John Siracusa and Merlin Mann try to figure out exactly how they got this way.

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#195: Sloppy Focus

November 12th, 2022 · 103 minutes

Trade-offs, risks, and feature requests relating to the next generation of panopticons.

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Download: MP3 (94.93 MB)

Links and Show Notes

Things kick off with about ten minutes of very useful nail clipper talk.

Up next, lots of good listener Follow-Up on the origins of CSS color names, how to pause a TikTok with your meat fingers, plus revealing some scalable methods for finding free money from the government.

Next, comes some FU on Lifestreams that somehow kind of becomes the basis for the rest of the episode.

How can we track the stuff that's valuable to us—but also provide the specificity and context needed to annotate that data in a way that makes it actionable?

Then, of course, you wonder about the privacy implications of living in a panopticon. Sure isn't working out too great for the Uyghurs. Won't somebody please think of the children?

The digital divide is real, but you may not realize how real until you watch someone else use a computer. Secret gestures, powerful browser plug-ins, and even general internet hygiene are still anything but evenly distributed.

Finally, John shows Merlin how to fix his notifications even as he continues to refuse a very generous job offer.

(Recorded Thursday, November 3, 2022)

Credits

The Roderick on the Line episode where Merlin talks about his haircut
Alex Sexton's talk about X11 colors - YouTube
Annotations in NCSA Mosaic
Screenshot of NCSA Mosaic on X11
Unclaimed property meta-search: missingmoney.com
Lifestream - Wikipedia
Yale Lifestreams homepage
RecDiffs episode #169 (November 13, 2021) where we discussed Lifestreams
Timestamp link to RecDiffs #169 where we discussed Lifestreams (at 53 minutes 22 seconds)
ATP episode 66 (May 21, 2014) where John talks about Lifestreams
Timestamp link to ATP #66 where John talks about Lifestreams (at 1 hour 52 seconds)
Rewind.ai
"How much does Rewind cost?"
The ATP episode #507 where John talks about Rewind.ai
Black Mirror episode - The Entire History of You
San Junipero - Netflix
What Next: TBD - "Big Brother, Big Tech, and China"

COVID may be an inflection point in the relationship between the surveillance state and the surveilled.

RescueTime Mac app
IINA media player for the Mac
1987 IBM PS/2 Computer Family Classic Intro - YouTube
IBM PCjr - Wikipedia
The Rape of Europa (2006) - Reference View - IMDb

The story of Nazi Germany's plundering of Europe's great works of art during World War II and Allied efforts to minimize the damage.

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Pinboard
Mozilla - Wikipedia
Firefox - Wikipedia
Greasemonkey - Wikipedia
Think of the children - Wikipedia
How to undo/redo on an iPhone - PhoneArena