#636; In which a Hunter goes fishing: “

“

Pocket Kite: “

I’ve collected quite an assortment of logo emblazoned pens, mousepads, stress balls, and other tchotchkes at professional conferences, but far and away the most fun and useful (as in, it gets used) item I have picked up is the pocket kite. The pocket kite is a small sled-style kite that is kept in a small zippered pouch attached to a key ring that also contains a little reel loaded with kite string.

The kite is very easy to fly, but doesn’t have any wooden supports or anything else that could break. The pouch is barely 3 inches across and weighs next to nothing, so it is easy toss into a backpack for a hike. I keep mine in the courier bag that goes with me everywhere. It is really fun to bust it out when unexpected kite flying opportunities arise. Day at the beach; reaching a summit; dull company picnic. Unless you are a hardcore kite nut, you probably aren’t hanging around waiting for a windy day so you can drop everything and go fly a kite. A pocket kite is ready when you are. And it’s cheap, so when it inevitably gets stuck in a tree, it’s not the end of the world.

— Toby Plewak

Stow’n Go Pocket Kite

$5

Available from Uncles Games

Manufactured by Toysmith

“

DFS: ““

Do we play Farmville because we’re polite?: “

Mental Floss clues us into an interesting article on MediaCommons about why we play Farmville — basically, because we’ve been trained to not be able to ignore social obligations.

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

I don’t play Farmville, but I do keep my Facebook page pretty app-free because I fear getting entangled in such obligations.

Cultivated Play: Farmville

“

Steam offers deep-discount game sale: “

PC (and now Mac!) digital download service Steam has kicked off a site-wide sale offering big discounts on everything from AAA to indie, including bundles like the ‘Northern Lights’ pack (above) — which includes Crayon Physics, the aforementioned Saira and the excellent UK indie Plain Sight — and the Best of the Underground pack.

Also of note, all the games from Darwinia creators Introversion are bundled for $5, and even recent releases like BioShock 2 and Borderlands are around half off (and available in their own 2K bundle).

The Steam store site has the full listing of discounted items, which remain on sale until July 4.

“

f.lux: “

f.lux is a free piece of software that slowly shifts the color temperature of your computer monitor throughout the day in order to adapt it to the natural rhythm of light. I first downloaded it after reading about Seth Robert’s self-experimentation involving sleep. As Roberts points out, research indicates that certain color temperatures stimulate wakefulness and affect circadian rhythms. This is why people with Seasonal Affective Disorder use blue light devices that supposedly mimic the blue sky of summer. By using f.lux to shift the temperature of a computer monitor away from blue light and towards red after natural light has faded the idea is that it will diminish the unintended wakefulness caused by the screen and allow for a more restful sleep.

While I am not as careful a self-experimenter as Seth Roberts, I have noticed that when I use f.lux not only do I get sleepier sooner but that I also awake earlier. By simply disabling the program for an hour (an option that is built into the software) I also notice an immediate sense of renewed wakefulness. The shift in color temperature is significant and immediately noticeable when I use my computer at night, but not in a way that negatively impacts the quality of the image on screen (and when it does, or if I need to edit photos, I simply disable it).

The program is available for Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista/7. A similar program called Redshift is available for Linux users.

— Oliver Hulland

f.lux

Free

Available from f.lux

Produced by stereopsis

“

As usual, Charlie Stross pretty much nails it.

“In a nutshell: the iPhone swallowed the iPod, the satnav, the phone, and the pocket camera. The iPad swallows the PMP, the ebook reader, and the netbook.”
…
“As for the big picture: this thing is roughly where the Macintosh was in late 1984. Which is to say, a lot of people don’t get it, and think it’s a toy — and in truth, there’s a lot of stuff it doesn’t do properly yet. But it’s an astonishingly promising toy. And what it promises is an entirely new way of getting stuff done. I think it’s going to be Macintosh 2.0. And today, even if you’re reading this in Internet Explorer on a desktop PC, your PC is a Macintosh clone: because the mouse-and-window based Macintosh user interface won.”

Bruce Sterling’s Shareable.net story about astroturfer gulag: “Shareable.net’s series of science fiction stories about societies built on sharing and sustainability continues, this time with a deeply ambivalent, darkly hilarious story by Bruce Sterling called ‘The Exterminator’s Want-Ad,’ about the special rehab prison that corporate astroturfers are sent to after climate collapse:

Personally, I loved to buy stuff: I admired a consumer society. I sincerely liked to carry out a clean, crisp, commercial transaction: the kind where you simply pay some money for goods and services. I liked driving my SUV to the mall, whipping out my alligator wallet, and buying myself some hard liquor, a steak dinner, and maybe a stripper. All that awful stuff at the Pottery Barn and Banana Republic, when you never knew ‘Who the hell was buying that?’ That guy was me.

Claire and I hated the sharing networks, because we were paid to hate them. We hated all social networks, like Facebook, because they destroyed the media that we owned. We certainly hated free software, because it was like some ever-growing anti-commercial fungus. We hated search engines and network aggregators, people like Google — not because Google was evil, but because they weren’t. We really hated ‘file-sharers’ — the swarming pirates who were chewing up the wealth of our commercial sponsors.

We hated all networks on principle: we even hated power networks. Wind and solar only sorta worked, and were very expensive. We despised green power networks because climate change was a myth. Until the climate actually changed. Then the honchos who paid us started drinking themselves to death.

The Exterminator’s Want-Ad

(Image: claytonjayscott.com)

“

Modern gadgets made in 1977: “

Alex Varanese’s sunset-hued walnut burl wonderland is a place I’d be happy to spend my evenings. From a blog post announcing his latest trip to the old-school:

This project is undoubtedly my most conceptually ambitious work to date. It comprises 14 full-sized, 18×24′ prints that explore the awesomely absurd idea of time travelers who return to the late 1970’s to release the technology of 2010 and dominate the world of consumer electronics. I re-imagined four modern products as if they existed over 30 years ago and tried to bring them to life through fake print ads, abstract glamour shots, and even a characteristically pretentious type treatment or two.

It also shows how modern ‘retro’ gadget designs are often quite half-baked compared to the real (fake) thing. If you’re going to go retro, you should either be so good at understanding the timeless that few even notice what you’re up to (consider how Apple often channels Braun) or basically do what Alex did here, which is make everything out of wood and spidery LEDs.

Gallery [Behance via Waxy]

“

Errol Morris: The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is: “In his ongoing series of fascinating NYT essays on the ‘influence and uses of photography,’ documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviews David Dunning, co-author of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which says stupid people are too stupid to realize they are stupid.

Morris opens his piece with the story of attempted bank robber MacArthur Wheeler, who rubbed lemon juice on his face before entering the bank because he believed it would render him invisible to security cameras. ‘If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber,’ writes Morris, ‘perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.’

DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS: Why not?

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)

“