I’ve a lot of love for LEGO, and so when I saw Swedish programmer Hans Andersson‘s Time Twister clock I just knew I’d have to share it. His creation is noisy, slow and indeed the epitome of chunkiness, and yet it’s a beautiful creation.
For me, the raw simplicity of Andersson’s design is really attractive and the way in which his creation goes about slowly-revealing each of it’s digits is almost hypnotic. When I watched the video above, showing his design in motion, I was shocked at how much anticipation and excitement I felt just simply watching the time being revealed.
Hans has also built some other amazing creation including two puzzle-solving robots which are pretty incredible. One can solve sudokus and an other one can solve a rubik’s cube. Both are well worth checking out.
I feel I should preface this post with, “I hate gift guides.” When a blog or website does a gift guide, most of the time they’re sponsored, and if they’re not, the person writing them is usually trying to get something free for writing it. In my opinion the gift guide has become the infomercial of our time, a way of saying that you don’t know how to buy gifts for the people you know best, so here’s a bucket of items to consume.
That said, I love what The Daily has done with their Gift & Gadget Guide app. To be honest, I didn’t spend a lot of time really looking through the app, though it seemed well put together and pretty fun to flick around on the iPad. What I enjoyed the most though were the awesome illustrations by Matthew Lyons, who helped bring across the theme of the guide, which was retro futurism. He’s a fantastic illustrator and it’s always great to see him doing work, especially on something special like this. The app is free, so for those of you with iPads I suggest giving it a spin, it’s a fun experience all around.
I had several people criticize my recent post about Steve Jobs, my thoughts on how he effected my life. I deleted them all, because soem of them were nasty or otherwise just negative in general and have no place on this blog. These comments though came to mind as I watched the video above, a recording of the keynote Steve Jobs gave from the Apple World Wide Developer Conference back in 1997. I hadn’t ever seen this before, but I was riveted as if it were being broadcast today.
To give a little backstory, Steve Jobs had been previously kicked out of Apple, that is until 1996 the company he started in the interim, NeXT, was purchased by Apple of nearly $500 million and Jobs was brought back into the company. At the time of the taping of this video his position was fuzzy at best, although he was still extremely opinionated. The video sounds like it wouldn’t be that interesting, it’s essentially him answering people’s questions for a solid hour, giving his opinion on the state of Apple and the future of the company and technology in general… which is exactly why I’m posting it.
To show you what I mean, here’s my favorite line from the video, as well as the most prescient one. I’ve paraphrased it slightly for clarity.
To me, what I want is this little thing I carry around with me, it’s got a keyboard on it – to do email you need a keyboard, until you perfect speech recognition, you don’t sit there and write stuff, you need a keyboard. And, you need to be connected to the net, so if someone would just make a little thing, where you’re connected to the net all the time… my god I’d love to buy one.
In 1997, he was describing the iPhone. Nearly 10 years later, he released the iPhone. I’m not sure how many people, technologists or otherwise, have made such a prediction and actually followed through with it.
It’s interesting that he mentions speech recognition, especially in regards to the recently announced Siri. You can read John Gruber’s review of Siri which gives a good look at how it works and what you can expect from it. To me it seems that speech recognition is the next step in Apple’s course. Earlier tonight I tried out the the existing voice commands on my iPhone 4, and the results, as they’ve always been, were miserable. I asked my phone to “play Radiohead” and it started to call a random contact from my address book. This has always been my experience with the voice commands, they’ve never worked. There are other phones that have voice recognition voice commands built in, though I doubt that any of them will match the quality and precision of Siri, and that’s where Apple will excel, because they do things better.
It’ll be interesting to see the mobile computing market (let’s stop calling them phones) in the next couple of years. Apple has made it clear that Siri is in beta, which means that it’s not perfect, and it’s certainly has room for improvement. Like the original iPhone, it lacks a certain polish and refinement, but it will surely be leaps and bounds ahead of what others have to offer. In the coming years the refinement will be there, and with it a slew of competitors trying to meet that seem quality, though trying to play catch up, just like what’s happened with the iPad. Pundits and analysts will, as usual, try to analyze what makes Apple work, and espouse their opinions on how things Apple should do to become “truly successful” and end up giving more awful advice.
The thing is, I think Steve Jobs has had a course charted for Apple for longer than any of us can possibly imagine, and that we’re all still in for a very long, exciting journey.
I like to dream about the future a lot, about what our technology will look like and how we’ll integrate with it. In particular I dream about the day that we start growing electronics into our bodies, the day we start becoming cybernetic. It’s funny because we’ve already laid out the future in popular media, be it films or video games, these ideas and concepts have already been laid out. But when will we start to see the gap between electronic and biologic start to narrow? One of my favorite things to talk about (especially over good food and drinks with friends) is the limited capabilities of human sight. The human eye is one of the most complex organs, the science behind which is certainly beyond me. But what if we were able to enhance our vision, or replace it with something altogether? Here’s the part where you start thinking big and let go of pre-conceived notions.
Day in day out we carry around the world in our pockets. Our phones are no longer phones, they’re data centers with which we communicate with our friends and family around the world. but carrying around these clunky, physical objects constantly seems silly, almost archaic to me. What if this already fantastic technology was embedded inside of us?
