23
Apr
2011
Going off paper?
Once upon a time the only ones glued to their phone screens in public were spotty teenagers playing snake. I suppose I got a glimpse of the future on the Tokyo subway a while ago with everyone glued to their screens reading the news (I presume, it was all in Japanese).
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts on my phone through the gReader app. Even in short journeys I can knock off a couple of posts, and it feels like I’m actually participating in things as they happen. (I’m aware that this is an illusion, but it is one that I’m happy to maintain.)
So the phone screen is a good place for short form essays and journalism, and at fist blush it seems that it works for long form too. I’ve been reading Gulliver’s travels through the Kindle app, which has actually been surprisingly easy. The screen makes the columns a good width for reading fast, and the page turns are easier than turning an actual page. This means that I can put the phone on a table, hold my head in one hand, a cup of tea in the other, and read.
The ability to condense a library of books into one small space is pretty cool, as is the ability to look stuff up in a dictionary or on Wikipedia. I’m not wild about having to buy books that I already own so that I can read them this way, it seems that the payment for the IP has already been made, and that the actual cost of providing the content must tend towards zero. However there are so many free classics available that it will probably be a while before I’m hooked enough to fork over any actual money.
I’ll update in a while about what I thought of the experience, but I don’t think that it’ll be too much of a competitor to ‘real’ books in the near future, but in the longer term, probably!
21
Sep
2009
my reading list
If you are going to stop smoking, the advice is to tell as many people of your intention. The reasoning going something along the lines of ‘if you tell a lot of people, and you fail, failure is embarrassing, so you put more effort into not failing’. Respect seems to be a powerful motivator!
I don’t smoke, but I do read, and I’m going to go all Philip Morris on some books by telling people of my intention to read more of them.
if you are reading this on facebook, follow this link to read it in glorious technicolour.
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21
Sep
2009
screen shots
I got really bashed in the feedback for my degree dissertation about how ugly the cover was. [I don't have a photo, but I'll put one up when I do]
I saw this this morning, it looks like an interesting book, which I’ll read when I get a second (more on that later), but it did remind me how disapointed that the most biting critique of my work was focused on the cover art.
I do feel a tiny bit vindicated that the same technique has made it onto the cover of a published book!
I’m going to start being a bit mercenary these days, and start putting an amazon associates link on here if I mention a book, if you buy it through this link, I get a tiny amount of money to feed my crack book habit.
23
Jun
2009
Programming.Architecture
Paul Coates’ book is finally scheduled for release just after Christmas. It’s pretty exciting as it covers a lot of historical (i.e. mid to late 20th century) computational design topics. This might sound dull, but a lot of what I come across my students struggling with these days is stuff that people were struggling with 30 years ago, some of it was solved, and would lead to an easy fix, and some of it was proven (pretty much) to be impossible, leading to a painless kill of a dead end. Basically what I’m talking about is precedent, and most people think that computational design doesn’t have any, but in reality, some very smart people have been toiling for the last 40 years to solve a lot of these questions.
The book is a great introduction to a lot of the ‘grander’ ideas of computational design too, if you’ve ever wondered what ? syntax, universal Turing machines, or artificial neural networks are, then this will be a great help.
This should be required reading for anyone who thinks that computers have a bigger role to play in design than just checking your email.
You can pre order it from here
http://www.tandfbuiltenvironment.com/books/The-Programming-of-Architecture-isbn9780415451888
20
Apr
2007