Walter Jon Williams - Aristoi

Undeva în viitorul îndepărtat, Pământul a fost consumat de nanoboți scăpați de sub control. Dar aceeași tehnologie e mai apoi folosită de atotputernicii Aristoi pentru a‑l reconstrui atom cu atom din modelele digitale existente. La fel ca planeta, aceștia au refăcut societatea umană pe o bază mai solidă, o civilizație stabilă, fericită și îndestulată sub conducerea lor. Dacă vă gândiți că Aristoi‑i sunt vreo rasă milostivă de extratereștrii vă înșelați: sunt oameni ca toți ceilalți, dar care au demonstrat capacitatea și responsabilitatea de a mânui cele mai puternice și mai periculoase tehnologii ale Omului pentru binele societății.

Lumea imaginată de autor în roman e foarte complexă și originală printre alte opere de gen, o utopie bazată pe numeroase elemente de tehnologia avansată: nanotehnologia care poate construi orice de la minuscule medicamente pentru eliminarea bolilor la întregi nave și planete, biotehnologia care permite o viață îndelungată, de sute de ani, întreruptă doar de colapsul numit popular boala Dorian Grey, comunicațiile tahionice instantanee care mențin coeziunea coloniilor, realitatea virtuală botezată oneirochronon folosită ca mediu de comunicare, creație și distracție, și Hyperlogos‑ul, versiunea hipertrofiată a Internetului actual, care arhivează practic toată informația trecută și actuală în timp real. Societatea este structurată oarecum într‑un sistem de caste, în vârf Aristoi‑i, imediat sub ei Therapontes, care studiază pentru a deveni la rândul lor Aristoi, și cu populația obișnuită – Demos‑ul – la bază. Granițele între ele sunt însă flexibile, și statutul de Aristoi e acordat pe merit, după ani de studii și examene dificile care fac dovada inteligenței, creativității, dar și ambiției candidatului. Pentru că odată promovat printre „Cei mai buni”, noul Aristoi va conduce mai mult sau mai puțin la discreție un domeniu de câteva sisteme solare, impunându‑și viziunea și stilul propriu asupra zonei și locuitorilor.

Tips for Twitter’s iOS app

Apparently one of the first apps I installed on my iPhone, I still use Twitter (currently at version 5.0.4) more or less every day; it’s not as good as desktop TweetDeck, especially for managing multiple accounts, but it will have to do until Twitter decides to properly update that app for mobile. Even so, the default Twitter app for iOS has some neat features designed for mobile, some even not found on the web site:

• Clicking on the ‘Compose new Tweet’ button will auto-populate the compose box depending on the current screen: if you are viewing a search page it will add that hashtag to the tweet; if you have a tweet open it will start a @-reply to that Twitter user, the same if you click ‘compose’ from a profile page.
• Like in the OS Mail app, you can tap and hold the ‘Compose’ button to quickly open the list of drafts. I’m not exactly sure who saves tweets as drafts, but the feature is there nonetheless.
• You probably already know you can swipe over a tweet in the timeline to see a list a quick actions like Reply, Retweet and Favorite. In case of sponsored tweets, this swipe menu also includes an option to remove that tweet from your timeline.
• If you use multiple accounts you can switch between them while replying to a tweet: click and hold the section above the text box for a couple of seconds, then the app will bring up the account selection screen and you can choose to reply from another account.

Firefox with built-in Facebook Messenger

As announced during the summer, Firefox released a new version with social integration – for now only Facebook. Currently available in the Beta version of Firefox 17 and in the Aurora and Nightly braches, you can theoretically activate it just by visiting Facebook and accepting the prompt. That didn’t work for me, probably because I use the Aurora channel; in that case it can be enabled via an about:config entry: toggle on social.enabled.

Once the feature enabled and after logging in to Facebook, Firefox will gain an additional set of four buttons on the main toolbar bar, as well as a ‘Like’-button inside the address field, and a new sidebar filled with Facebook real-time updates and chat. The four buttons reflect the main actions on the Facebook site, providing access to the profile, friend requests, messages and notification without visiting the site. It’s like having a mini-Facebook following you all around the web.

Twitter is becoming more like Facebook every day

There has been a lot of controversy lately around the changes Twitter made to the API rules, practically restricting what developers can and can’t do with the data. Compared to other ‘walled gardens’ they may not seem that bad, only compared to the relative freedom from a couple of months ago. The way I see it, Twitter is trying to steer its business and app ecosystem in a similar direction to Facebook, the only difference being one of perception. Facebook was always considered ‘closed’ and hasn’t really encouraged third-party apps to display the stream; that was in any case much harder because of the data complexity, with several stories types and numerous layers of privacy settings. On the other hand Twitter was viewed as ‘open’ – even though it’s not; it was probably a misperception of the public nature and the simplicity of the network. On a related note, it’s interesting how every now and then a start-up proclaimed itself the open alternative to Facebook; but only this year we have a start-up (app.net) making the same claim for Twitter.

