Archive for the 'Moving Images' Category
February 1, 2010
You’ve seen the new toy. You’ve seen the experts debate: Will the Apple iPad “save” newspapers, journalism, book publishing? Will it kill the Amazon Kindle? Is this the death of the laptop, and the PC as we know it? Has Apple just signaled the death of the ultraportable MacBook Air? Will it replace smartphones like the iPhone or Nexus One? Has Apple just pwned another media marketplace — sorry Amazon, Google, Microsoft? Goodbye, netbooks? Farewell, computers?
Blah, blah, blah. Nobody knows the future, so such pronouncements are justifiably viewed as so much hype.
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Posted in iPhone Apps, Moving Images, Paper & Ink, Social Media | 8 Comments »
Tags: Amazon, Apple, Books, computers, e-books, Google, iPad, iphone, iPod, iTunes, laptops, Microsoft, Nexus One, NYT, smartphones, technology
September 9, 2009
More often than I care to recall, I have impulsively downloaded a fancy new iPhone application, only to have it languish on my phone. That was the inspiration for the first “list of iPhone apps I actually use” last year, after the iTunes store started selling third-party applications.
Since then, the number of new applications has grown rapidly. Now there’s a cottage industry of lists, blogs and podcasts devoted to reviewing applications. Here’s a recent Techcrunch list of the “best” apps, which notes the store had 300 new apps rolling out every day. Here’s a similar post at Gizmodo, which put the total number of apps at more than 74,000. Many of the lists that try to sort out the best applications seem to focus more on flash than substance.
In August, I finally renewed my AT&T contract and upgraded to the iPhone 3GS. It seemed like the right time to reconsider the programs I had loaded onto my phone. Did I actually use them?
Here’s my revised list:
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Posted in Blogging, iPhone Apps, Moving Images, New York, Social Media | 10 Comments »
Tags: 1Password, AIM, Amazon, AOL Radio, Bento, Books, computers, dictionaries, Facebook, games, Gizmodo, Google, iPhone Apps, iPhones, iPods, iTunes, Kindle, Last.FM, macs, Midomi, music, newspapers, NPR, NYC, NYT, O.E.D., Pandora, Posterous, radio, Readdle, remotes, Shakespeare, Shazam, SMS, software, Stanza, Techcrunch, technology, texting, Tweetie, Twitter, Twitterfon, UpNext, Urbanspoon, Wall Street Journal, webcams, WikiHow, Wikipanion, Wikipedia, Yelp
January 15, 2009
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered!
My life is my own!”
From “The Prisoner” (1967)
A few years ago, I bought a boxed DVD set of the old series “The Prisoner” starring Patrick McGoohan, who died at 80 on Tuesday in Los Angeles.
My wife has been obsessed with the show since childhood. We watched the whole thing over that winter. It was a bit dated, but most of it held up. Unlike many series, it actually had a conclusion with a final episode where everything was sort of resolved. It was not set in the future, but was vaguely futuristic, and quite prescient in pointing to some trends in information and control that outlasted the Cold War era.
The themes of identity, torture and mind control echo to this day, in the news and in cultural artifacts like Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” and the Fox series “24.”
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Posted in Moving Images | 2 Comments »
Tags: 24, Blues Traveler, Brazil, Danger Man, deaths, Gattaca, James Bond, Johnny Rivers, movies, No. 2, Patrick McGoohan, penny-farthing bicycle, Secret Agent, Secret Agent Man, spies, technology, The Prisoner, torture, TV, video
January 7, 2009
I’m happy to report that I finally finished the 900+ page “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson, just four months (!) after starting it. I have to admit that I took breaks to read a few other things.
I previously posted about the difficult, otherworldly vocabulary that Stephenson made up for this book. (For example, the “Reticulum” is similar to what we call the Web or the Internet, though you have to figure that out based on the description of a narrator who is basically a cloistered monk who never uses technology. “Jeejahs” are smart phones or mobile devices of some sort. Videos are “speelies” recorded with “speelycaptors.” Those are some of the neologisms that feel apt. Not all of them do.)
Others have weighed in about the lexicon, and the book’s need for editing, especially in the early chapters (here’s an example from Slashdot, the bulletin board for geeks). And there’s the question of the title, which looks like a typo and calls to mind Ayn Rand’s completely unrelated polemical novel “Anthem,” which Stephenson says he has never read (see video below).
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Posted in Moving Images, Paper & Ink | 2 Comments »
Tags: aliens, American Nerd, Anathem, Any Rand, Arbre, Battlestar Galactica, Books, Buddhism, Clock of the Long Now, concents, Cryptonomicon, Edmund Husserl, geeks, Google, Internet, IT, jeejahs, Kurt Gödel, Neal Stephenson, nerds, quantum physics, Reticulum, Roger Penrose, science fiction, spacecraft, speely, speelycaptor, string theory, uncertainty, video, Web
October 1, 2008
Updated March 12, 2011.
Hello, my name is Patrick LaForge.
@Palafo is a purely personal and non-commercial blog, a public notebook about a few of my obsessions — the Web, technology and computers; media of all types (books, podcasts, blogs, Twitter and social media, and music); and my quest for the perfect cup of coffee.
I am no relation to this guy nor am I the president and CEO of the Edmonton Oilers hockey team.
By some happy accident, I am an editor at a local newspaper in New York, where I am currently the editor in charge of news presentation, which is a fancy yet imperfect way of describing the copy desks and aspects of Web production.
I was also the founding editor and one of the creators of the paper’s blog about New York, City Room. The blog you are reading is not affiliated with those enterprises in any way, and I am responsible for its content, which follows my employer’s ethics policy.
This blog is updated erratically. I spend more time posting on Twitter; you can follow me there: @palafo.
Thanks for reading.
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Posted in Blogging, Coffee!, iPhone Apps, Moving Images, New York, Paper & Ink, Podcast Zeitgeist, Smart Playlists | Comments Off
Tags: Atex, Blogs, City Room, Edmonton Oilers, names, NYT, palafo, Patrick LaForge
You’ve seen the new toy. You’ve seen the experts debate: Will the Apple iPad “save” newspapers, journalism, book publishing? Will it kill the Amazon Kindle? Is this the death of the laptop, and the PC as we know it? Has Apple just signaled the death of the ultraportable MacBook Air? Will it replace smartphones like the iPhone or Nexus One? Has Apple just pwned another media marketplace — sorry Amazon, Google, Microsoft? Goodbye, netbooks? Farewell, computers?
