…for all my talk about the liberating power of technology, I was beginning to see how imprisoned I was by it. – Sam Graham Felsen Thoreau hadn’t run away from life. He’d run toward it. Why can’t we leave our lives of quiet, digital desperation and do the same? – Susan Maushart, The Winter of …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
For the Win?
Back at the beginning of my career, my then creative director decided the best way to bring in new business to our nascent agency was to win design awards. Not knowing any better – we all cheered and put our collective nose to the grindstone. Developing the concept, the interactions, the flow, all for a …
CHICKEN NO MORE
“LAST STEP IS SMASH CAGE, LIGHT BARN ON FIRE. DO THAT, YOU WIN.” – FAKE GRIMLOCK Related: Notice, the animal in the top cartoon is a chicken and the animals, stuck in the barn are pigs. Reminds me of a story about the difference between a contribution and a commitment.
FOSS Abhors a Vaccuum
You know, I could have sworn we already had a Linux-based, mobile-optimized operating system, with a HTML/Javascript-based application development environment. I guess purgatory isn’t the same as open source.
Fire – Amazon Launched Their Sputnik Today
At the beginning of the month – before I knew anything of today’s Amazon Fire announcement – I announced that Amazon (along with Mozilla and Samsung) were going to be tomorrow’s tech innovation leaders. Scanning through the Amazon Fire page I was immediately struck by how it neatly integrates everything Amazon has been working on …
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Extracting iCalendar feeds from embedded Google calendars
This is an update to John Utell’s 2009 post with the same title. If the Google embedded Calendar URL something like: https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=GOOGLE-USERNAME%40gmail.com&ctz=America%2FChicago%22&mode=week…. The iCal feed is https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/GOOGLE-USERNAME%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics Now you know. (It should be – https://www.google.com/calendar/GOOGLE-USERNAME%40gmail.com – If only Google cared about good URL design)
All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Hang Out?
“Both services are essentially time sinks designed in both cases to stroke the souls of thousands of lonely people. I use them both, to be sure, but are they changing anything with these additions? Are they improving our lot in life?” – John Biggs
Tracking you like it’s going out of style
“This means that Twitter has the ability to even track surfing habits (on Tweet button enabled websites) of users that have no Twitter account and have never visited a Twitter website before. When using the same browser to create an account at Twitter afterwards this collected data of the past can theoretically be linked to …
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Mechanical Turks only existed because machines weren’t good enough yet.
“..a job is something that we each have to create. We can’t count on someone else to create one for us. That model is disappearing. We have to carve something out for ourselves, something that the machines won’t immediately grab.” – Phil Bowermaster
For that Impulse Nap (and so much more)
Now at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. First off – sleep pods were part of the dystopian future I was promised so I’m super excited they’re a reality. Airports are a great first deployment for these – lots of people with hours of unexpected time on their hands – but the potential deployments are fascinating. Create …