Monthly Archives: September 2012

Testing Apple’s new secret tablet

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I know I’m going to get in trouble for this but I can’t help myself. Through my work I’ve been testing Apple’s new tablet for a week or so now – i’s insanely great and I want everyone to know that mobile computing is about to make a huge leap – never mind the NDA.

It’s not smaller. Like the new iPhone it’s now wider – more than 11 inches across. The colour and resolution of the image is fantastic – which is great but that’s not the point. The resolution of the touch is hugely improved – Apple have licensed the technology in Wacom’s professional tablets to give you pressure sensitivity and per-pixel accuracy. No more painting with crayons – when using a pen this tablet records your brush strokes with complete fidelity – or just use your finger as before. I always hated the clumsy touch in the old iPad and it’s like having gloves removed from your fingers. You can finally really paint on this.

Good thing then that this tablet can run PhotoShop. No, not a cut down version – the real PhotoShop. In fact this new tablet runs the full operating system – that means real applications like Pro Tools, Live, Reason, the Adobe suite – even 3d tools like Maya – all with multitouch and complete portability. You can forget about using Garage Band and cut down crap – look at the photo. Of course that means you don’t have to translate between your desk tools and the tablet using iTunes anymore. Just link by WiFi and get busy.

My old iPad on the right (in a case) and the new secret tablet on the left. Notice that it’s running Ableton Live – and how bright and sharp the display is. Retina really is great technology.

Apple have realised that you need a real keyboard and a dock that holds the tablet so you can sometimes type notes and do your office stuff (yes, you can run Office). So they’ve included these in the price… no more hidden extras. And… amazingly… you can expand the memory with SIMs. It comes with 32Gb but I doubled that by plugging in a micro SIM – now there’s two volumes available on the system. Of course it works fine with Time Capsule and other external drives.

Only Apple could come up with something this powerful and innovative. They’ve begun a site where you can see more about the tablet – it’s supposed to go live at year’s end – but I’m going to make enemies and let you see it right now.

 

Trolling, epilepsy, halloween.

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This blog started when a BBS collapsed under trolling – trolling so horribly lame that I realised my community thought ‘post pictures of your desktop’ was astounding wit. Widening the audience to village idiots was doing no favours to anyone except the idiots so I closed it down. We’d always termed the BBS an experiment and the first post on this blog presented the findings: there was blame on all sides. There was a power imbalance implicit in the BBS which could not be smoothed over.

Here we are in 2012 and the newspapers are howling about flames on Twitter. Celebrities are horrified that their narcissistic streams of minutiae are being interrupted by foul and violent voices. Should have read my findings, creeps. If I failed to make my online home a home for everyone, Twitter disposes of even that gesture. Twitter accelerates the power imbalance between the haves (recognised, respected) and have nots (ignored, spoken at) in the worst possible manner because it cuts out online equivalents of body language. The word limit discourages seemingly unimportant verbiage that carries the subtext. Everyone who is upset about Twitter needs to see it as reaping exactly what it set out to sow: CB Radio without the tone of voice. And CB Radio was really really bad.

When you make no attempt at conversation – when you have ‘followers’, when there is no junk language (which like junk genetic code is anything but) – the violence of the repressed reply might be upsetting. Twitter is a manifestation of celebrity – and celebrity is a cancer fed by endless appeals to be known and liked as means to sell products. While I feel sorry for the poor fish being hauled out of the ocean, I also feel sorry for the poor human cattle being syphoned of their empathy.

(At this point some journalist will throw up ‘Arab Spring’ as the great power of Twit. This is sad because it means you think Twitter was more important than the complex conversations individuals were having face to face. Hey look at that thing drooping off your head – it’s called a body.)

Thousands of screaming faces

So I dusted off the Playstation3 and turned it on to ensure it will be ready for Our Special Announcement on October 31st. Poor thing only gets used when there’s a video to be replayed, and must feel entirely unloved for months on end. It updated the system and all kinds of new things appeared on the control panel. There’s a whole bunch of video channels and TV stations, one of which plays Cindy Lauper videos back to back, so quality stuff.

Anyway, there is now MUBI. MUBI is on the internet so you can have a look for yourself, it’s a kind of Netflix for film ‘buffs’. You can pay to stream films that you would otherwise not see and then tell your friends how cultured you are ’cause you’ve seen some obscure movie they might not have heard of. Maybe I’m being a little hard.

So on the website if you click on Discover you get a list of films they have in the database (sadly most not available to view). On the web it’s OK… on the PS3 they are shown as an infinite set of tiles like this:

This is a bad idea. When you have brain problems, a BAD IDEA. Because I am looking at a big screen and I see a person in front of a backdrop and another person in front of another backdrop and ANOTHER person in front of ANOTHER backdrop and ANOTHER PERSON IN FRONT OF ANOTHER BACKDROP AND THERE ARE TWELVE THOUSAND MORE PEOPLE IN FRONT OF MORE BACKDROPS AND MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP

and we’re off…

… every one of these films is just some person against their damn backdrop and superimposed they’re a jiggling coloured ants nest and it’s intensely irritating… and I think how much I have come to hate film narratives because of the existence of this endless army of face and field. The MUBI pictures distil that irritation and amplify it 12,000x …

ending with the usual searing migraine. I still can’t look at that interface without pain.

