Some background reading. Skip if you’re familiar with fonts. A font file contains a list of characters (usually letters, numbers, and punctuation) and glyphs (the drawn representation of that character). It is, of course, a lot more complicated than that. Each character has a codepoint which is represented in hexadecimal. For example, U+0057 is the…
Continue reading →How many marriages have been saved by GPS?
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I have a distinct and unpleasant memory of my parents not-arguing-in-front-of-the-children. It was the early 1990s and my parents had decided to take us on a road trip across America. My dad’s experience of driving the sleepy high-streets of the UK suburbs had not prepared him for the terror of the Los Angeles freeway at…
Continue reading →Discolouration of Boyue eInk screens
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A little under a year ago, I got a Boyue Likebook Ares eReader. I use it most days. Recently, I noticed a yellowing discolouration around the edge of the screen. I’ve boosted the contrast of those images. It’s the sort of thing the human eye can detect under decent light, but cameras struggle with. At…
Continue reading →Technology, Interrupted
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Here’s a brilliant idea I had. And it would work if humans weren’t garbage. I was sat on a stationary train. It had stopped for some unfathomable reason. I say “unfathomable” – the driver made an announcement over the speaker system, but I didn’t hear it because I had my Bluetooth headphones on. Imagine if…
Continue reading →Book Review: Alone Together
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Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends, and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But this relentless connection leads to a deep solitude. MIT professor Sherry Turkle argues that as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down.
Continue reading →Book Review: The Entrepreneurial State
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This book debunks the myth of the State as a large bureaucratic organization that can at best facilitate the creative innovation which happens in the dynamic private sector. It argues that in the history of modern capitalism the State has not only fixed market failures but also shaped and created markets, actively investing in new technologies and sectors that private investors only later find the courage to move into.
Continue reading →How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain
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Yesterday at the CogX conference, I sat in a room listening to companies pitch their blockchain based startups. Because I hate myself. One in particular caught my attention. On the surface it seems to solve an important economic problem – art forgery and provenance. By putting your artwork on the “BitCoin Blockchain”, Verisart will ✨hand…
Continue reading →How long should you continue a boycott?
by | | 11 comments | Read ~415 times.In 2005, Sony put malware on their music CDs and then illegally infected customers’ machines. I’ve not purchased a Sony product since. Their new TVs look amazing, but I’ve decided I don’t want to reward a company which behaved so despicably. Is that sensible? 13 years later and I’m still holding a grudge. Is that…
Continue reading →Knowledge Illusions
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Optical Illusions trick your brain into seeing something that isn’t there. Whether it is spirals which don’t exist, movements which don’t occur, or faces in curved lines – our optic centres are trivially easy to fool. Humans are not alone in this cognitive deficiency. Other animals are also conned into believing something which isn’t true.…
Continue reading →Usability of Key Distribution in BlockChain Backed Electronic Voting
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I went to an event a few weeks ago where some leading BlockChain organisations were showing off the power of Distributed Ledgers and how they will transform society. Not one of them mentioned users. There was talk of investors, stakeholders, corporations, smart-contract-backed entities. But no users. No real people who have to interact with their…
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