A life less digital

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  • I am an iPerson

    Oops. I have an iPhone.

    Not long after my smug anti-iPhone post ‘It’s not real until it’s an iPhone app‘, I have become an iPerson. We had a series of internal family phone swaps:

    1. My sneaky brother convinced our mum that he would make better use of her new iPhone. (Well, she wasn’t using it properly anyway …)
    2. Our mum has gone back to her non-i phone.
    3. I have my brother’s old iToy. (As he warned me, the battery is crap, and I think he dropped it in water somewhere… But I’m not fussy.)
    4. My almost-husband has my old non-i phone.

    So, I don’t hate it. My typing/tapping has improved slowly. I like the swiping and swooping of the screen.

    I still don’t think I NEED it, but as expected, I am browsing the web a lot more than I used to, just because I can. And I haven’t even begun to investigate downloading apps yet.

    Brought to you by the Interweb – fingerprints from your ears

    As I marvelled at the amount of ear grease left on my iPhone, I wondered if we could use our unique earprints to replace PINs and passwords. I found out that scientsts have been researching ‘acoustic fingerprints‘ as a way to add security to phones.

  • The long and winding path to photo album happiness

    I saw a little boy peering through a digital camera at a park bench. He was taking many pictures at very close range, possibly quite artistic ones in an abstract way. Grandma bustled over, saying: “Stop wasting the film, William!” The mother sipped her coffee and sighed: “It’s OK mum, it’s DIGITAL. It doesn’t use film.”

    Years ago, I reluctantly gave up on film when it became too expensive to develop. However, I still try to keep my photo albums of printed photos (almost) current. It is a slow and sometimes tedious process of sifting and sorting and procrastinating …

    1. Take far too many pictures. Download them to computer.
    2. Import photos in to Adobe Photoshop Elements. Wait a few days for Paul to tag them (location, people, event etc). Leave them for a while.
    3. When ‘print photos’ has been on my list of things to do for many weeks, I start doing the first photo cull. Delete the following:
    • any shots where I look confused, odd and/or old
    • the 20 extra shots of the same scene that we took ‘just in case the first one didn’t work out’
    • any photos where the kids had runny noses, strange bruises or too much blue icing on their faces.
    Then I get bored.
    4. A few weeks later, go back and realise that we still have too many photos. Delete even more photos of the kids looking cute. We have lots of those already.
    5. Finally upload the limited selection to Flikr. This is our online backup of hi-res files.
    6. Then transfer from Flikr to Snapfish for printing. Feel a bit worried when I see that the shopping cart has $80 of photos to print. Make a cup of tea.
    7. Delete more photos from shopping cart. Make the order and wait for pictures.
    8. A few days later, pictures arrive. I flick through them and leave them on the shelf next to the photo albums. Some time passes.
    9. I put the pictures in chronological order, and then slot them in to the photo album. I write in dates pictures were taken and some locations. Hooray – the photo albums are up to date. (NB: Since step 1 above, we have taken many many more pictures… sigh …)
    10. A few months later, upload some to Facebook.

    Is it worth it?

    Brought to you by the InterWeb – your face is as big as my bed

    I love you so much that I made your face my duvet cover – see personalised bedding! I can imagine a charming picture of hubby as the duvet and a lovely child on each pillow.

  • It’s not real until it’s an iPhone app

    No, I don’t have an iPhone. My mother has one*, but I don’t. They are very pretty, but I don’t quite see the point. Not yet. Because my mobile is only OK-but-not-great for web browsing, I don’t do it much. Key times for web browsing so far have been:

    • waiting for a train
    • waiting for my husband who is in the hardware store, whilst I sit in the car with sleeping kids
    • waiting for the bank teller to methodically stamp his/her bits of paper and open/shut drawers.

    I am very attracted to the iPhone’s clean, modern look. If I buy one, I am sure I will use it a lot, and then wonder how I coped without it. Until then, I am happy to not know what I am missing.

    *My mother only uses her iPhone to make and receive calls, so I wouldn’t say that she is fully exploring the rich and varied world of Internet goodness with it. However, she does look very contemporary.

    My iPhone observations

    Many of the cool iPhone features are cool because they look like the real-life (non-digital) thing they are simulating.  When the early-adopters cradled their new itoys in their palms and displayed their latest purchases, they showed me calculators that looked JUST LIKE a real calculator; pinball games that looked JUST LIKE real pinball games ; maps that looked JUST LIKE real maps ….

    Why are physical things just automatically cooler when they become digital? Why is one of the definitions of online coolness, how Real it looks?

    I can not quite get the hang of the touch screen for typing. I felt very silly because I was typing like a unco-ordinated fish, if a fish was wanting to send a text message. Previous studies have shown that the iPhone keypad is less efficient than physical QWERTY keypads, so I’m not alone.

    Brought to you by the InterWeb – clever animals in labs

    At the University of Vienna, they have a department of Cognitive Biology. They have pigeons, clever dogs, and even tortoises in their fascinating labs.

