Everyday Experiments

Everyday Experiments is a project by Space10 and Ikea that explores how new technologies will impact our homes and how we live.

I particularly like their Invisible Roommates, which provides an anthropomorphized AR view into the invisible connections between the gadgets and doodads in our homes. Reminds me of Ericsson’s Social Web of Things from 10 years ago.

How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations

Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions. Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald Trump’s struggling campaign afloat.

from Pocket https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.html
via IFTTT

Copy & Paste the Real World into Cyberspace

A very clever and impressive tech demo by Cyril Diagne allows you to copy & paste objects from your real-world surroundings into Photoshop using your smartphone:

The code is available on GitHub and it’s probably worth pointing out that BASNet, the machine learning smarts responsible for object recognition, are available on GitHub as well.

Recommended Reading: What the Death of iTunes Says About Our Digital Habits

I just read and enjoyed this:

The abandonment of iTunes heralded a broader shift in how Americans are assumed to approach their digital lives. You could call it the victory of Gmail. When it debuted in 2004, Google’s email software offered Americans a revolutionary new way of thinking about their digital footprint: Don’t.

Read “What the Death of iTunes Says About Our Digital Habits”

Previously: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

Recommended Reading: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

I just read and enjoyed this:

I love files. I love renaming them, moving them, sorting them, changing how they’re displayed in a folder, backing them up, uploading them to the internet, restoring them, copying them, and hey, even defragging them.

There are some good observations on how development has changed as well:

Years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.

The other day, I came across a website I’d written over two decades ago. I double-clicked the file, and it opened and ran perfectly. Then I tried to run a website I’d written 18 months ago and found I couldn’t run it without firing up a web server, and when I ran NPM install, one or two of those 65,000 files had issues that meant node failed to install them and the website didn’t run. When I did get it working, it needed a database. And then it relied on some third-party APIs and there was an issue with CORS because I hadn’t whitelisted localhost.