http://www.ns-ae.net Pretentious, inconsequential ramblings under a thin veneer of self-effacement. Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:22:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en   Hello, HP. The UI of your latest TouchSmart computer says something about you. You may not have recognized your own weaving-in of meaning, but it comes across quite clearly if one reads just right: You want out. You want to escape the world of Windows to which Microsoft has sequestered you ... http://www.ns-ae.net/2008/08/21/a-letter-to-hp/ Former Apple CEO John Sculley unveiled yesterday, at the Consumer Electronics Expo, his company's vision for a high-end, consumer home phone. "The iPhone of Home Phones," sings PC Magazine of the device known as OpenFrame. Unfortunately for Sculley and Verizon, the approach shown in the press photos is approximately as appropriate ... http://www.ns-ae.net/2008/01/09/openframe-open-this/ Today, a Minnesota court found Jammie Thomas liable for copyright infringement. You might think that the 24 songs the jury found her liable for sharing could have easily resulted in $500, even $1000 in lost RIAA revenues from those dastardly pirates who, were she never to have made the songs ... http://www.ns-ae.net/2007/10/04/transgressions-against-kings/ Many tech pundits have suggested, in defense of third-party applications on that Barack Obama of a mobile device known as iPhone, that its fabled killer app won't come from Apple. Steve Jobs told the world last January that there would be no such support, then amended the pronouncement this week, ... http://www.ns-ae.net/2007/06/13/everyones-killer-app/ What was, not too long ago, a tepid and vague consumerlust of mine has, over the past week, metamorphed into a barely-dismissed obsession. The Apple TV, far from the impenetrable fortress of iTunes clubbiness I had once imagined it to be, guarded from any practical use by its own local-area ... http://www.ns-ae.net/2007/03/29/a-newer-name-for-a-new-product/ I am not above admitting that it is likely due in part to a fear of commitment that, for my daily robot project, I chose not to register a domain including the word "daily." In a coup of lukewarm, noncommittal dedication, I have safely set up shop under a domain ... http://www.ns-ae.net/2007/03/01/robotprojectnet/ Over the past month, I have been readying a new project. It is one simple in objective, an exercise purely in creative visual form, perhaps with latent traces of narrative, all within a construct of regimen. Inspired by a delightfully demented project (whose delightfulness and dementedness I may only aspire ... http://www.ns-ae.net/2007/02/07/in-the-future-there-will-be-robots/ I frequent Illinois' east-west corridor of Interstate 88 with a certain degree of frequency. My spatial sense of the route has been shaped by maps (mostly Google), perhaps in significantly greater proportion than the actual act of driving it. My Place sense of the route has been shaped by the set-back ... http://www.ns-ae.net/2007/01/04/back-roads-google-maps-and-place/ Over the past week, the blog-reading public has seen the Wii remote's accelerometric sensors intercepted and interpreted by a PC, and today the infrared interface has been cracked. Beyond moving a mouse pointer with the remote, though, the implications of this unintended interfacing could be far more profound that Nintendo ... http://www.ns-ae.net/2006/12/07/when-the-remote-escapes/ Wii would like to play. Oh, so clever. But to label Nintendo's new television (and, from the unedited length, presumably theatrical) ad as simply smart and entertaining is to miss a larger shift in Nintendo's branding, perhaps even in the practice of Japanese-American marketing as a whole. Nintendo, representative of much Japanese ... http://www.ns-ae.net/2006/11/17/a-revolution-in-itself/