Ged Carroll

Category: technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.

One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.

My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.

I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.

My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.

Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.

That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.

  • Quantum computing & other things this week

    Quantum computing explained for different skill levels. The explanations of quantum computing are amazing. The simplicity of the quantum computing explanations should be must watch content.

    A video on Sony‘s old school copy protection for the original PlayStation. It is the height of ingenuity. I had a couple of CDs with black faces like a PlayStation disc. They were a Sisters of Mercy Japanese import disc and a limited edition disc by Yello that I picked up secondhand. I have got no idea where they are now.

    The black coating was a ruse from a copy protection point of view; except that it may have concealed the real copy protection system (if you had a microscope good enough to see it). The technology is down to the way wavy data lines were put down on the PlayStation disks rather than a copy management style encryption.

    An amazing video of Hong Kong’s tram system. Get Lost in Hong Kong on a 3-Minute Trolley Adventure

    My friend Stephen is travelling at the moment and passed through Bozeman, Montana. I tried to explain who Mystery Ranch and Dana Gleason was, and how they came to make the best backpacks in the world. But in the end, I sent this link to him as it explains it all so much better: Interview with Mystery Ranch Founder Dana Gleason – Dana Design Founder Returns to Outdoor Industry | The Field

    Sailor Moon’s Moonlight Densetsu as played on traditional Japanese instruments | Sora News 24 – and yes it is as good as it sounds. The mix of modern and older Japanese culture is fascinating.

  • German nuclear plant + more things

    German nuclear plant infected with computer viruses, operator says | Reuters – So Sarbannes Oxley meant that a lot of corporates disabled USB ports. Technology company Huawei used to have ‘dirty machines’ and clean machines. Neither of which were connected by a network. The same was true in many agencies where I worked. Yet a German nuclear plant allows easy access via USB. Secondly, why do the USB chargers on airplane cockpits have any intelligence at all that would store a virus and allow it propagate? I would be very paranoid about using any USB chargers in coffee shops or an aircraft seat moving forwards. This is the problem when everything from light bulbs and doorbells now contain a Linux server. More security related content here.

    Ogilvy’s rebrand reveals an ad industry in confusion | Thomas Barta – an inhouse marketers perspective on things. If you substituted the word advertising for PR in this as a discipline it could be an analysis of all agencies.

    iPhone maker Foxconn is churning out “Foxbots” to replace its human workers — Quartz – I am not convinced that they will be that successful. This is partly down to some of the manual dexterity required being similar to a watchmaker in some parts of the assembly. And that is down to Apple driving an industry race to squeeze phones into tighter factors for the guts. The process is repeatable, but hard to deliver. Back in the day Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers used to use pick-and-place machines for a lot of consumer electronics. It is why Japan went more towards micro-chips faster than players like Philips. Japan did a lot of component standardisation in terms of sizing and connectivity to the board. The boards were relatively simply designed and gave a bit of latitude to allow for a lack of precision from the machines. That meant slightly larger goods. More expensive devices like Sony’s Walkman  Pro, were handmade because they crammed so much technology inside them .

    [Publish] Facebook Profiles can no longer be connected to Buffer Publish – Buffer FAQ – well that’s a bit of a bummer. But you can still publish content via more expensive systems like Percolate. Is this Facebook trying to discourage organic content from anyone but brands (that spend advertising money?)

  • Cyberpunk 2077 & other things

    E3 largely past me by, except for this trailer for forthcoming game Cyberpunk 2077.  Loving the William Gibson’s sprawl trilogy era meets synth-wave vibe to Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk 2077 is being developed by the same studio that adapted The Witcher books to computer games.

    This is a few years old, but Blu e-cigarettes put together a good documentary seven-episode series on dance music and DJ culture that is well worth watching

    Think influencers can be filled with entitlement, who inflate their follower numbers and leech off marketing budgets and want an alternative? You wouldn’t be alone. Virtual personalities have been a thing for a few years in Japan thanks to  Yamaha’s Vocaloid software; you have a purely artificial ‘idol’ (popstar) who appears as a hologram. Virtual YouTube personalities have followed and it was only a matter of time for one of them to start speaking in English to increase their reach.