There are many clues to this slow transformation. Aside from the API changes, the new Twitter Cards are probably the biggest give-away: Facebook had rich previews of the shared content for as long as I remember – they provide a more diverse experience and decrease the need for users to navigate away from the site. Twitter Cards have basically the same role – they even use the same OpenGraph markup – showing a snippet and thumbnails for shared links or allowing you to play videos without going to the original site. The new appearance of tweets on the web is similar to Facebook, with the number of likes/retweets on the bottom; Twitter also started showing replies inline, matching the look of Facebook comments. Heck, even the new profiles resemble Facebook’s Timeline with a large, banner-like background photo.

File naming on Canon digital EOS cameras

A couple of months ago, just a few days before leaving for Paris, I finally made the switch to digital photography. I figured I would be much more comfortable than carrying film cartridges all around Paris and swapping them after only 36 frames. And I also got a great deal for a Canon EOS 600D from a local shop, since Canon was about to launch a new model.

Overall I am very happy with the camera. The articulated screen is practical because it helps conserve battery power – I keep it closed most of the time. My habits as a film photographer come in very handy here, because I am used to not reviewing every single shot on a screen – you simply can’t do that with film, so you need to develop a sense of how the picture will turn out simply by looking at the scene and knowing how the camera will capture it. It wasn’t that easy at first, because the new camera tends to over-expose some scenes, for example in dark churches, which can ruin the atmosphere, but in time I learned when to apply some exposure correction.

One thing that bugged me in the first days of using the camera, after I started downloading files to the PC, was the unusual naming convention. I got a mix of files, some named IMG_xxxx, some _MG_xxxx. Since I worked in a Canon support center a couple of years back, I distinctly remembered there was a reason behind this, but just couldn’t recall the specifics. I found the answer pretty quickly online: EOS cameras use the two file name formats to distinguish between photos captured in the sRGB and Adobe RGB color space. But that explanation quickly led to another question: I selected Adobe RGB in the settings and didn’t change it back and forth during the day, so why were the photos named differently?

Blogger mobile templates with (buggy) swipe navigation

As many bloggers, I like to monitor when my articles get shared on social networks and what do people think about them – actually only on Twitter with a saved search in TweetDeck. A couple of days ago, someone complained on Twitter that a post was unreadable on mobile. I use one of Blogger’s default templates and I hadn’t noticed anything wrong with it previously. After asking for some clarifications, it turns out that mobile templates support a limited set of gestures: you can swipe right or left to navigate to the previous or next post. The problem is this interferes with another native iOS gesture, pinch-to-zoom: if you pinch the page, instead of zooming, Blogger jumps to another article! This issue seems limited to mobile Safari, because in Chrome pinching doesn’t cause the browser to navigate away. At first I thought it’s a bug introduced in iOS 6, but the feature is more than one year old and some complained about similar issues six months ago, so I guess nobody took the time to test the mobile templates on an iPhone…

@exde601e The page content isn’t scaled to the viewport so it’s too large. But you can’t pinch to zoom out as this loads another/next post.

— Jamie Reynolds (@jamusreynolds) October 11, 2012

There is no easy solution it you want your readers to have a good mobile experience: the desktop templates are often too bloated with widgets to fit into a portrait-oriented small screen, the mobile dynamic templates are much slower to load and the sharing buttons ‘leak’ out of the page – again an indication that the team designing the templates is not really focused on mobile. And designing a unique responsive template for both desktop and mobile is unfortunately not something an average blogger can do…

Update: A reader found a solution from the Blogger help forums and shared it in the comments: How can I disable the arrow-slider on mobile?.

David Brin - The River of Time

Continuând cu povestirile, am luat la rând o colecție mai veche – dar adusă la zi în 2012 – a lui David Brin. Deși nu am citit până acum decât un roman al lui – și acela scris în colaborare cu Gregory Benford – a rămas destul de sus în lista mea de preferințe, ba chiar am reușit să‑l citesc de două ori. Colecția de față se axează în general pe întrebarea „Suntem singuri în Univers?” și, dacă da, „De ce?” și încearcă numeroase răspunsuri la ea, mai mult sau mai puțin serioase; dar e loc și de ceva anticipație și istorii alternative.