Nice LaCie external hard drives from Philippe Starck. Described by Starck as a 'brain with a motorcycle helmet'. The desktop model comes in 1TB or 2TB capacities, while the mobile drive holds either 430GB or 500GB. For more info, click here. Original article by Andrew J Wiener.
I was at a get-together of techie sorts a few weeks ago and I overheard some very clever people talking about Facebook. One of them said, “Yeah, I used to use Facebook but then my 10 year old nephew started using it so I don’t bother anymore.”
I kind of thought this was a stupid thing to say. I wondered if he had stopped travelling on the bus when his little sister was old enough to start going into town with her mates on Saturday mornings? Did he stop eating spaghetti when his next-door neighbours’ son started eating it? Did he stop going swimming once the local primary school kids started using the pool?
Good technology should be a great leveller; as open and easy to use to the technically minded and the technophobic. If it isn’t, then it’s not good technology.
Jung talks about the shadow-self, or if you’re into your Star Wars, your dark side. We all have a dark side of course but some people’s seem to be darker than others. In my job I meet a lot of very very clever techie-types and I’ve found that many of them, not all, but many of them, seem to have a darker side than most.
They’re modern day magicians who seem to speak a different language to the rest of us. They usually like to keep their magic to themselves, not wanting to reveal their secrets to mere mortals who simply “wouldn’t understand”. This attitude then is their dark side coming through, their shadow-self.
I wonder what kind of world we’d be living in now if the man who wove the www, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, had had a ‘darker than usual’ dark side, if he’d kept the web to himself or sold it to the highest bidder? Perhaps the internet would have become the domain of the super-wealthy and the super- technical; people who didn’t want to share this new technology with mere mortals.
As Stephen Fry would say, “bah” and “pish” to dark-sided techno-wizardry. Let good technology be the great leveller it should be. And if there’s a techno-snob near you, remind them that we were all ‘given’ the www as a gift, snotty nosed 10 year old nephews and all.
This post first appeared here.
I thought it might be an idea to list the new networking groups I've become involved with during 2009. In no particular order:
CamCreative
What the blurb says:
CamCreative embraces a diverse group of interests which includes design, media, literature and publishing, visual arts, multimedia, performing arts and general culture bringing together a mix of large and small firms. Its aims are:
Two new sites from the Mono Industries stable have recently gone live. One is for Anglo/Iranian theatre company 30 Bird Productions and the other is for security search company Planit International. We're very proud of both of them.
Google are 10 years old this week. Happy Birthday.
I'm currently researching HTML E-mail systems for a client. If anyone has used any good ones that are easy to set-up and cheap (free would be preferable), please do let me know. Thanks.
