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There are 188 posts filed in tech (this is page 18 of 19).

[Book Review] Daemon

Daniel Suarez's Daemon

I picked up the book Daemon, by Daniel Suarez a few months ago and read it within a few days. Since then I’ve been thinking about writing a book review for it. It’s an interesting book and requires a deep analysis of the topics that Daniel touched in the book. Suarez used his in-depth knowledge of the world of IT and his impressive imagination to build a world where bots, automated software running wild on computers, control not just the usual stuff – bank transactions, toll booth cameras, and Google’s search algorithms, but also complete corporations and the fate of millions of people. This world has mad men like Sobol, a legendary game designer who creates a bot to control everything in the new world and I mean, everything. From sourcing professional killers from seedy chatrooms and creating new weaponry part by part from the hands of young 3D printer owners looking for some extra cash, the software controls the fate of many corporations and important people around the world, destroying whoever stands a chance against it. It even does the good task of killing major spam creators, just to be able to have a better control of the Internet.

The book is well written. Suarez manages to grasp your attention for a long time, even if you’re an Internet junkie with the attention span of a goldfish. His characters are well outlined, his story line is a continuous joy ride, with every piece of amazing added in there to make it the perfect story for a tech lover. Games that recruit people based on their kill percentages, Bio-suits that can control cars and the ultimate truth that everyone works for the corporates, it’s all there. But, as always, there’s the low-point. Unfortunately for the reader, this point comes at the ending of the story. The ending is weak, to say the least. It has all the elements of a block buster but it seems that Suarez pulled the plug on his creativity too soon. I can saw this with certainty because initially, Suarez printed this book himself. This means he had the time and opportunity to build any ending he wanted, but he left it where it stands today.

Over all, read it, if only for it’s amazing insight at the technology that already stands tall amongst us and for what’s to come or may already be here. Interested readers can head to thedaemon.com to find out more about the book.

Curating Music on iOS

I recently came in possession of an 80 GB iPod Classic. That means my entire music collection is now sitting in a tiny silver box. When I listened to some music on it, one of the first things I noticed was the ease with which I could mark a song on a rating of five stars. My entire music collection, from time to time gets vetted like that. I mark songs when ever I feel like and the one star ones get deleted. This reduced the load on my Mac’s Hard disk, a 250 GB baby HD. So, as of now I’m really happy with this device because I can quickly audit songs and after syncing with my music library, weed out the ones I don’t like.

 

So, what’s this about? An article in the limelight these past few days is about rethinking the iPhone’s app switcher. You can read it here on The Verge. It’s a pretty neat article detailing how the process of switching apps can be made a lot more productive. It’s a beautiful design meets functionality idea. In fact, I can safely say that some of the ideas in the article have already been implemented on the iOS by coders who believe in jailbreaking. The recent example of the idea of a new way of editing text on the iPad and the quick response by the jailbreak community shows how the 3rd party developers are faster and more innovative than Apple on the iOS. The one thing, however, that’s missing in the article on The Verge, is the concept of music curation. The ease of marking songs on the click wheel iPods has not translated well to the touchscreen and it’s something Apple or the jailbreak community can fix. The idea that the app switcher can be a lot more than just a dock is an important one and must be explored a lot. Maybe some day, I’ll have a way to curate my music right there in my iPhone.

Internet Addiction

I was sitting at dinner with a few friends of mine, most of them Masters students who have excellent communications skills. They were all talking about something. On closer inspection, I realized that most of what they were talking about was the topic of the single most important communication revolution of this generation – the Internet. To be specific, they were talking about two things, memes and Facebook. I pointed out a few lines ago that most of them had excellent communication skills. The importance of that is the vocabulary in use in the conversation. They were talking about “liking” things and getting the best pic so that it can be their next “profile pic”. They were talking about flying cats and Loki-bashing memes. It seemed that all of these people were talking more in terms of Facebook features and popular memes instead of that once popular language, English.

Who am I to talk about this? I’m as much a part of this meme culture as anyone else. But some times I worry about why simple English is being replaced by Internet lingo in dinner tables across the world. Or maybe that’s not the case? Maybe I’m looking at a group of highly educated individuals who wish to break free from the rigid language-sensitive world of academic papers and presentations and the best way to let off some steam is by using some bad language and talking in some silly and distorted lingo. I certainly hope that’s the case because otherwise the world is doomed to one day just talk in terms of “like”, “comment” and “forever alone”. This does not bode well for expression. Because drawing cartoons and using lingo to accommodate original thought is a good idea as long as the cartoons themselves are originals. A few building blocks can easily form millions of complex structures but they are, in fact, limited by the types of building blocks to begin with.

