technology

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This week, a tale of two Shawns/Seans, their impossible dream, and the file sharing service that lived fast, died young, and helped create the internet as we know it. Plus, Metallica.

I wanted to explore the malicious, confusing, and deceitful things that occur after signing up for digital services, as well as how design can nudge us to forget about a free trial or accidentally sign up for things that we didn’t intend to.

Dark patterns are often most egregious with subscriptions and free trials, especially when attempting to cancel, so I focused on those.

Though it makes me feel like a grandmother on her deathbed to admit it, I remember the days when the internet was vast, when there seemed to be more places to go than anyone could ever visit and infinite things to read. What you saw was not determined by some highly protected coded algorithm that lives somewhere in the cloud. You could just go out and find it.

I have a rail line right under my apartment, so I built a small computer vision app running on a Rasperry Pi which records each train passing, and tries to stitch an image of it.

More information about this project can be found here.

Knit grotesk is the first type family made especially for hand knitting

Cool website too!

No posts today! Murdered by Elon.

One of the few aggregators I loved to use. Goodbye.

The tech industry is abuzz about a new standard for social networking that is more open, more user-centric, and potentially more powerful than Twitter and Facebook. But we’ve been here before.

The screenless device, which does not require a nearby cell phone to work, uses a combination of voice and gestures for input and can display information by projecting it onto nearby objects.

Unfortunately, the current Companies House name rules – while covering copy-cats and offensive language – do not cover attempts to poison data inputs.

This is a problem, because dozens of websites, databases and other processors pull in details from Companies House – and not all of them are good at sanitising their data inputs, which can be poisoned simply with a name.