  • Microwave cuisine

    Following on from my post last month about life before microwaves …

    A friend, whose mother was an early-adopter of microwave technology, demonstrated how to magically nuke chunks of Coon cheddar cheese on Salada crackers (quick and tasty hors d’oeuvre in seconds!). When we got our own microwave, I used to melt chocolates* then eat them with a teaspoon (a quick and tasty dessert in seconds!).

    *I believe they were After Eight dinner mints, sadly no longer fashionable in Australia.

    Microwave alive

    I was an avid fan of X-files. In the episode Ghost in the Machine, various digital devices start taking on a life of their own. Not long after watching this, I came home by myself one day and noticed that the microwave display was flashing ominously: “help me help me help me”. My first thought was, of course, “My mother’s microwave is self-aware, and it’s talking to me! How do I find out if we have an X-files department in Melbourne?!” A few calmer seconds later, I realised that there had been a local power blackout and all other appliances also needed to be reset. I was a little disappointed.

    Lots of people think the Ghost in the machine episode sucked. See IMDB and wikipedia entries, where fanboys and girls are really too harsh. It was the 90’s and I remember that episode fondly.

    Brought to you by the Interweb – half a kilo of chocolate, they call it a Slab!

    It’s 500g of chocolate, so of course they call it a slab.  See the shiny pictures of Giant Chocolate Slabs.

  • Wonderful whistles

    The platform attendant (is this what they are called these days?) at the train station yesterday afternoon held a blue flag in one hand, a shiny gold tote bag in the other, and a whistle in her mouth. Most other train staff I have seen accessorise with an orange safety vest and a weary expression of unhelpfulness. I was very curious as to what she had in her gold not-quite-a-handbag. The standard wallet, keys, tissues and a lipstick? Or perhaps lots of flags in different amusing colours?

    I like the fact that the train guards still use whistles. It’s reassuring to see an object that is simple, real (not virtual) and efficient being used for it’s original purpose. I hope they won’t be replaced by electronic devices with genuine whistle-simulation software.

    Brought to you by the InterWeb – toy nunchuck with whistles

    I found a description of a patent for a scary toy. “A toy double club with whistle including two elongate tubular bodies connected with a chain, each tubular body having a whistle in its inner cavity …” Just what every parent is looking for – a  noisy AND dangerous toy weapon.

  • Is life better if it’s on a screen?

    Yesterday we went in to the city to take a look at the Chinese New Year celebrations. We found ourselves at a rather damp market, watching ‘cultural performances’ of varying quality. The troupe of little girls in gold and pink sequins performing cute military-style arm gestures was adorable. The women doing Chinese Salsa were less impressive. How can you possibly combine Latin passion with Chinese distaste for public display of emotion?

    The kids were fascinated by the costumes and dancing. However, instead of watching the real, live actual people on stage, they kept gravitating towards the huge screen showing the same performance. They were standing in front of the stage, beneath the camera that was filming the performance, watching the screen… Why is the screen always more compelling than the stage?

    We go to restaurants with televisions more often than is fashionable. I am both relieved that there will be something to keep the kids sitting still, and offended that they find the screen more interesting than me.

    Brought to you by the InterWeb – Chinese salsa

    I Googled ‘Chinese salsa’ and came up with this story on page 3 of the results: Chinese company makes soy sauce from human hair. If it’s on Google, it must be true.

  • New iphone app – Mind the milk?

    Before we had a microwave, we used to have a small saucepan for heating up milk. We poured the milk into the saucepan, turned on the stove and waited for the milk to heat up. I remember having to be really careful not to miss that split second when the milk changed from a calm white pond to a bubbling cauldron of unhappy calcium.

    I am not bemoaning the lost art of milk-warming up. I could not imagine living without the convenience of the microwave. As an equation, “freezer + microwave = happy working mother”. However, I do find myself operating in ESMT zone (Eastern Standard Microwave Time). In ESMT, 45 seconds is a long time in which to produce a balanced family dinner.

    Microwaves allow me to rush around the kitchen conjuring up meals in minutes. But sometimes I miss the excuse to slow down and watch the milk. Virtual bubblewrap has been around for ages, so could this be the next iPhone app – Mind the milk? You heard it first here …

    Brought to you by the InterWeb – Virtual bubble wrap

    I found the official Bubble Wrap site, set up by the manufacturer Sealed Air Corporation. Aside from the virtual Bubble Wrap game (tucked away in the “bubblewrapfun” area) Bubble Wrap had a birthday this year and, of course, you can become a facebook fan.

    I wonder what lucky bubble-happy person looks after this site?

  • A life less digital

    A life less digital

    I am a digital immigrant. When I started my career, we would always put a hyphen in e-mail. I threw myself happily in to e-anything. Now, my children are digital natives, but I want them to remember the old country. We can participate online, embrace technology, and still appreciate life offline.