TOC 2010: Arianna Huffington, ‘Publishing Is Dead; Long Live Publishing!’

Self-expression is the new entertainment. So, you know, we used to never question the fact that people could be sitting on a couch for seven hours watching bad TV. Right, and nobody said, “why are they doing that without anybody paying them?”

Clay Shirky also speaks about how passive consumption need not be the primary means of entertainment in Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, one of my favourite of his talks.

Seen Not Heard—How obscure security makes school suck

Though watching students at home through the webcams of their school-provided laptops may be mercifully rare—I mean, what the hell were those teachers thinking?—running a school like a hotbed of violence does no favours to the kids there.

Written by a recent graduate of Virginia’s public school system, this article describes the draconian measures on offer at his old school, which he says made the children feel more paranoid, not more safe.

Harmony — Procedural drawing tool

A quirky, wonderful drawing program. This is just my playing with the brushes, but even so I find the interplay of form just magical.

It’s written using JavaScript and Canvas, so you’ll need a non-IE browser to play along.

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.