Unfiled

Down with aristocratic taxation, up with photo stamps.

On Matt’s blog I found a place to raise my freak Internet appliance flag, ‘If we look at what people actually use PCs for, there’s a bell curve that includes email, web, digital photos, and a couple other things. Why not spend $299 for that? ‘. He points me to the Emailer plus: emailing and…

Interesting that a price policy in something as relatively low cost as blog software has spurred such good thinking about price policies. Mark Pilgram gives us the long-term view: ‘In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end… It’s not about money; it’s about freedom.‘…

Irony was cited as a trait of my generation, but it seems even stronger in the upcoming generation, increasingly reality-show self-aware. Is this a trend, growing irony over time? Douglas Coupland, author of Gen X, later said, ‘When you’re younger, you think a little irony is all you need. You think it’ll get you to…

The current issue of Fast Company is all about design. It’s mostly them confirming that yes, design is important, but also putting a nice human perspective on it by focusing on design leaders. I discovered Angela Shen-Hsieh’s gorgeous data visualizations, she has a beautiful/fascinating ppt on the AIGA site.

My MT Alternatives post back on May 6 turns out to be prescient, with Movable Type upping their prices and competitors finally coming out of the wood work. Regarding MT’s prices, mostly I’m disappointed in the we-want-everything-for-free attitude of the complainers (heard before when Blogger had load and security issues), I thought that went away…

So I’ve got this big, expensive computing machine under my desk that’s capable of generating some serious music, and yet out of the box it’s rather difficult to get it to play anything at all. Sometimes all I need is the A below middle C to tune my guitar, ya know? I found Audacity which…

I’m trying to forumulate my rationale to myself of why I don’t want a piece of the Google IPO. It has something to do with 1) IPOs are bad for companies in general, 2) Google has explicitly warned it won’t try to make returns in the short term. Given that Google took the search crown…

In case you’re only reading the feed: Backslider slides through your recently visited web pages, the Wall St. Journal discovers IA, summaries of an MBA journal on design, and the classic Bell telephone meets the mobile.

In case you’re not following sigia-l at home, peterme states what the rest of us were thinking, and ziya runs and tells dad. Hey, if it doesn’t yield much actual professional knowledge ya might as well enjoy the soap opera!

Wow. Congratulations to the Digital Web crew on a be-ah-u-ti-ful new site, a great example of balancing aesthetics and functionality.

Tolerance.org just won the Webby for best activist site again, after having won it in 2002. The design has nicely evolved and it still sports the same structure we gave it back in 2001. I wince a little when I see it, being intimately aware of the flaws, but I’m super happy that it works…

LiveDictionary for Safari is the kind of functionality that should be enabled everywhere. Imagine how our kids vocabulary will increase when they can point to any word and get the definition. Link courtesy of jr.

Woz’s site contains some fun stories, including this telling bit: ‘…the Gates/Allen BASIC was becoming the standard thing to get for your Altair computer.‘