Streams of Content, Limited Attention

From danah boyd, a thoughtful, engrossing piece about how the spread of the means to produce and publish could, perhaps counter-intuitively, make the world more insular and clique-ridden.

	In an era of networked media, we need to recognize that networks are homophilous and operate accordingly. Technology does not inherently disintegrate social divisions. In fact, more often then not, in reinforces them. Only a small percentage of people are inclined to seek out opinions and ideas from cultures other than their own. These people are and should be highly valued in society, but just because people can be what Ethan Zuckerman calls “xenophiles” doesn’t mean they will be.

One possible use for the research into auto-summarisation and related-content-finding tools could be to bring conflicting (balancing?) views into one’s information stream. For those who wish to.

This is a guide to creating a setup which keeps a master copy of media stored on your laptop in sync with a media computer using NAS-based storage. This guide deals with Macs, but I expect it would be easy to adapt. Indeed, I post this more for inspiration rather than concrete instructions.

I have a Media mac attached to my TV to play music, movies and iPlayer. It runs Plex, which allows you to scan a folder into it’s music and movie libraries. The catch: Plex needs to be restarted to pick up new files and add them into its library. The Media mac always runs as the “mediacentre” user.

An Indictment Against Ourselves

Sean Sperte collects two articles about “how we geeks have used complex technology that we understand but the common man doesn’t to ensure our value in the world”: first, an article saying we do and we shouldn’t; second, an almost satirical article proving the point.

When I got my first MacBook a few years ago, I opened Safari and didn’t look back. It’s slick, fast, fits the OS like a glove and renders websites well. So why am I now back with Firefox? Two things: Tree Style Tab and the awesome bar.

The awesome bar I’ve spoken of before, and it’s still just as great, so lets talk about Tree Style Tab.

First, a little bit about how I use a browser. I’m a bit of a tab addict. Before tree style tab, I would group my tabs into different windows. Each window would have a group or two of related tabs. A Twitter tab and a few links opened from tweets. A newspaper’s homepage and several stories open. The website I’m designing and several sites full of reference material. The tabs often stay open for days or weeks before I get around to reading them. It soon adds up to several windows containing several tabs. The total number of tabs spirals.

I was suddenly curious about why I start to crave trashy food when I’m at the pub. I’m sure you know what I mean: when you first walk into the pub, the sea bass looks great, but after a beer I just want something filling, preferably with chips.

People appeal to chemistry, evolution, inhibitions and desires when they try to explain why this happens.

When people appeal to chemistry for justification for their beer-fueled desires, conversation turns to the loss of water and electrolytes during the many toilet breaks—alcohol induces urine flow as chemcases charmingly puts it—as causes for the munchies. The loss of water causes blood to become more concentrated, causing the dehydration symptoms. Several online sources, including chemcases, agree that the loss of electrolytes cause a craving for salt to redress the balance.