Minimalism

Since returning home form university I have spent far too much time thinking. In particular about the contrast between these two places. One thing that on this occasion seems to be bothering more than anything else is how I have managed to live in a room where I could describe almost everything as an essential and now there’s a house full of things that seem either pointless or obsolete. Hence I seem to be increasingly advocating a minimalist way of living.

We are living in the transition to digital media – CDs are a classic example of old technology now taking up vast amounts of space in the home. A single portable hard drive can replace the entire CD rack. And the same thing is happening with video and perhaps with books sometime in the near future. There are other things too that seem to have their days numbered – there is no place for the stapler in a digital world, for example. Yet these things still make the trip to university - for now. There’s far too much more, however, that’s just been bought. It’s not outdated technology or ornamental and is now just cluttering up the place, often in boxes, but kept for sentimental value or forgotten about.

Its nice to live in a society where we can afford to keep and continue buying all of this junk, but our lives should be more measured on how we spend our time than on what we own. Managing large collections of personal belongings requires much time and a large house and hence more maintenance. I feel that perhaps some of the university style living principles should be applied at home – keeping essentials and focusing on how time is spent. Besides, rather than buying an item individually, we should look to share with neighbours where possible (and probably gain a better purchase). That’s another fundamental aspect of student life that seems to have been forgotten at home
All of this would also, of course, be great for the environment with less emissions and less waste. Yet in today’s Britain this seems incredibly difficult when people measure personal wealth and try to compete with neighbours rather than work with them.

Picture Blog: Transport vs. Technology

The near future sees a big battle between the need to transport and the use of technology.  A face to face meeting or a conference call?  A trip to the cinema or download a film from the Internet? Work in an office or at home?  Take a city break or play computer games for a weekend (surely not!)...?

Inform

I seem to be increasingly valuing information as more important than objects that I own.  Particularly unique and original information.  Having spent weeks this year sorting through files, papers and what seems like (but unfortunately is far from) everything in my room, I have refined my ideas on what I actually want to keep.

If it means something to me, it is important to me to keep it.  It seems that far to much does though, so its difficult to sort through my things.  Firstly, tackling those useless "objects", those things that aren't paper or have a use basically, there seems no point in keeping them unless they are on display.  Yet I still keep several collections of things since ts nice to look at them.  Yet they will be meaningless to anyone else and most likely binned when I'm gone.  So I have found myself taking pictures of things I know if I keep it will be even harder to get rid of them next time I do a sort out is helpful.  I can keep pictures of these things on a hard drive taking up an increasingly negligible space as technology progresses.

The information of the picture lasts far longer than the object that's now in the bin.  Ultimately this is true for everything on the Earth.  When the Earth is destroyed, its existence will still be noticeable to people in the future from the light that has been emitted from the sun and its consequential distortions.  An object can't be transmitted as light but a picture can be easily.

This works brilliantly well for all the paper I have lying around.  Its possible now, although its far too time consuming or expensive, to scan in and even have an OCR program read and index all these pieces of paper and have them searchable - accessible to everyone online perhaps - and have them actually utilised rather than stuck in the boxes on top of my wardrobe.

They will also be kept for a lot longer  - once transferred over the Internet, sent out in radio signals to satellites, broadcast across the whole galaxy.  Hopefully it will easily be possible to scan objects in the future to preserve them fully in the future.  If there is actually any value to any of the "information" we produce.

A quick thought (oh dear!)

To add to the "because I was bored" label, I was looking at the map of the underground in the back of my diary and for some reason wondered if it was possible to traverse every tube line by changing at every station (i.e. not staying on any of the trains for more than one stop).  I found one way if you count the DLR (it goes in a tunnel into Bank so I think thats okay) but couldn't do it without it.  Theres the difficulty of teh Waterloo & city only having two stops and the East London Line being very short.  Anyway, don't read this, there should be more interesting stuff on this page.

You could also get on at Old Street to add the other arm of the Northern Line to the trail.  If I do this I'll update this.

Locations (a 20min-ish blog)

As no one seems to read this, I might as well announce that I plan to set up a website about locations. I plan to have general locations which I find promote certain emotions and circumstances. Classic ones for me are in the built environment for example underground railway stations and multi storey car parks.

That is not really the subject of this post, but more the opposite - the irritation of the recurrent use of these in media - especially computer games. Although I personally love the underground stations that pop up in many RPG games, could we have something a bit more original? Some of the old classics, in particular I was thinking of Deus Ex, Rainbow Six, Metal Gear Solid & Half Life, there are many similar locations in the games:

• Warehouses
• Heliports
• Prison Cells
• Snowy Mountains
• Tunnels with or without trains in / air vents
• Lifts
• Ports / dockyards
• Generator Rooms
• Hotels
• and many more!

But we do we get fed up with dodging lasers and security cameras in what really could be almost anywhere without the graphics? I personally seem to play the games with a high priority to explore new virtual worlds, sometimes to annoyingly high detail!

