I love it when my brain makes connections from seemingly unrelated things and points out an interesting pattern. Sometimes this leads into weird conspiracy theories which I then need other parts of my brain to help me debunk, but often it offers genuine insights.

Recently I’ve been watching a lot of videos with Louis C.K. As I watched this video, I instantly connected it with this article by Leo Barbuta, that I read earlier this week.

Louis is talking about how George Carlin advised him to throw away all his material every year and come up with something new. Before that he had been gradually developing material for about 15 years, and some of his jokes he had kept in the routine for that long, with limited success. Continue reading

We all know wearable computing is coming. But what will it be like?

Google glass is kind of cool, but the current version suffers from an input problem. It’s voice activated, which isn’t super-practical. I’m not very interested in writing my text messages with that, and like someone said on Reddit: “I can’t wait to run into the office bathroom and yell ‘OK glass, take a picture and upload to Facebook’”.

Microsoft has been working on a bracelet that can sense hand-gestures (sort of a Kinect for your wrist), and Apple is probably joining the soon to explode Smart-Watch market.

Now let’s put all this together:

Smartwatch:

• Flexible screen shows you notifications and allows simple touch-input
• Hand sensor detects the location of your hand and fingers down to a fraction of a millimeter, allowing for precise gestural inputs
• Motion detectors, self-facing camera and whatever else they think would be useful on there

“Glasses”:

• Screen with a controllable transparency or in eye laser that can show stereoscopic images (3D)
• Can also record everything you see (in 3d?)
• Can be placed on/over normal prescription glasses or shades OR has cameras and lenses that self-correct to give you 20/20 vision when worn

“Phone”

• Computing hardware with a touchscreen, much like our current cellphones

The glasses and smartwatch will be optional, but you need the phone as a computing/storage center.

There used to be a time where I couldn’t see how all the input and output problems of wearable computing could be solved, but now I’m getting really excited. All that’s left now is figuring out the details and designing actual products.

I love Ross Kemp’s documentary shows, so I thought I’d compile a short list of his stuff that can be wathed for free online. At least the ones you Youtube. From war, to pirates, to gangs and poverty, he shows the side of the world you won’t be shown very often.

Frontline: Afghanistan

Return to Afghanistan

In search of pirates

Continue reading

First of all, let’s look at what file formats the different vendors expect, and what they offer:

Biggest Stores

Kindle (Amazon)

Continue reading

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of Passive Income: Earning money in a way that requires periodic effort, instead of constant effort.

Songwriters earn passive income when they get royalties for songs they’ve written in the past, bloggers do it when they get ad revenue, and investors do it when they get interest or dividends.

So I’ve set a goal that I mean to achieve.

Continue reading

I like to think about what people will say of us in the future. Of course, they’ll have their own nonsense to deal with, but it’s fun to figure out what it is we take for granted today but will be considered ridiculous later.

There must be a lot of things, but let’s take the holiest of holys: The Economy.

Continue reading

Been getting into illustration lately. Mostly started with Damian dragging me to a live drawing class, but from then I’ve started to study the techniques and the tools to draw people convincingly.

It’s pretty hard and I have a long way to go, but the great thing about drawing is that even something half-decent feels great to see and to show off. It’s a lot of fun no matter how good you are. (or aren’t)

Check out my gallery on DeviantArt, but don’t be shocked, live drawing means nudity: http://froztwolf.deviantart.com/gallery/

Computer games teach us that the more time we spend on something, the better we get, the more toys we have, the further we progress. Games are like this because this is what we want, this is what we expect from life.

When we were children we always progressed. We learned to crawl and to walk, to talk and later to read, write and do math. As we got older we were expected to get better at all these things.
As young adults we move away from home, we start making more money, get careers, have intimate relationships with people outside our family. (hopefully)
At this point we have been progressing all our lives. Always keeping what we have and moving beyond, adding new toys, extra skills and more developed relationships.  We expect this progression to last forever.

It doesn’t.  Continue reading

We have passed the era where a man is measured by the contents of his wallet, or his financial net worth. Today, you are measured by your ability to acquire, whether it’s really yours or not. Nobody has money in their wallet. The hobos have the highest financial worth on the block. Gradually, it became not enough to spend the money you have earned already, but to an increasing extent we started spending the money we hoped we’d earn later.

But it’s peculiar that either of these should be the measure of a man: How much stuff he can amass, or how much he owns. Can you imagine a society that were focused on honest expression rather than money and dead items? This may be a flight of impossible utopian fancy, but let’s indulge it for a brief moment. Continue reading

Been listening to a lot of Red Ice Radio and hanging out at Reddit’s conspiracy subreddit for a while now. There’s a lot of interesting ideas floating around in this space, and when you look at enough of them, you see an overarching structure emerge.

(Image by fallingwater123)

While some of it is just bad science or even science fiction, and some of it no more than the paranoid fantasies of raving madmen, a lot of it is well sourced and cited and can be demonstrated to be true. Most fit somewhere in between, they are somewhat sourced, with leaps of faith in between that seem reasonable at a glancing observation.

Now, I’m thinking it might be interesting to draw together these theories and show their internal structure, the credibility of each section, and where to go if one wants to study that in more detail. The table of contents might go something like this: Continue reading