Welcome to Emmet's homepage
Short version:
I redesigned this blog.
Long version:
Before there were blogs there were home pages. Big ugly HTML websites blinking and flashing, startling affronts to aesthetic taste, but at the same time lovingly crafted and full of passion and originality. What happened to home pages? Geocities was great. Better than MySpace is, anyway. Remember K10k? Am I right, or is this just more techno-nostalgia?
Homepages on the web were like zines, all made from photocopied paper and glue and staples, and most of the time they were about something, and passionately so. They were punk. Here’s what my homepage looked like some time before Y2K:
But here comes the new millennium! CMSs mean that most pages in a site had to conform to a generic template, blogs are in, homepages are out. Now I see that same damn Kubrick Wordpress theme every single day. Or worse, I don’t see any themes at all, I just consume feeds from within an RSS reader. I mean, I love the fact that I can follow a hundred different websites every day using an RSS reader, but there’s also something immediate missing in that experience.
It’s a tough balance to strike. Not everyone is a designer. Ben Hammersley’s blog nicely deviates from the blog format, where the design shifts about to reference the content of each post. But by and large, there’s not much that’s new and exciting happening. I mocked up the new design of this site just a couple of weeks ago, and I’m getting bored of it already; list of posts on the left, sidebar on the right, bleuch. This is all a bit formal for our personal playgrounds, isn’t it?
So here’s the new plan for this blog.
The homepage will use the two-column template I’ve already mocked up. But from now on, each individual page on it will be different in some small way. Nothing major, just a little something to say that I thought about it. I think I’ve figured out a way to do that without killing Wordpress. I don’t post much anyway, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble to knock together something visual once or twice a week. If it takes longer, that’s ok, too. It’s the slow movement applied to blogging. Maybe.
If you read this blog in an RSS reader everything should be pretty much the same as before, but if you feel like looking at something handmade, click through to the individual entries from time to time.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Electroplankton
By now I have little doubt that the Nintendo DS is a work of interactive design genius, and that Nintendo’s brave new plan is working and is brilliant. In our little household, Animal Crossing has even managed to win over a videogame luddite. It seems that the DS just invites people to pick it up and start prodding and pushing (and shouting and blowing and scratching) at it to see what it will do.
Latest is Electroplankton (flash site), a little explorative sound and music thing. You play with lots of little microscopic particles swimming about in petri dish by poking at them with your stylus, and they make sounds. That’s it. Its loads of fun. It’s not a game in the sense of something to be beaten or overcome, but an object play with, to explore and just enjoy.
The game is designed by Toshio Iwai (whose talk at Futuresonic this year I just missed, which I really regret now). I love the inlay card that comes with the game, which explains how he came up with the idea:
Just for fun, here are some MP3s I recorded while playing with Electroplankton: Luminaria, Lumiloop, Hanenbow, Marinesnow. And a rare bonus track from my Electroplankton avant-garde period: all of them at the same time.
Computers set to destroy the earth
Well, not quite, but if Nick Carr can come over all sensationalist then so can I. Nick takes the fine art of guesstimation to dizzy new heights in looking at the potential environmental impact of Second Life:
So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals:
(4,000 x 250 x 24) + (12,500 x 120 x 24) = 60,000,000 watt-hours or 60,000 kilowatt-hours
Per capita, that’s:
60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh
Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they’re in the same ballpark.
Never mind that his figures are almost certainly crazy wrong (SL servers aren’t just dedicated to individual avatars, avatars owners PCs could be turned on anyway, and wrong number of servers according to the comments); its great that people are thinking about this type of thing more and more. We’re so used to thinking of power consumption as being a direct result of our immediate actions (driving, throwing things away, etc.) that its easy to think of the impact of computing as the running of the box on your desk. But online activites incur an embodied cost of running servers too. Or as Nick rightly says:
… avatars aren’t quite as intangible as they seem. They don’t have bodies, but they do leave footprints.
Previously on thoughtwax: Linutop: less is more, The environmental impact of thin client systems.
Emulating the past. Or, nostaligia isn't what it used to be
For a young man, I seem to have an odd preoccupation with nostalgia. Like lots of other people who are thinking about the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii and what its all about, I’ve been wondering about videogames and what type of fun they are, and thinking about the fun I used to have playing them in the relatively untroubled days of my youth.
