Yearly Archives: 2011

Movie review : 127 hours

Technology as a life recorder

Posted on October 2, 2011 by eloone
127 hours

127 hours

Waouh, I love that movie. Super intense. The movie is excellent on so many levels. For me the morale I retained is that true independence is tough. You can try to live as independently as you want but in the end you will always need and miss the help of others. We are humans living among humans.

Social media?

The story is a true story about Aron Ralston who got stuck in an accident in the middle of a canyon. He knew no one was looking for him because he didn’t notify anyone of where he was going. The story is set in 2003. In other words, when the “social media” were not as popular as today. Do you think it would be different today? I mean, if this would happen today, would he notify people of where he was going on his facebook for example or, maybe check into Places or something like that?

Smartphones?

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Posted in Inspiration, Movies

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Please format me

Facebook is building a library of people

Posted on September 26, 2011 by eloone

I’ve read about the new Facebook Timeline feature today. It’s a feature that lets you see your data organized in a timeline in your profile. It looks like this:

Facebook new Timeline feature

Like anything they do, it left a bitter taste on my mind. I already understood why people use this, but I still get rather sad thinking that humanity is willingly formatting itself into that stuff.

The web is a recording device

The web is a recording device, it means that whatever you put there, it’s going to be recorded and be a trail of you. Right now, thanks to the diversity of the sharing platforms available online (unfortunately still not diverse enough), you can have several trails, you can move your trails from there to there, you can delete your entire trail, you can decide of what is left of you online. With tools as popular as Facebook, that just offer you the interface, people tend to forget the innate freedom they have to broadcast from their own “antenna”, and they start formatting themselves into that single possibility of the Facebook profile, because it’s easy. They leave to Facebook the power to format, present and keep their data in a way that they can remember their life, but not in a way they chose to remember it. The format is fixed, inflexible, not customizable, you can just get stuck there without you even noticing. After allowing to list unborn children as family members, it’s clearer and clearer where Facebook is taking its crowd.

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Posted in Favourites, Observations, News, U.I, Identity, Nature of the Web

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The “I sooo love my phone” phenomenon

About the emotional attachment to a phone

Posted on September 15, 2011 by eloone

Tonight I spent time with my friends and at some point they talked about their phones. Two of them had the same Blackberry, and another one had the iPhone. The conversation went something like this:

blackberry1 Oh my god! I so love my phone! Today I went grocery shopping, my hands were full of bags, and suddenly I realized I didn’t have my phone with me. I completely panicked, I put all the bags down. Put my bag upside down. Didn’t find it. I was so in panic. I checked everything until I realized I had put it…….. in my pocket !!!!!! Phewwwww. I’m always looking for it. I should buy a bracelet or something for it. I was so relieved, I love it so much!
blackberry2 Oh yeah. I really love mine too.
iphone Me, the same. Sometimes I’m even looking for it everywhere until I realize that…. it’s in my hands…and that I was doing something with it!!
android (me) (-__-)

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Posted in Stories, U.I

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Movie review: The Adjustment Bureau

Screenwriters, you need to find other problems than just "losing touch with s.o" or "not knowing" for your stories because technology is already solving this.

Posted on September 4, 2011 by eloone

The Adjustment Bureau

I watched this movie this morning: The Adjustment Bureau. I had no idea what it was about but I just assumed from the poster that it was a regular action movie. That’s what I was in the mood for: action movie. I hadn’t watched the trailer or read the reviews or summaries to benefit from a potential pleasant surprise effect. I suggest you do the same for that movie, don’t read or watch anything about it, just watch it, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Now about the movie (beware some possible spoilers following).

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Posted in Inspiration, Movies

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Google plus and real names: filtering users based on their intentions

Posted on August 30, 2011 by eloone
g+

g+

This morning the topic of G+ and real names was buzzing because of  Eric Smidth’s statement:

If You Don’t Want To Use Your Real Name, Don’t Use Google+

See the source on Mashable.

It’s funny that I read that article this morning because it directly relates to the book review I had just written about “The myths of innovation”. If you read that article, you’ll see that I was reporting my breakthrough about “good” and “bad” technology. I had found that “good” or “bad” technology happens because of users’ actions, and you can’t prevent users from using badly a technology because you can’t control users’ intentions. No application can filter its users according to their intentions (no application can read your mind, yet). Well, apparently I was wrong because that’s exactly what G+ name policy is trying to do. The article reports that Eric Smidth said:

would be better if we knew you were a real person rather than a dog or a fake person. Some people are just evil and we should be able to ID them and rank them downward.

which implies that “using fake name” => “has bad intentions” => filter.

