Becoming a designer
Boy, it’s been a while. An oxymoronic combination of being lazy and busy, I guess. Anyway, for this post I wanted to talk about design. It’s a topic that comes up a More »
Support for Windows 7 ends today
It is a sad day, as Microsoft is officially ending updates and security patches for Windows 7, the popular OS still being used by a large majority of PCs. Windows 7’s popularity More »
Returning Home: World of Warcraft Classic Comes Online
On August 26th, fans of the original World of Warcraft (henceforth referred to as WoW), and those who are just curious to see what all the hubbub is about, were finally able More »
The Lawnmower Man, and Vintage CGI
Inspired by a couple of Reddit forums to which I am subscribed, VintagePixelArt and VintageCGI, and being a fan of all things historical as it pertains to technology, I uploaded to the More »
Jony Ive leaves Apple
As someone who teaches extensively about design as it intersects with technology, and is also a computer and technology historian, I am conflicted about Jonathan (Jony) Ive leaving Apple. Mainly because he’s More »
Alvin Toffler passes away at 87
Alvin Toffler got it right. It was all the way back in 1970 when he published Future Shock, a book that predicted, with surprising yet not complete accuracy, the impact of technology on our future selves. From throwaway consumerism which was a spot-on prediction, to Rapture-esque underwater cities which was not so accurate, his vision of the impact of technology has mostly come true. FutureShock became a trilogy with two more books; The Third Wave and PowerShift.
He was also the first to coin the term ‘Information Overload,’ a term we use to this day, and one I use frequently in my classes, which refers to our inability to take in and process the overwhelming amount of information that continues to be created even today. The title of the book itself is a reference to what would become an inability for us to keep up with the fast pace of the future. He predicted that the family as a cohesive unit would continue to be tested as the busy nature of life and all that would go along with it would wedge itself between those familiar bonds.
He correctly foresaw the development of a new knowledge economy and information age, in which the ability to learn and adapt would become more important than the ability to maintain a trade skill, which we see in the creation of job titles such as ‘Knowledge Worker’ (itself a term introduced in 1966 by Peter Drucker). In his eyes, it would be the inability to adjust that would become the illiteracy of the new millennium.
Indeed, Alvin Toffler predicted technological development would completely reshape the fabric and structure of society, and we now know that he was right.
A true forward thinker.
Public service announcement
Reading an article on Destructoid of all places, I was made aware of a bizarre situation involving video cards, and thought I would pass it along here.
NVidia recently released a powerhouse graphics card known as the GTX 1080. Before this card, their flagship was the Titan, a very powerful card that ran about $1000. The new 1080 is significantly faster, quieter, and most importantly, much cheaper at around $699. That’s still a lot, I know, but it’s a beast of a card. I have one in my office machine, which is beyond overkill. I can run Word documents So fast!
A post from the new phone
Just a couple of posts ago I wrote about how I was feeling rather melancholy over having finally given up my beloved Windows phone, which I have used for many years and did so with pride. It had served me well, and I actually am still using it for some of its offline functions, but I broke down and finally jumped ship to the Android-powered Galaxy Note 5.
Why am I telling you this if I already told you a couple of posts ago? Along with the vastly improved selection of apps (confession: I’ve been playing Pinball Arcade – almost perfect recreations of actual pinball machines. Don’t miss out!), I discovered a WordPress app that lets me post from my phone. I can’t imagine I’ll be doing that a lot, but I figured I may as well give it a try. Incidentally, those links should link to the Google Play store which was a test of this platform and my ability to use it, but depending on how you’re reading this they may not work. So be forewarned!
A major change for the site
As you can likely tell from the image header, and as this site continues to expand, I have switched the comment system over to the venerable Disqus platform. While I was more than happy with the stock commenting method provided by WordPress, I also was never completely comfortable with people having to login via social media in which they might not be comfortable leaving a comment, or logging in anonymously, in which *I* wouldn’t be comfortable with them leaving a comment.
I have to admit though, WordPress has so far caught 100% of the spam that has been levied against this site, and I can’t argue with those results. I have seen spam get through on many, many sites that use Disqus, and so everything here today is done with the understanding that if Disqus can’t handle the inevitable comment spam that will arrive, or in some other way becomes odious, I may have to switch back to the old way of doing things.