Since then my Huxley-like ‘realisation’ has dissipated – I don’t actually hate narratives (hating Werner Herzog is impossible) – but this endless film after film after film with protagonist, antagonist, three acts, turning points on page 60 etc. etc. – when you see it tiled as 12,000 faces and backdrops it causes nausea. While the hero’s journey is satisfying to the human spirit – surely we can aspire to move on to something else.

Modern Education

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As any teacher knows, the so-called ‘breaks’ that dot the educational year are there to pack with urgent reviews, meetings and ‘professional development’. The only chance to get people all in a room at the one time and thus an exhausting and sometimes infuriating race to complete a forest of competing agendas. This last week was a ‘break from teaching’ which left me with a piercing headache as if belted in the forehead with a claw hammer.

Australia is going through a ‘modernisation’ of the education system. As with all things ‘modern’ it must be made measurable, homogenised, ‘open’ and entirely filtered of flashes of brilliance. It is the best of ideas, it is the worst of ideas.

Efficient.

I agree that every student deserves to be measured by the same rubric, that a distinction is a distinction no matter who does the marking. I think it’s fair that you be able to look up what the criteria are, and not be mislead. In principle it’s a fine idea which is to be expected as most fine ideas work in principle. The details are not as well behaved.

A high distinction in mathematics means that you have solved all the puzzles on the paper. That’s to be respected. A high distinction in art means … what? We were provided with a table of definitions which were sensible, no dispute there, just that everyone in the room struggled with their ghosts – the student that said very little but painted dreams, the low effort big talker that ended up in feature films, the smart one that never graduated – you know – people, individuals – that you struggled to place on any grid. The convener was firm. No. No intuition, no bargaining between opinions. You can write the grid, but there is a grid.

I looked at what a ‘fail’ means. In Australia, below 50 is a fail and it’s a pain to be only able to mark within the region between 50 and 85, with most students horrified to ever go less than credits. The grid elaborated that 50 percent, it expanded on all the ways you could fill that abyss – like Dante’s Inferno in Excel. I thought the vast majority of students would end up in there. And then there would be the inevitable investigation, firings and adjustment to bump everyone over the threshold. The headache started.

How do we assess? We assess on what we think they should become. Everything is tailored to fitting the criteria. The current jargon is about ‘Global Citizens’, which I can’t help think is ‘we are only impressed by people who leave’. I imagine some Gilgamesh in a suit striding through airports, shaking hands and hiring 1000 workers to mass produce jewelled skulls.

Really we’re back into the whole game of worker’s uniforms and idealised architecture that the post-modernists had to crush underfoot years ago. Instead of endless regimented housing and clothing we have regimented identities and aspirations: having to join Facebook gave me a chance to see what so many people choose as their home – an identikit worker’s cottage that you can accessorise with a few family photographs. They will live in these cottages and dream of being a CEO or at least a celebrity on YouTube. Whatever force was thwarted in the late 20th century bided its time and climbed in another window.

I parked my home here somewhere

There’s a pile of paperwork in front of me, to be absorbed into my thinking so I can produce measurable and accurately boxed ‘artists’. The headache is intense.

Bradbury rang up on the Friday. We talked shit for a long while as per usual, part of which was trying to figure out what ‘school’ ever got us started on our ways. It just seemed so obvious at the time and both of us still create as ‘the birds’ require. For my part I was stupid and ignorant enough to be impressed by everything and angry enough that I wanted to better it all. The notion that this grid will produce a nation of artists seems a vanity. Better this – to throw out ninety percent of them and beat the remainders into the scourges of society. Of course there’s no money in that, is there.

The temptation is to do what they ask, but ferociously, without mercy. Apply the rubric, mark like a machine. They will be horrified to see their monster unleashed, and will all the sooner come to see the folly in it all.

Severed Heads are NOT on Facebook : Final update.

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Another fake account. Hell, why don’t people GET IT? If I wanted a Facebook page I’d make one. The only real page is at sevcom.com

Problem is to complain about a fake page you have to join Facebook.
Update: Joined, set maximum privacy and complained.

Update: The person that set up the account has made no attempt to talk with me despite my being very clear that I was pissed. Facebook has a procedure for identity theft which is completely false. You’re told to click on controls next to a time line that don’t exist. That’s seriously fucked up. They DO have copyright set up – I guess they are actually worried about that. So far I have managed to get three images taken down. I hope that the body snatcher gets the message.

Update: Still no response from the pod person. I suspect that they don’t feed this Tamagotchi very often. Sigh. I asked that the rest of the images go (didn’t realise that they were on a Facebook external drive.) That leaves an untidy mess which I’ll have to deny for years to come, damn them.

Update: We have contact. Page is coming down. Good result and reasonable exchange of emails. It was over-enthusiasm. Next week on Batman, the Riddler covers Gotham with a giant tea cosy.

What’s the problem? Well since you asked:

  • If I want to do something I’ll do it. I’m not crippled. I’m not mentally incapacitated. I don’t need you to do things ‘on my behalf’. Just let me make my own decisions.
  • I really don’t like people ‘being me’. That’s creepy. Particularly signing contracts as ‘me’. That’s illegal.
  • I find Facebook repulsive. I don’t have to justify that to anyone, but I find it horribly conformist and a lifestyle template for the normals.
  • I don’t want to trade my privacy to get access to other people. I don’t really want that kind of access.
  • It’s ugly. It looks like some kind of bank. I want my stuff to have my personality, not some bank.
  • Seriously – number 2 again. You’re creepy.

Should have asked BEFOREHAND