What’s worse is that the force of Facebook and memes is so strong that it is changing the way the whole Internet interacts. The original game changing communication medium is now being forced into careful coercion by a social network and a silly set of characters adapted from 4chan. I can only hope that another tide brings some other social network into the lime light and that one will not be forced to define a person’s image with a “cover photo” alone.

On Reading

I believe reading to be one of the best ways to open your mind. When you’re reading, you’re really getting a chance to read a line and think about it. It is in that second, when you hold a thought in your mind, that you really grow as a person. People often say to me, “Oh forget it, I’ll just wait for the movie.” But that’s not the right way to go about life. When you’re watching a video, the next second comes too fast. You don’t have time to reflect upon what just happened. Thus, you just go with the flow and enjoy it, without thinking. When you’re watching a film with friends, you really enjoy, because you’re collectively not thinking. When you come out of the film, you realize what your real emotions are about the film, but the moment is past and you don’t think further about it.

 

Ever seen Friends or Seinfeld? At the end of every punch line, there’s a whole bunch of background people laughing. The show makers put that laughter there so that you don’t pause the video and think about it, you just laugh. They don’t want you to think if the show is funny enough because a lot of times the show won’t be, it’ll be ok. But when you hear other people’s laughter, you’ll be obliged to laugh. That kills your thought process.

 

Here’s an experiment – Ever seen a movie that you liked and some friends of yours didn’t? See the movie once more and then go to Wikipedia or IMDB and real the story from there. Think about what you liked about the story and whether it made sense when you read it. You’ll find out in an instant if the story really is that good or not.

Pebble Smartwatch: The why and why not

There’s a new project on Kickstarter, the wildly popular crowdfunding website. It’s called Pebble and it’s breaking some records. The goal of the project to get started was $100,000 and as of the writing of this post, the project has  $6,193,523 of funding pledged from people.
The watch, made with an e-paper display, the same display that the basic line of Kindle devices uses, is extremely customizable, correctly priced (at $150, it’s the same as the Sony smartwatch and probably does more) and as you can see from the Kickstarter page, has gained the love of 42,000 early bird backers.
https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/597507018
Sounds awesome doesn’t it?

No.
Yes, it’s got great features like an amazing choice of apps, analog or digital or typographic watch face, Android remote SMS, email and phone call notifications (iOS doesn’t support those features yet), caller ID, accelerometer based functionality, an ARM processor for near-infinite modding capabilities, bluetooth and even a 7-day battery life (ZOMG!), but all these features are over shadowed by one tiny detail –
E-Paper.
The watch and it’s entire ecosystem is based on the concept that you are using it in the day(light)!
Remember how irritating it is when you want to read from your Kindle but the light is just not enough to let you read? Remember how that wonderful afternoon in the sun with your favorite books turned sour as soon as evening hit the valley?
That’s what’s gonna happen with the Pebble smart watch over and over again. You’ll need to find just that spot that works. You’ll have to move to the only light in the room as soon as a phone call comes in, just so that you can read the caller ID before you decide what to do with the call.
What I’ve pointed out doesn’t seem to be of much concern to those funding the watch, in fact, when I tried to explain this issue to someone on twitter, I got it handed to me on a platter! (Apologies @mcowger if you didn’t want to be highlighted!)
http://twitter.theinfo.org/190114510063935488
I’m not saying don’t buy the watch. In fact, if you’ve got the dough, put it in right now before the project funding stops on May 18th. You’ll even get the watch cheaper than market price ($99 instead of $150) so it really is a good deal, just make sure you switch on the lights in your bedroom before you look at your watch at night!
After-note: The Pebble manufacturers added a back-light to the watch to combat the useless-in-the-night issue, probably as an afterthought, so, I as an afterthought, am going to talk about the Sony smart watch that came out the same time as the Pebble project was launched. Don’t be surprised because it’s called Smartwatch or that it runs Android. Or the fact that despite being technically superior than Pebble (multi-touch color OLED display), it’s going to sell much less.
http://www.sonymobile.com/us/products/accessories/smartwatch/
That’s all folks!
N

The new iPad is out. It’s not enough!

I followed the launch of the new iPad and I’m not satisfied with it. Apparently others aren’t too.

The iPad update has come through. And it wasn’t a great big awesome update. No it’s not. Here are some clips from the internet about it…

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/tablets/ipad-3-rumours-what-you-need-to-know-937498
http://www.apple.com/ipad/
http://twitter.com/Macworld/status/177463719293501440

Update March 2019: I was using the Storify plugin to create visual links to all the URLs above, but I am no longer using Storify. So please click the links above to check them out.