The games I enjoyed more than any other I’ve ever played in my life were the early 1990s LucasArts adventure games. You walked around and talked to characters and solved little puzzles. They were clever and funny and bags of fun. They’ve stopped making them now though. And in an odd inverse-obsolescence kind of way, you can’t run these old games on your computer any more because their programmers had to allocate memory slots manually in order to improve performance, whereas modern machines manage memory dynamically. Here comes the nostalgia, but I think there’s a certain romanticism in that; each little byte hand-delivered to the computer. Animations drawn pixel by pixel, not rendered by an engine. Today’s processors are too powerful to even support this old way, and instead do their work by brute force.
You can run old games using an emulator, though, tricking the game into thinking its on an old 386. ScummVM lets you run the LucasArts adventure games on your shiny new laptop. I installed it a couple of nights ago and have been having lots of fun since. Here’s Monkey Island 2 running on my Macbook Pro:
(As an aside, I also came across ScummVM for Nintendo DS. It seems to me that this is what the DS was made for. I would gleefully pay the price of a new game to legitimately and easily play Day of the Tentacle on a Nintendo DS, if they were to re-release it on a cartridge. Please make it so, rights-owning people.)
Back to the Wii. Of course, it’s going to be pretty lo-fi in comparison to Microsoft and Sony’s offernings. It’s also going to have an online store that allows you to download and play old Nintendo console games for a few euro, which is a fantastic and crazy selling point, when you think about it. You pay the price of a coffee for a decades-old game that you then play on your expensive, brand new next-gen console. There’s got to be an -ism to describe that. But if the thought of it appeals to you or someone else (it does to me), maybe it represents something.
Granted, that something could be kind of pathetic, namely that our personal culture and memories and emotional triggers are based on dumb, corporate entertainment, packaged experiences. But I don’t think it’s that big a deal.
In a way, it shows a certain sense of maturity in videogames, an ability to move beyond the bigger, faster, stronger approach. I’m not sure what progress is, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t linear. These very same things happen at different stages in fashion and in literature, and in film and software and music and art and architecture and living and pretty much any other form of culture I can think of. I think it means that the medium is breathing.
New camera
The hand-wringing is over. I’ve taken the plunge and spent what is still a ridiculously large amount of money on a discretionary item by getting a Nikon D80 digital SLR. Despite the fact that some of my favourite amateur photographers use a Canon EOS camera, I decided to go for the Nikon based on personal recommendations and the fact that I’m a sucker for the rich browns it seems capable of capturing. Good times ahead, although I fear this purchase may be a gateway drug to also finally spending money on a Flickr pro account.
I don’t think I’ll ever leave film behind though. Despite my lousy conversion rate of about five decent photos for every roll shot, there’s something about film that digital will never match. Not only in the texture of the image produced, but in the anticipation of development, the joy of the happy accident (a common occurrence in my light-leaky old Canon AE-1), and the sense of wonder at the precise mechanical ingenuity that went into the manufacturing of my beautiful, heavy old camera, long before I was even born.
Anyway, despite the fact that the clocks went back last weekend and all our lovely summer light is gone, there should be more photos around here soon.
Linutop: less is more
I’m excited by this; the Linutop will be a small desktop computer with just enough specs to run Firefox and some open source office apps comfortably, and no hard disk.
Details are pretty sketchy on their website, but I assume that it will run a simplified version of an existing Linux distro that just boots into Firefox. Price is also undisclosed, but my guess is that this will come in somewhere around $150. The cheapest Mac Mini costs four times more than that. We’ll see.
Of course, people aren’t going to want to go without a hard disk, but if you’re the type of person who uses their computer for email and doing The Google, it looks good to me. If anything, it’s probably a little ahead of the broadband and web apps curves. We should get some of these into Irish schools.
I’m more interested in this from an environmental point of view, though. If you’re reading this on a desktop computer, chances are the beast humming away under your desk right now is gobbling up an order of magnitude of electricity more than it actually needs to support your actual activities. There is a massively long tail of home users that are spending way too much money and energy on their computers, and the long tail of power can add up to big numbers.
(For more, there’s a poor quality 30 minute introduction to the Linutop on Google Video. I wrote more speculatively about the environmental impact of thin client systems earlier in the year.)
