Screw you, Cloud

I hate the term cloud computing. I'm generally opposed to the idea of it. I know that this goes against the current fad, but I really really have a philosophical problem with it. Before I go into a long-winded history lesson to make a point, I want to address one point first: the utter stupidity of the name "cloud computing". When ( Read more... )

A bit ago I mentioned the core ideas for Recursed. Well, after registering the most awesome domain name ever, I set up a Wiki, and went to town putting together the core rulesets and some printable playtesting supplies.

The wiki has all of the core stuff, even if most of the pages are protected against edits. The Talk pages aren't, and that's ( Read more... )

I got a bug up my ass the other day, and started working on making a set of rules for a miniatures strategy game. Being the sort of person I am, this is no normal combat game- it involves time travel.

Not the whimsical variant of time travel you'd see in a game like Chrononauts, where you're looking down on all of history and playing with it. No, ( Read more... )

Hey look, the work is partially done for me. Awesome. And Mozilla has an extension for this.

The real trick is to tie it to mobile devices. That's where the future is.

I've been doing some simple Google searches, but I'm looking for information on geolocating web sites. Not websites that can do geolocation, but actually attaching location information to websites, either via a tag or some sort of xml file (like site.com/geolocation.xml) that contains geographic information ( Read more... )

Technology should be smart enough to know what you want it to do. Context is important, and that's the hardest thing to design into software or hardware. The question is- how can we shortcut that ( Read more... )

Given all my Smart Reality musings lately, I've been thinking about some of the things we can do to rate the complexity- or really, the "quality" of user interactions with technology- and I'm not just talking computer technology here. Or even complex technology- a bow and arrow has a user interface. A car has a UI. A club has a UI. A hammer, etc ( Read more... )

One of the biggest issues with most technological interactions is the requirement for the user to enter the context of the technology. Virtual reality is the best example of context switching- in order to use the traditional "according to movies" version of VR, you must engage in a context switch. You shut out reality and replace it with a ( Read more... )

I hate technology. This is my final confession, a shocking revelation (especially when made over the Internet!). I am, truly, a closet Luddite that thinks technology should go away.

Okay, not really. What I do think is that technology should get out of the way. In the ultimate act of self-centered thinking, I think the world (in so far as ( Read more... )

Thought. Custom clients, web page posting interfaces, etc. are kinda ass. Why should we have yet another interface to learn. One thought- create a filesystem interface for user-generated content sites. Instead of using an "upload" tool, I open a word processor, type my journal entry in and format using that word processor's tools, and save it in a ( Read more... )