Today I am sad (over a phone)
It finally happened, and how bittersweet it was. After having been a champion for Windows phone and the potential it had, and as a rebuke to the cult of Mac and unquestioning expansion of Android, it was finally time to say goodbye and put my beloved Nokia Lumia (that’s right – it’s an original Nokia phone from before the Microsoft buyout) out to pasture and become an Android myself. Hello Galaxy Note 5.
The Lumia still worked, sort of, but it was starting to experience freeze-ups in both the hard buttons and the screen. Additionally, the quality of the images taken with its camera, once ranked as the best phone camera in existence as you can see with the picture of my parent’s back yard below, were not as high quality as they once were, and let’s face it – although I’m not an app junkie, the app selection is anemic at best.
Taken with Nokia Lumia
A huge mistake, and disaster averted
Other than not being a woman, I know just how that lady feels. Today was a bad day, and her expression was my exact expression earlier. You’ll notice over to the right, on the twitter feed, the words “OR DON’T.” That was the header image to a post I had written about two separate attacks this month that targeted remote access software. One attack on June 1st compromised TeamViewer, a program I use myself, and the second, more recent attack targeted GoToMyPC, hence the OR DON’T. Get it? Anyway, both were based on password reuse, so change your passwords if you’re affected. Or even if you’re not.
However after I posted it, I noticed that the LightBox functionality was not working on recent posts. LightBox is the function that causes an image to expand when you click on it while darkening the background. It’s only not working on recent posts, for older posts it works fine. I didn’t know why, and started to investigate.
New ransomware method to worry about
(Header image credit: makeuseof.com)
Over on security blog Bleeping Computer, there is a post about a new type of ransomware that presents a triple threat. Known as RAA, what makes this one different is that instead of using an .exe attached to an email which would pop up an alert when a user tried to run it, this one is written entirely in JavaScript, a language often used to encode and provide functionality for web pages, and if a user runs something written in JS it likely would not pop up any alerts, and the damage would be done before you knew it.
Let’s listen to some (obscure) game music!
(Crossposted from theexperiencebar.com)
This isn’t an article about JRPG soundtracks being performed by symphonies or the great song selection in Grand Theft Auto or the Fallout series, or Song of the Dragonborn, or the track lists for Guitar Hero/Rock Band/other random plastic-instrument game. Those already get a lot of attention.
Here, I wanted to focus on the really obscure songs that I think add immeasurably to a game yet never got the recognition they deserved. I have a couple that were written specifically for games that stand on their own as eminently listenable songs in their own right, and a couple that so complimented their game that the entire game would have been lesser without them.
And I’ll even give you a surprise at the end.
There aren’t that many that spring to mind, so luckily this will be short and not one of those absurd “100 best video game songs of all time” lists.
Off we go!
This is why we can’t have nice things
As you can see in my previous post, I have a new PC in the office. This involves logging back in to all my accounts and setting things up just the way I like them, which can take a significant amount of time if you happen to be particular about it, which I am.
One of the things I did was copy my music library over to the second hard drive so i can have access to it here. I don’t use it all that much, I tend to rely on YouTube more often (although I’m not sure why when I have local copies), but that’s how it is.
Anyway, I decided to fire up Groove, a service I have never used before as that is what Windows 10 wanted my music player to be, and as I was scrolling through my list I found the late, great John Denver’s hit “Country Roads, Take Me Home.”
That sounded good, so I fired it up. Except I couldn’t play the song, and Bam! I was hit in the face with why I don’t like digital distribution and have gone so far as to set up my own personal Netflix. To explain what happened, have a look at this picture:
This is so very strange
I recently built a new PC, and decided I wanted some flash to go along with it. I put in a motherboard and fans that have some LED elements, and kept the inside to a generally red theme. The nice thing is, the fans are RGB so I can switch them to any color I want, or even have them cycle through colors. No functional application, but nifty to look at.
I’ll be doing a video walkthrough of it soon, but here’s a picture to hold you over until then. And yes, that’s a reference GeForce 1080. It’s by Zotac, a brand I’ve never dealt with before, but it seems to be doing fine so far. Of course, it’s only an office machine.
The new PC
