totalcontent - the blog.: technology

Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

wired for words.

What a 17-year-old book on the language of technology means today.

On Saturday mornings, I’ll often be found in Leamington’s Oxfam Books and Music on Regent Street. It’s a great place to pick up second-hand vinyl and old Penguin paperbacks, and you never quite know what you’re going to find.

The other day I snaffled ‘Wired Style — Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age’ for a couple of quid, which got me thinking not only how rapidly English is evolving now, but how technology is constantly changing the way we write and speak. It was ever thus, I suppose, but these days it’s happening at warp speed. Doing what I do, I’m a bit of a sucker for style guides, and own everything from the Economist and the Guardian, to Oxford and Fowler’s. But ‘Wired Style’ has a different agenda, proclaiming itself a celebration of writing that “jacks us into the soul of a new society”.

Read on...

had we but word enough and time.

OK, I’ll come clean, numbers are not my forté. To me, they’re just confusing marks best left to bookkeepers and accountants. Actually, I’m beginning to think I suffer from a mild form of number dyslexia, often transposing digits and being perennially useless with PIN numbers and phone numbers. So Word Clock, by the ingenious digital designer Simon Heys (currently working at the Times), is a welcome antidote to the number fascism of time. It’s a rather beautiful screen saver (for Mac, PC or iPhone), which tells you the time in written out words, which change… well… every second. You can set it as a full screen of words or a rather elegant spiral, you can change the colours or the typeface. It’s wonderfully mesmerising watching time click by in words. And you can get hold of one for yourself right here.

spotify the difference.

OK, I’ll come clean. I have a bit of a CD habit. Well, a lot of a CD habit. I visit a music store in Leamington called Head (formerly Fopp) most weekends. The prices range from £2 for old stuff to £10 for chart stuff, which means temptation is never far away. But this may be about to change. Yesterday I read a piece in the Guardian about Spotify, a new online music delivery system which is completely free. You don’t get to ‘own’ the music, but you can just play what you want whenever you want. Which is as good as in my book. The Guardian called Spotify ‘a potentially life-changing experience’, and having played around with it for a day, I can see why. You can listen by genre, make playlists, search, shuffle, skip… anything you can do with iTunes except download. But best of all you can be adventurous – check out stuff you’d never normally listen to because you don’t have to pay a penny for it. Is there a catch? Well a very small one. Every 25 minutes you have to listen to a 30-second ad – but I can live with that. (And if you really can’t you can pay £9.99 a month for an ad-free service). I can see my laptop is going to be hooked up to my stereo system any day now and I won’t have to worry about drowning in a sea of CDs.

hello, is it me you’re looking for?

A couple of months ago, I bought the most exquisite set of cordless home phones I’ve ever owned. I’d seen the Colombo Two (named after the Italian designer Joe, not the Seventies mac-wearing detective) in a design magazine, and coveted them them for weeks. I waited patiently for their release, and made a special trip to Selfridges – the only place in the UK you could buy them. The space-age retro curves, the way they fitted in your hand, the dinky blue LED interface, the sleek buttons, even the disco-ish typeface used for the numbers were all spot on. What’s more, these beauties were orange, and as you can tell from this web site, that always does the trick for me. They were just perfect. Except they weren’t. When you made a call, there was always a loud hum in the background, like the amplified strangling of a bumble-bee. For weeks I persisted, in the vain hope that things would get better, and strenuously defended my babies when Deborah dared suggest there was something wrong with them. Finally, I threw in the towel. I went to Robert Dyas and bought a cheap set of black, no-nonsense BT phones. You wouldn’t call them objects of desire, but they work perfectly. The word ‘what?’ is a stranger to me once more, and my clients have stopped insisting we communicate by email. Please get in touch if you’re interested in taking some barely used designer handsets off my hands, and you don’t mind the score Form 10, Function 1.