Our brain is an organic computer, surrounded by a skull which is essentially a case to protect it. Synapses in our brain fire electric pulses to tell our body what to do, which is exactly what an electronic circuit does. In video games, you have something called a HUD, or a heads up display. The HUD relays information to you in a simplified manner, showing you at a glance necessary information. Let’s say we combine all of these ideas, the brain, the computer and a heads up display into one, you’d have the most personal computer ever.
The way I imagine it is your iPhone and your web browser now living like a layer in your vision. You’d be able to see things like your email, Twitter, the weather, directions, text messages, Wikipedia, recipes… all of these things that we rely upon our iPhones and laptops for. As fast as you can think of something there’s the answer, right in front of your face. I’m sure many of you think this is the scariest thing that could ever happen, but is it that different from how we are now? I know I’ve got my nose in my computer or on my iPhone most of the time anyhow.
There’s also the idea of having cameras in your retinas, so anything you see, you could document. Your eyes could catch and record beautiful or tragic moments and then share them to the world instantly. That alone is a pretty big idea, with such far reaching implications it’s hard to quantify it in such a small sentence, but I’m trying to hit the bullet points on this. The other idea is that your eyes could identify people and objects, pulling up information like the persons name (and the name of their partner, which you’ve probably forgotten) or checking instantly to see if that TV you’re shopping for is cheaper online somewhere.
Lastly, and most importantly, if all of this sounds entirely overwhelming, well it is. But like all good things, you’d be able to customize your experience, so you have the control. Plus there would be something like a silent mode, which turns everything off when you want. We have this level of control on the objects we own now, so there’s no reason to think that would change with new technology. I think I’m going to explore some of these ideas a little bit more in-depth here on the blog, but I’m happy that I got some of these out. They’re certainly not new, I didn’t come up with half off these things, but the future excites me more than anything else.
Yesterday, it was discovered that Samsung, in an effort to not get sued by Apple, is attempting to prove a point that Stanley Kubrick created the original form of the iPad when he made 2001: A Space Odyssey. As you can see in the images above, there’s clearly some kind of electric tablet sitting there, and Samsung claims that “two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers.” It’s that last part that I don’t agree with.
Is that really a personal tablet computer? Or is it a personal television? As you can see there are 10 buttons on the bottom of the tablet, and what they do, we can only imagine. The scene which this was featured lasts only two minutes, and they never actually touch or interact with the devices in the scene. Looking up a timeline of the personal computer, in 1968, the same year 2001 was released, Hewlett Packard coined the phrase “personal computer”.
An advertisement in Science magazine by Hewlett-Packard introduces first programmable scientific desktop calculator, which Hewlett-Packard calls “the new Hewlett-Packard 911A personal computer”. (This is claimed as coining the term “personal computer”.)
In another example, you can see the Nova by Data General, which is basically a giant filing cabinet with a tiny monitor on top. So to say that the image is a personal computer seems just a tiny bit far fetched. What’s also funny to me is that you can clearly see a tiny IBM logo on the bottom right of the device. Interestingly enough, IBM launched the first laptop called the IBM 5100, in September of 1975, 7 years after the release of 2001.
Now, I’m not saying there isn’t similarities. Perhaps Kubrick did envision this as a personal computer, and perhaps IBM or a prop guy built something close to his idea? But is there any solid proof that says that’s what this was? Either way, I found the history lesson of personal computers rather interesting. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in the last 40 years. Imagine the computers we’ll be using 40 years from now.
One of my favorite things about technology’s advancements is that so many things are “instant.” You can instantly watch movies, you can instantly download applications, you can instantly buy music, and you can instantly buy games. The days of going to the store to buy ways to entertain yourself at home are nearly extinct. Moreover, with everything being so at your fingertips, people are really taking advantage of this and getting their passion projects produced for the small screen audience.
My favorite manifestation of this is in video games. A lot of crazy games come through the instant market and, while some are super silly, others are amazing. For Xbox 360, we’ve had the pop culture filled girl and gay guy geared Ms. Splosion Man as well as Sim Earth meets Katamari Damacy meets The Gods Must Be Crazy spawn From Dust. However, this weekend I discovered a newly released game that eclipsed every online only game I have every downloaded: Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.
First off, it is stylistically beautiful. It has great, brooding orchestrated music playing over this elaborate sci-fi world that looks like Limbo-meets-Scratch-Magic. The game plays with darkness (dark reds, dark blues, dark greens, black) complimented with bright, high contrast colors, allowing for moments where this color palette is completely broken in nearly blinding white, light blues, and cool yellows. The game is a total visual treat as you traipse through this dark and–at points–scary planet.
Moreover, the game play is ridiculously fun and surprisingly challenging. It also retains a simplicity that other games nowadays do not have. While Limbo was understated and a beautiful Ouroboros, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet challenges you through puzzles, fights, and even timed trials…and everything is done visually. Moments of confusion are not clarified via title cards but rather images that, basically, show an image and your ship exploding, obviously alluding to the item in the image is bad for you. Details like this make the game such a treat.
I downloaded this game this past Saturday at 6PM and played it until 3AM, where I had to stop at the final boss because I was so tired. The game is fairly quick, but only if you let it be. It lends itself well to replaying and has a lot of little hidden items you can find that really make you want to explore the entire map of the game. It also has a really, really, really challenging and somewhat frightening and stressful multiplayer game that involves your little spaceship toting a lantern across the evil planet while being pursued by a Cthulu look alike.
