Posts tagged with "Technology"

E-waste recycling event at Tekserve Mac shop - NYC

By Ari | Apr 10, 08 03:55 PM

Our favorite Mac shop and my one-time employer Tekserve, who recently sold us our new and amazing video editing system (THANKS!), is having their second annual Electronics Recycling Event, together with the Lower East Side Ecology Center. These sorts of environmentally-friendly shenanigans are just what I'd expect from Tekserve, home of "Fair Weights and Square Dealings." The event will be April 26th-27th, right here in NYC.

More tips on recycling things you just don't know where to recycle:
GrassRoots Recycling Network
EcoCycle
GreenDisk

Making my bookmarks more del.icio.us

By Ari | Mar 1, 08 03:37 PM

Recently, I finally got to a place where I wanted to share my Safari bookmarks; I thought I'd try importing them into a social bookmarking tool, and switch to keeping track of things there instead of in Safari. After long consideration I chose del.icio.us.

Weirdly, the only way I could figure out how to make all of the imported links public at once was to run a script written by a blogger in 2006. I'm not convinced there isn't some way to do this in del.icio.us itself, but the last comment from a grateful code borrower like myself was in December 2007, and I can't find any way to batch edit within the site for the life of me.

Anyway, the script works - it takes a while though. If anyone knows of a way to batch edit more effectively in del.icio.us, please comment!

Also useful-looking, by the same blogger: Scripted Re-Mark

Oh, and check out my del.icio.us links: del.icio.us/arimoore

Books: Searchable, free, earth-friendly, and extremely organized

By Ari | Feb 15, 08 10:29 AM

I read a lot and am always keeping lists of books I want to read. After cutting and pasting into text documents for years it occurred to me there must be a better way to do this; sure enough, there is. I tried LibraryThing (not free after 300 books!) and Google's My Library (lousy interactivity and no way to add notes). Then I actually typed "track books want read" into Google and Ask Metafilter came to the rescue.

Folks seemed to really like Goodreads, and now I know why. It's free and very interactive, and offers fields for notes/reviews and recommendations. It also automatically offers you "read" and "to-read" bookshelves, with the capability to add as many other shelves as you like - useful if you want to offer lists of recommended titles on particular topics.

In the process of all of this catalog-perusal, I realized something that I guess should have been obvious if it wasn't. I've long been annoyed by not being able to hit Command-F ("Find file...") in the real world. I mean really, wouldn't this make life a lot easier? With books it's particularly infuriating - unless I take copious notes and write in my books like crazy, I know the likelihood of my actually being able to find a quote or idea in the future is pretty slim. Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to search your shelves for "nonviolence," say, and find all references, across genres?

Well, at first I thought it was silly to input books you already have into a catalog tool like this, but now I get it. It's surprisingly easy and quick to get them in there, and then, you can search your shelves. This is where Google is supposed to be better, allowing you to actually search within books - but for me, the interactivity of GoodReads outweighs the usefulness of that feature. In any case, I'm now able to hit Command-F and then find the result on my shelf, and however imperfect the system is, it's made our library more useful.

A major issue I have with all of these sites is that they usually offer purchasing links, and those links all send you to giant corporations who send new books through the mail. My ideal book is a used one my neighbor hands me - no new printing and paper, no shipping materials or freight fuel and pollution, no participation in global capitalism. Unfortunately none of these sites allow you to customize the book purchase links that come up while people are looking at your catalog, so the best I could do was put a list in my profile. Here it is, if you too like to get books but want to do it in an earth-friendly way:

FreeCycle - facilitates swapping free used stuff in your local area
PaperBackSwap - book/DVD swapping community
BookCrossing - used books sent/left and tracked, sort of a worldwide booksharing system
Better World Books - Carbon-offset shipping, profits support literacy programs worldwide
Alibris - used books, for sale
Abe Books - used books, for sale

Simulated stupidity

By Ari | Feb 3, 08 02:05 PM

Recently I saw a big ad for EA's "Sim City Societies" that shows three (fake) people and the societies they've built, one of which is obviously meant to be an earthy crunchy green city and another that's insanely capitalist. Curious what options the game would actually give you (can you make a sustainable anarchist community, for example?), I checked out their site.

The game does seem flexible, poking fun at both capitalists and utopians and hinting at the idea of creating a balance. ("Mix and match societal values — productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority, and knowledge — to determine the core attributes of your city... Witness the evolution of your city as its appearance and sounds adapt to reflect these values.") But right up at the top of the home page is a prominent "Learn more about alternative energy" link that leads to a BP-branded site explaining that this game is the result of a partnership between the oil company and EA.

While I appreciate that BP is apparently doing a lot of work in green energy development, and that this game will allow users to experiment with wind farms and other green technologies, this looks like a massive greenwashing campaign to me. BP paints itself here as a green energy company, with nary a whisper of its record as one of the ten worst corporations in the world.

With BP so intimately involved in this game's development, my guess is that folks who want to set up oil-guzzling societies will be conveniently prevented from causing the oil spills and oil refinery explosions that characterize oil's real-world impact... which sort of negates the whole point of a game that supposedly serves as a mini experimental laboratory for various energy options, doesn't it?

Related: Games for Change: Serious Fun

Here Comes Everybody

By Ari | Jan 30, 08 08:56 PM

Why User-generated Content Mostly Isn't by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody:

The internet is in a way the first thing that really deserves the label 'media'. It is a truly general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold multiple types of content, created and distributed for a huge variety of reasons and in a huge variety of ways, ways that can't be fit into the old mode of "content", where one group creates and another merely consumes.

(via unmediated)

Ch..ch..ch..changes

By Shira | Jan 21, 08 07:22 PM

zora checks out the new mac pro tower
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

It's still hard to believe that Shirari Industries is my full-time gig. My days feel longer in the best possible way, and I fall asleep excited about the next morning.

We just got a new Mac Pro, and it's pretty awesome. My old iMac could barely run iPhoto without crashing, so with me working from home, it was definitely time to upgrade. The cats were almost as excited about opening the boxes as we were. So far, I'm a happy customer and I'm especially psyched about the new iApps. Unfortunately, I think I might have some major issues getting sound recording set up as there are Panther incompatibility issues with the MBox and the Oxygen8 - bummer!

Technology is weird. Somehow, no matter how incredible a device seems when it first comes out, it feels slow and useless only a few years later. Has the device degraded or have we, as individuals, just upgraded our expectations? I recently read Victor Papanek's 1972 book Design for the Real World. (He was a friend and colleague of Buckminster Fuller, developer of the geodesic dome.) The book presents an indictment of planned obsolescence, the notion that corporations purposefully perpetuate a disposable, commodity-driven culture by creating products that aren't built to last, and by always pushing the newest model while discontinuing support of older editions.

The moment I started up GarageBand on my new Mac and tried to record a song using my MBox, only to discover that the device is "not yet supported," Papanek popped into my head, and I felt a rush of guilt. Should I really be investing in more machinery that's probably going to end up in a landfill in a decade or sooner? At least I can console myself with the fact that my Samsung monitor had an Energy Star sticker on it and that Apple went a little greener in 2007.

Shirari Industries