A lot of the above involve transport systems - perhaps due to their generic set up and required functions that we are all familiar with but also because it adds a dynamic feel to the game. Certain locations, however, do seem to create certain moods and when done in the right way with a half decent story line they can be fairly emotional. The industrial style and scale of many, such as the furnace in Metal Gear Solid or the warehouses in Deus Ex add to the significance and dark side of the stories. This presumably helps suck the player into the world which is presumably what we want when we play games. Notably similar situations occur in films where the stories and moods are more vital, but I'm thinking of computer games today. Games give you the opportunity to play about in environments you may visit (or may just know about) such as a warehouse which you wouldn't get to do in real life - so in a way fulfills a real life desire. That seems to be why most games are based on real life situations which most of us won't get to experience - car racing, combat, mass management etc.

Notably the locations often make the most of what a character in the game can do - climb crates, swim underwater, shoot from a distance etc.

So could we get some other good locations? Here are some of my ideas (which may be in games I haven't played):

• a level whilst parachuting in mid air?
• a level on an icy slope with ice buildings?
• more real life landmarks like in some early Rainbow Six games
• mines / construction sites
• fields of crops such as maize
• offices with particular purposes - e.g. stock exchange (okay, the bank in Raven Shield was good)
• a level on a motorway such as in Matrix Reloaded
• more sports grounds / stadiums

but I must admit that I still love the classic locations, especially the underground railways! I also wouldn't want to advocate pointless, purely made up and unrealistic locations (the inside of a plant that produces newspapers?)

Any more suggestions or are we limited?

Some iTunes improvements (5 min blog)

Just as an aside, I've had some of these in mind for a while, but shall I bother emailing apple to tell them?

Firstly, if I spend 79p per track I expect to be able to more with it that I can at the moment.  For example, why don't they sell you it in a form where you have the individual track elements (instruments, voices, special effects etc.) available so that you can either play it as it was edited or select the individual elements that you want to emphesise (by changing volume / equaliser) or even apply special effects.  You could remove an entire instrument if you wanted!  It would be like maxing your own remix but surely easy for apple to do considering that tracks get produced like this (or at least they do if you listen to the music I do).

I would also love it if they could include the lyrics with the songs and have them appear in the top of the box Karaoke style - so you know what it is people are singing and can sing along.  Again it requires the co-operation of the artists but then it would be worth 79p a song!  Also, a slow / fast play button would be nice.

Finally, a little one, they could do with a "start playing from here next" button - how often I am listening to a track but then want it to jump somewhere else afterwards, but will be busy programming / typing up a report by the time it finishes the track and would like it just to jump there automatically.  This would be so useful especially considering VNV Nation have many 6 min + tracks and I could be in the middle of a complex for loop by then!

I don't expect Apple will implement any of this if I emailed them, because people are still paying that 79p (or more for "DRM Free") but it would be great though!

Ditch the desktop and return to terminal computing

Cable TV has been the poor relation in the UK Television market for decades but with the ability to stream on demand content in brilliant standard terrestrial and satellite TV resolutions I began wondering where this personalised television feed could be leading us.

If the current Virgin Media platform can deliver an individual stream of video to each box on its network then there are fairly immediate consequences for traditional TV channels and our video & DVD collections.  I can rent a film from the comfort of my chair for half the price of the video shop and I needn't worry about having to get it back in time or if the disc will be scratched etc.  So when will this brilliant service be extended to cover entire computer systems?

How wonderful would it be to chuck out the desktop computer and replace it with a small cable box with a few USB ports, a keyboard, mouse and television screen.  The screen would receive a full resolution stream from the cable company's computers and the input devices would send commands back via the cable as is possible now using a remote control.  The cable company would then take care of everything else for you.  There needn't be any difference in the look and feel nor operation of the computer since the cable stream would just be what you see on computer screens today.  Simply switch on the box and a desktop would appear instantly with programs and files accessible as they are on your desktop. There would, however, be no need for a powerful computer chip, graphics card and hefty hard drive in the cable box since the cable company would have all that hardware off site in something like today's Internet data centres.  So you simply have the inputs & outputs in your home and the processing and storage taken care of somewhere else.  Use the cable box's USB ports to attach your camera and USB drive.

This system would offer many advantages including:

• No more waiting for the computer to boot up - just switch on the screen & cable box and its instantly ready to log in since the cable operators computers are always on
• You would pay monthly or as you go rather than paying one large sum to buy your PC.  The Internet would also be included in this price
• Less time wasted trying to sort out technical problems since most hardware is maintained by the cable operator so little or no technical knowledge required
• The processing power and storage is shared.  This means that all of today's wasted storage and processing power inside the worlds desktops will be shared out and thus less needed in total and this should reduce costs.
• The Internet would be faster due to the location of the cable operators computers on major fibre optic Internet links
• Instant updates of programs and operating system - since you subscribe rather than buy you are always using the most recent version of programs.

There are, of course, several disadvantages of this system, mainly the fact that you rely on your cable connection working to do anything - even access your files.  I don't trust Virgin Media with that at the moment!  There are also the obvious security risks that would result in everyone's data being transmitted over the cable network and stored centrally.

I personally believe that aspects of this future is inescapable due to the ever improving bandwidths of the cable system.  It could end up with laptop devices receiving streams via radio waves.  It could be the return of Terminal Computing.