Slovakia by bus
I went to Vienna for the long weekend with Paula and Margarida. We flew into Bratislava (how very Ryanair to drop you in the next country and expect you to bus it from there). The journey through Slovakia was very odd; dull concrete communist hangover highrises on one side, tall forests on the other. Reprocessing plants and billboards on the horizon. Then onto a wide raised motorway, curving right over miles of corn fields before arriving at the border checkpoint, right in the middle of a massive wind farm. A couple of miles into Austria and the landscape couldn’t be more different; winding roads through small hamlet towns lined by squat homes. Apparrently the marked difference was planned by the Austrians to encourage commuting city workers to live on their more expensive side of the border.
"It’s actually no trouble to walk around"
As covered here, a computer scientist has claimed that Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon were in fact grammatically correct. The recording sounds like he said “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, but apparently failed to pick up an “a” before “man”.
It’s a pity; I kind of like the idea of all those years of careful engineering and planning that it took to get there, everyone holding their breath, all to culminate in that first sentence being a fluff.
Here’s what was said next:
04 13 24 48 CDR (TRANQ) And the - the surface is fine and powdery. I can - I can pick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.
04 13 25 30 CC Neil, this is Houston. We’re copying.
04 13 25 45 CDR (EVA) There seems to be no difficulty in moving around as we suspected. It’s even perhaps easier than the simulations at one sixth g that we performed in the various simulations on the ground. It’s actually no trouble to walk around. Okay. The descent engine did not leave a crater of any size. It has about 1 foot clearance on the ground. We’re essentially on a very level place here. I can see some evidence of rays emanating from the descent engine, but a very insignificant amount.
Sunday afternoon odds and ends
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Must try to get back into the swing of things. To get going, a collection of thoughts and links:
Apple and Greenpeace have contrasting takes on the former’s environmental impact. I’m interested in exploring the environmental impact of computing, but its difficult to find reliable statistics — just look at those first two links. How significant is computing’s impact? Does paying attention to this type of thing really matter in in relation to higher impact industries like air travel? And why are we waiting for a software company to drive change in this area?
It’s conference season. I went to Barcamp and Blogging the Election. Thanks to the organisers of both.
New (to me) music: The Books’ Lost and Safe, The Clogs Stick Music. Both great.
Some links: David Byrne on Sufjan, CR Blog on the aesthetics of MySpace, Anne Galloway on Pulse Laser, History of the Button on… buttons.
We’ve moved house. All of the observations that get me every time I have moved before apply again this time. Despite my ongoing attempts to pare down my material possessions, I still have to cart half a room worth of stuff around behind me. I’ve realised that (apart from their practical uses), a lot of this stuff serves as an anchor; a day after moving into a strange new building and already spreading our familiar items around the place starts to make it feel like home.
Irish broadband service is still painfully poor, so I’ll be online less often for the next few weeks that it will take to get connected in the new place. It’s pretty much accepted here that Eircom did their best so slow the rollout of broadband in order to hang on to their phone line customers for another couple of years. This week they made a decent stab at shutting down their main competition.
Can people recommend nice cafés or quiet pubs with free wifi in Dublin? I’ll map them if I get enough for it to be useful.
When Dublin developers roll, they roll big
In more Dublin urban development news, this is quite odd: Dublin Coastal Development, “a new vision for Dublin”. I must embarrassingly admit that I was a couple of minutes into the video before the penny dropped.
It’s very slickly produced, sporting just the right amount of cheesiness. It also touches enough contemporary points to be almost believeable; Dublin’s unstoppable urban sprawl and tremendously stupid developments given the green light thanks to planning corruption have resulted in worse travesties than this.
(On a meta note, that’s the first time I’ve embedded a YouTube in my site, and I found myself wondering if I wanted to, you know, take my blog in that direction stylistically. Until I caught myself. Does anyone else have these delusions of grandeur about their blog without even realising it?)
I'll send you a link
Back from a weekend of proudly introducing some colleagues to the joys of the west of Ireland. At one stage, I noticed that many conversations I have these days about cultural stuff seem to end with me saying, “I’ll send you a link”. As in, have you seen the trailer for the new Michel Gondry film? Oh, it looks good, I’ll send you a link.
Here are the links that I promised to send over the weekend (that I can remember, there may be more):
Andy Goldsworthy videos on YouTube McSweeney’s The Onion on Wikipedia Articles about Wikipedia’s faults and it’s contributor breakdown
A result, I suppose, of spending more time online and less time on traditional media, a habit whose progress continues unabated. At least now I can just point them to this blog post instead.