steve jobs

I was literally woken this morning by the radio coming on announcing the death of Steve Jobs. I was shocked. Of course we all knew that he was ill, but I didn’t imagine that he would die so soon. I came across my first mac in 1984 (all these ancient recollections are a bit imprecise when it comes to dates etc) when I worked for British Telecom as a development manager in their computer games …

the conference, the paper and the iPad…

It’s unusual for me to write another post so soon, but I am trying to get into practice for what I hope will be quite regular postings from Iran. To this end I have been spending quite a bit of time setting up all the apps, online services and interlinks that will allow me, hopefully, to blog from there on my iPad. In truth, this device is not really well geared at present for the …

a new renaissance?

Sunday past I went to a performance of Philip Glass’ 1000 Airplanes on the Roof in a hangar, at East Fortune in Scotland, that has been built around a decommissioned Concorde. It was a promenade concert – allowing us to walk around as the piece – a “melodrama in one act” – was acted out, and the music played…

ebooks – a superior aesthetic?

Let me whisper to you a heresy: ebooks may be aesthetically superior to paper books. There, I’ve said it. Before they come for me, to burn me as a witch, let me try to explain what I mean. First I would like to distinguish two different functional components of the paper book: the paper book as machine and the paper book as a (complex) surface that bears text. Though it is the latter that concerns …

tablets and the cloud…

I’ve been hankering after a tablet computer for many years (I hope not as a result of having been brainwashed by Star Trek!?). Specifically I was wanting Apple to produce one. I have been using their computers since 1984 and supported them through the hard years before Steve Jobs returned – much in the way other people support a football team that keeps losing. Now that they are becoming masters of the galaxy I find …

wiki books

With my purchase of an iPad I have finally made the move to actually reading ebooks – about time! since I have (for theoretical reasons) long been a proponent of electronic reading. However, in hunting down an obscure book (a history of Byzantium written in 1892 in the ePub format), I discovered that it was full of typos and layout errors (probably because it was scanned using OCR). My first reaction was to correct these …

Apple’s tablet

I have been following the rumours of Apple’s tablet device with interest. I have been a Mac user since 1984 and, for a long time, I ‘supported’ Apple the way some people support football teams. Of course, once they went mainstream with the iPod, my fervour cooled a little *grin*. However, and in spite of them being just another evil corporation, there is something of a ‘vision thing’ that goes on at Apple that I …

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