G+ is not a creative tool

For me G+ name policy just means that G+ is clearly not destined to be a creative tool. It’s rather meant to Continue reading →

Posted in News

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Book review: The myths of innovation by Scott Berkun

Posted on August 29, 2011 by eloone
The myths of innovation

The myths of innovation - Scott Berkun, O'reilly

So I read this book “The myths of innovation” by Scott Berkun a few weeks ago, and I’m going to review it now to see what I learned from it.

As the title suggests, the book aims at clearing all the myths we usually believe in when it comes to innovation. The book is not a history book, so it doesn’t tell the story of innovations one by one to detail how they happened. It’s rather like a long blog article, with anecdotes about some innovations and interesting insights about what innovations imply, and how they happen realistically.

Context and influence

What I retained from the book is that innovations depend a lot on the context of a period, the innovator’s network and personality, historians, journalists… Continue reading →

Posted in Inspiration, Books

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Hej Stockholm !

Posted on August 21, 2011 by eloone

Sweden’s sky and sun = the origin of Sweden’s flag

So I went to Stockholm for 5 days. I wanted to go there since last year, and recently I realized nothing was stopping me. So I went.

This time I learned from last experience in Cologne and played it old fashioned 20th century style: I bought a travel guide. Also since last time Gmaps upgraded with the offline mode, so I took the opportunity to test it in real life conditions and pre-cached the Stockholm map before leaving. To complete my serious preparation, I also stored a lot of information in the form of pdfs, notes, etc. in my phone to avoid carrying any form of paper (…other than the guide and …passport). Finally, there was nothing particularly technological about my holidays (20th century style) but I’d like to highlight these discoveries: the nobel prize, museums in Stockholm and the “lagom” principle that very much inspired me.

 ***

But first, let’s debrief about how I improved the logistics of my holidays by mentally accepting that there is no such thing as a global knowledge resource available from anywhere and anytime.

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Posted in Favourites, Inspiration, Discoveries, Stories, Travels, U.I, U.X

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Trip to Cologne: using the Internet on holidays

The real point of the Internet is to explore the unknown anytime and everywhere

Posted on July 9, 2011 by eloone

Ich liebe Köln!

I went on holidays to Cologne a few weeks ago. It was great and I realized how dependent we have become on the Internet and how it’s becoming a necessity, even during holidays.

A few years ago we would have planned the trip searching what exactly to see and do there before leaving. Today, we go on holiday in the mindset that we can search for what to do and see once we are there because we count on the Internet to guide us. We rely on the Internet because we are used to have it at home, in the pocket, everywhere. The Internet avoids us the planning and allows us to live more spontaneously in a “decide as you go” mode. When I say the Internet here, I refer to mobile Internet on the smartphone, the most convenient use on holidays. Also I mainly refer to Google’s services and I’m going to describe in this post how very useful and pleasant these were for us during the holidays. Using the mobile Internet abroad made me realize the real point of the Internet: explore the unknown.

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Posted in Inspiration, Stories, Travels, Technology saves me

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Show me the numbers !!!!

The use of numbers to describe online representations of people: the difference between a database of things and a database of "people"

Posted on May 24, 2011 by eloone

This article is about the forced display of numbers to describe online representations of people, it studies the cases of Twitter and Facebook. What is the difference between an online database of things, like an online shop, and an online database of “people”, like a social network? What’s wrong with numbers? The answer could seem common sense, but this reflection was intentionally developed in detail for the technical minds. Continue reading →

I recently noticed that now when someone adds you as a friend on Facebook, this line appears under the name :

I find this line very inappropriate. Why is it there? Am I supposed to judge this person from those numbers? And make my decision of confirming or refusing based on these numbers? WHY ? Maybe for people who use Facebook to add strangers it’s useful to know if the account is real or not, but if really the goal is to “connect people” why tag them with numbers like this?

You know, it feels like when you see a product, you immediately look for the price tag. This line feels like the price tag. It’s like your scores. A measure of your influence and even worthiness. What use could this have other than to make people judge each other by numbers? Is it to encourage people to post more, have more friends etc? I wonder how the meeting to decide this went …

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Posted in Favourites, Observations, Thinking, Identity, Humanism, Philosophy

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How to install the printer canon mx340 wi-fi without the cd on mac

Posted on April 8, 2011 by eloone

This is not a usual post but it can be useful for those who struggle installing a wi-fi printer without the setup CD on a mac. I just bought the canon mx 340 printer, unpacked it tonight and unfortunately I realized my CD reader didn’t work. So I couldn’t use the setup CD and go through the setting up of the wi-fi connection after setting up everything else before that. Here is what I did to make it work.
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Posted in Tutorials

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