context of the computer use are displayed. The [...]
I had a bit of an angry customer moment today. A public strop. I needed to get an iTunes gift-card this weekend. I tried buying one at the train station’s newsagent. The thing about these electronic gift-cards is that, even if you have the physical instantiation of the thing, they’re worthless before subjected to an [...]
If Iggy Pop is just the passenger, why is he the one sorting out the car insurance? Or indeed selling it. “I’m not selling insurance, I’m selling time.” All of the insurance ads seem to be emphasising speed and convenience at the moment. One insurance comparison site sponsors “24″ on Sky, which is surely the [...]
Oh, but the first few minutes of Babylon AD seem so promising. Our hero awakes in a partially destroyed apartment, an ambitious DIY project apparently abandoned after initial demolitions. Plastic sheeting forming its notional walls. But beyond the collapsed appartment – a collapsed world. Tehran’s anti-America murals adorning an eastern European housing block. Street markets [...]
I’ve just watched The Bourne Ultimatum. It’s an excellent action movie/travelogue, but not as all-round entertaining as, say, Die Hard 4.0 due to the utter lack of humour. Bourne’s been described as an “anti-James Bond” in some of the publicity interviews. Principally, because Bond, like anyone who works in a field dealing with death, has [...]
Occasionally I’ll be reading a text file in a browser window which hasn’t been formatted for a printer/terminal. But the text in Firefox doesn’t wrap, so as a result I’m sliding the horizontal scrollbar backwards and forwards to read paragraphs of text. Is this only me? Am I the only one who deals with this? [...]
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