The day I can do without a keyboard case for the iPad, I’m getting one of Miranda’s Moodycases.  These things just look gorgeous.

Nice video, too.

Sun Glitters – It takes me from Victor Ferreira / Sun Glitters on Vimeo.

• Future Perfect » A Sense of Ownership
  "Facial recognition will be a growing source of friction because the companies that are building businesses around connecting the physical you to some form of online identity will, over time connect people to the online you that makes them the most revenue, rather than the online you that makes the most sense to you. A lot of this will happen in the background, but there it will have sufficient visibility to be annoying e.g. a picture of your face as a search parameter triggering an advertisement for a particular kind of product."
  (tags:tech social money comms )
• America Elect — Minimally Minimal
  "I am a Canadian that studied industrial design. It’s not surprising that I often got strange looks when I told people about my thesis project to redesign America’s voting system. The reason is simple though – I find America to be an amazing and fascinating nation and also like exploring the diverse applications of industrial design thinking. The 2012 election was the first time I experienced an American election first hand. I found it to be absolutely exciting and intriguing. I loved it." This is, as all his posts are, beautiful and interesting. It is also full-on Bigend-Draperism — control through the emotional leverage of nostalgia. Quite brilliant.
  (tags:design )
• Status Flight and the Gendering of Google Glass » Cyborgology
  "I thought about titling this post, “Google Glass: The Beginning of White Flight from Smartphones,” but instead I’m going to propose a new term, status flight, to describe what happens when elites abandon a status symbol that’s lost its signifying power after becoming too quotidian and ubiquitous."
  (tags:culture social phones comms )

The network is the drone’s native environment. So, we must – like our colleagues in biology – see them as part of this wider ecology, if we want to better understand their use and their meaning.

A great “state of play” talk by Honor Harger, who ran the IMPROVING REALITY thing I spoke at last year.

Anab Jain gave an updated version of her barnstorming “Design For The New Normal” talk at NEXT13 that was heavily buzzed about.  Shamefully, NEXT13 hasn’t gotten a video of it up, but Anab has put up the text and slides of the talk.  It’s an upgraded download of the present strangeness, and very much worth your time.

Because, if you’re a regular reader, you know I’m shit at keeping track of things.  So this is one of those posts that’s mostly for my own benefit.  That I’m burying on a Saturday night.

I have Skype and WhatsApp.  Hilariously, almost nobody has my Skype and WhatsApp IDs.

The first two screens of my phone are always the most-used apps, and the apps I kind of feel like I should be using more.  If I’d shot this yesterday, Days would have been on there, but I tried that app today, and it didn’t seem to be in the mood to let me use it, so. 

Downcast is a pretty good podcast app.  A damn sight better than having to manage them through iTunes or Apple’s appalling Podcast app that I’ve railed about before.

You may, if you haven’t passed out already, have noticed there’s not a writing app in the first two screens.  There are a couple in the back screens.  But I don’t want a writing app staring at me on the phone, demanding I write something in it.  (The WordPress app, on the other hand, is there specifically to taunt me.  I am way out of practise with this blogging shit.)  The phone is, first and foremost, a thing that gathers information.  And I live on this goddamn phone.  I can and have written on it, using a foldaway Bluetooth keyboard, and it works fine.  But I find – and here is the proof, horribly, now I look at it –- that, as much as I talk about devices needing to be equipped as communication and creation tools, it’s become a consumption device.

Which is kind of an interesting thing that I didn’t realise until I put this up here.

• The Prefuture of Synthetic Biology « NextNature.net
  "Somewhere between a vat of expensive face cream and a baby Neanderthal lies a probable future for synthetic biology."
  (tags:future )
• soundcloud.com
  D Towards K toronto, field, recording, ambient
  (tags:music ifttt soundcloud )
• Booke
  "Booke is a smartphone companion, which will help you capture,
  keep and share all the important moments of your 'real-book' reading experience."
  (tags:apps books )

• BLDGBLOG: Forest Tone
  "Lorenzo Pellegrini, who "gardens" the Risoud Forest in Switzerland to assist the future resonant acoustics of the wood currently growing there. It's a violin garden for the 24th century."
  (tags:eco art )

• How cross-media storytelling is about to change the way that we consume and interact with content
  "The way in which the public consumes media is changing though. Television shows are broadcast globally and social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook allow millions of fans to communicate and debate with one another in real-time. There’s a chance here to move away from a passive, never-changing form of content"
  (tags:media )
• BBC News – Google searches predict market moves
  "The volume of Google searches for finance-related terms may predict moves in markets, research suggests." You'd think that was an obvious signal
  (tags:money )

I’m at an event in Brixton with authors Lauren Beukes and Ben Percy. It sold out weeks ago, but it’s not very big, so I’m expecting a relaxed evening. It’s an overnight trip, because my experiences of trying to get out of Brixton late at night to make the last train have been grim. One time someone tried to stop me getting the last Tube by throwing themselves under it.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t specifically to spite me. But still.

Clatter off to sleep.

Kieron Gillen unwittingly provides the slogan for the Tumblr years.  (via)

It’s not a bad one, as accidental slogans go.  (Though I am still sad that “It’s all about control, Luigi” never caught on.  It could have been the new “son i am disappoint.”)  Though it’s interesting to me that Tumblr’s own gif tumblr hasn’t been active in months.  The Storyboard team there got fired recently, replaced by an algorithmic solution to surfacing content that was rolled back the same day because it didn’t work.  Amusingly, it turned out today that the statement about the Storyboard group firing was actually written by one of them.

It’s a very Tumblr thing.  Kieron’s tumbling through the servers now, alive and looping as pure Tumblarity.  Tumblr loves nothing more than a GIF.

I don’t have much of a presence on Tumblr, but I like it there.  I loved the early tumblelogs that Tumblr moved so quickly to emulate, and what they’ve made out of that cheeky sticky-fingeredness is quite remarkable.  Especially given that they seem to have no visible business model beyond convincing investors to give them money.  Which, I guess, is also impressive: until such time as they have to monetise and their actions in that regard impinge on the tastes of a user base sometimes as touchy and rabid as the old LiveJournal crowd. 

I’d like to think that Tumblr will solve their obvious problems before they crash down like asteroids.  I’d also like to think that most users have copies of their most-loved Tumblr posts.  The year of All I Want To Be Is A GIF would be a very sad thing to look back on, if it turned out you’ve died when the servers were switched off.

• Oh God Robert Scoble Is Wearing His Google Glasses in The Shower
  A warning to a generation
  (tags:tech )

I’ve got my head in a weird and fun piece of work today, so please allow me to distract you with the unusual things kept in Brooklyn by our friends at the Invisible Gallery.