    I’ll let Sakura Fujima introduce herself. And here’s the kind of content we can look forward to expecting from her

    I’m a big fan of Carhartt and love this advert

    MTV are looking to get hold of some sweet streaming production money by bring back golden oldies including Daria. Expect more dry witticisms and the same monotone delivery that was very gen-X zeitgeist. This time Daria is becoming more woke, by blowing off her bestie Jane and focusing on her black friend Jodie instead.

    While its not likely to affect your post club kebab shop any time soon big food has been showing some interest in automation (like McDonald’s self-service ordering and apps). There will obviously be a trade-off between the likely returns on capital expenditure versus the ready availablility of cheap flexible labour. The number of available products for sale and their relative complexity is another consideration. This Bay Area installation is taking things to their logical conclusion.

    creator burger robot serves this gourmet diner classic for 6 dollars from designboom on Vimeo.

  • Batteries + more things

    How Batteries Went From Primitive Power to Global Domination – Bloomberg – but has the technology moved on at a pace to really justify this upsurge? The chemistry in lithium ion batteries was developed back in the 1970s and commercialised by Sony and Asahi Kansei, with the first batteries appearing in 1991.

    Beans – pretty sure that this isn’t an ad, but nicely played. It looks and feels more like a creative calling card that are usually sent to agencies. In this case the video effects house that created this animation. You have a mix of computer animation, green screen backdrop for the moon and . More related content here.

    Fifa threatens action against BeoutQ for infringement of broadcast rights | The Drum – this is interesting. beoutQ is a pirate pay television broadcaster serving Saudi Arabia. Established in 2017, the service primarily simulcasts the programming of Qatar-based broadcaster beIN Sports, with beoutQ on-air logos overlaid over the original ones. beoutQ has similarly taken content from other broadcasters, and its set-top boxes also contain access to various IPTV services carrying other forms of live channels and entertainment content. The service launched shortly after beIN was forced to stop selling its services in Saudi Arabia, due to the then-ongoing diplomatic crisis between Qatar and other Arab countries over alleged government support of terrorist groups. beoutQ set-top boxes and subscriptions have since become widely available in Saudi Arabia. The owners of beoutQ aren’t known. It is suspected that they may have a connection to the Saudi government as it was considered to be a way of attacking Qatar-owned media that come under the gulf states stand off with Qatar.

    Opinion | Hey Boss, You Don’t Want Your Employees to Meditate – The New York Times – nails it. Why mindfulness and meditation isn’t great for a lot of businesses.  (paywall)

  • Checkout free retail + more things

    Exclusive: Microsoft takes aim at Amazon with push for checkout free retail | Reuters – I hope that checkout free retail works better than self service checkouts. Also will checkout free retail work well in low trust societies? More related content here.

    The Ruggedmen and the End of Free & Easy – but out of the Ashes is born something new

    Are Apple AirPods Any Good? – The Atlantic – interesting observation on the changes on consumer behaviour using AirPods

    Why the Future of Machine Learning is Tiny | Pete Warden’s blog – and not AI – the early 1990s use of fuzzy logic is a better analogue

    Upscaling of Sneaker Brands Threatens Luxury Fashion | Jing Daily – Gildo Zegna, CEO of Italian luxury fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna, attributed the rising price of sportswear sneakers to their rise in emotional value, “If there is one product today that is impulse driven and creates emotions among consumers, it is the sneaker (…) you are talking about people spending $100 to $700 on a single pair.”

    Publicis publicity win was bigger than the bot | Special: Cannes Lions – Ad Age – Publicis campaigns won’t be absent from Cannes after all, because clients and partners stepped up to pay for the entry cost for a few hundred campaigns

    Volkswagen tests quantum computing in battery research | eeNews Power – chemistry makes sense as it works on low qubit machines. Involvement with Google and D-Wave is a blow to IBM

    Monzo’s big smart bank move links your money to Alexa, Twitter and pretty much anything else | WIRED UK – I find this quite scary

    Customer Experience Trends In China, 2018 | Forrester Research – Today, China has become so innovative that businesses in mature Western markets are taking note. The country’s tech giants are blurring the boundaries between digital and physical and expanding the reach of their platform businesses with new value propositions

    Microsoft acquires a whole bunch of game studios | TechCrunch – interesting how Microsoft is going about this. Steam is looking like the future of gaming

    About the Finder… | Ars Technica – the finder is a bug bear since I started as a Mac user and the lack of positive change in Mojave is no different