e-Passports and the RFID Chaos.

Ever since I first travelled abroad on an airplane as a young boy, I found it interesting to observe the screening and security procedures at airports, train stations and borders. Customs/Immigration officers typically peruse a travel document, be it a passport or visa for less than 20 seconds before handing it back to its owner. […]

Comic Sans MS: No Mercy!

Ναι, μπορεί τα Comic Sans MS να μην είναι μια από τις ομορφότερες γραμματοσειρές που κατοικούν στον υπολογιστή σας. Κανείς δεν αμφιβάλλει πως σε κάποιες περιπτώσεις ίσως να ήταν μια καλή επιλογή. Όταν όμως έχουν καταντήσει κοινός τόπος σε κάθε είδους ταμπέλα, κείμενο, ιστοσελίδα, φυλλάδιο και φτάνουν να αποτελούν τη βασική γραμματοσειρά επίσημου κρατικού εγγράφου (όσο ασήμαντο και ευτελές κι αν είναι αυτό) τότε είναι πλέον σαφές πως κάτι δε πάει καλά. :)

The job history of Jens Alfke

A developer of AppleScript, Stickies, MRJ, iChat and Safari RSS. You'll find some clues as to why iChat seemed so promising at first, and ended up being such a disappointment ever since. Let's hope that Jens' ideas for Leopard got approved and are more exciting than what we've seen in the WWDC'06 preview and the numerous rumour sites ever since. Otherwise Leopard seems to be a very, very minor release for users --- Objective-C 2.0, significant improvements in the kernel and API additions make it quite interesting for developers anyway!

The trick would have been finding it

An interesting podcast featuring a discussion on BBC's Digital Planet about the 'end of broadcast', user generated content and the role of mainstream media in a world where (some) users can and do cover general and special topics as well as current and historical events faster and more accurately than mainstream media. What I found really interesting was the possibility of the BBC adopting the additional role of a user-generated media search engine and filtering service, pinpointing user-generated content worth listening/seeing/reading. Interesting times! [also available on iTunes]

Your Data, The Digital Era and The Future

Greetings person of the digital era! Let’s see how you store your knowledge, your wisdom, your data. Your (very very early) ancestors had word of mouth. Then came drawings and hieroglyphics and then written language and tools let words be inscribed on stone. Scrolls, books and analogue storage of text, audio and video followed. And […]

Wii love MEMS accelerometers.

For propellerheads: An article on IEEE's Spectrum Magazine about the man (and the technology) behind Wii's motion sensor controllers. Next stop: miniature gyroscopes!