On screen, Ensign Crusher...

Is reading online better than on paper? It could be, says a California scholar. (You just knew he had to be from California.)

The reading experience online "should be better than on paper," Chi says. He's part of a group at PARC developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts you'll be interested in. "Techniques like ScentHighlights are offering the kind of reading that's above and beyond what paper can offer," Chi says.

ScentHighlights? Sounds like something that comes with weather like we're having here in Toronto. Ozone, old man, raw sewage. Highlights, all.


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Edited by author 06-17-2005 10:25 AM
Steve Jobs commences

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Heartwarming.

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Well, blimey, if it isn't a bill bisset page!

You left out this one:

http://www.google.com/intl/xx-bork/

Edited by author 05-20-2005 10:52 AM
You wascally wabbit

Google has had this for a while but I thought I'd point it out for those who don't know and need a giggle. Among almost every language living today, Google provides Elmer Fudd, Pig Latin and Klingon as personalised home pages.

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Sci-fi pirates
Sci-fi writer John Scalzi says stop worrying about online piracy already. Scalzi has made money in the past by selling his books as shareware, so it's an interesting take on things. He's also got some Jesus bumper stickers for you that are kind of fun.

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Morse code still beats SMS

Clive points us to an interesting it-ain't-over-yet article about a 93-year-old telegraph operator pitted against a 13-year-old rival (named Brittany, no less) with a cell phone and an arsenal of text message shorthand. Stop. Guess who wins. Stop.


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More on how Google is killing Europe

When Google Challenges Europe. Google's plan to digitize the (English-speaking) world is forcing the (not-English-speaking) world to counter-digitize. I somehow doubt Google even noticed Europe. This is like the ant writing a book about it's battle against the shoe.


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Edited by author 05-06-2005 10:01 AM
Men in safari jackets sighted at Google board meeting

Anglophone cyber-colonialists are raping and pillaging and, guess what? The Parisians are smoking-mad (and I mean Gauloises).

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Edited by author 05-04-2005 09:21 AM
Obsolete or antique?

Turns out all those old computers are worth a fortune!

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The history of desktop publishing in Japan
From the introduction of woodblock type to the development of a Japanese word processor. I'm going to read this as a bedtime story to the next kid I have.

Determined to make their offices as efficient as those of the West, the Japanese invented a typewriter for their own complex writing system early in the 20th century. The typist was touted as the belle of the workplace. But the Japanese typewriter was a challenging tool that could only be mastered after rigorous training. The development of a truly efficient writing machine -- the word processor -- necessitated a reassessment of the Japanese language itself.

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Edited by author 04-08-2005 07:42 AM
Here we go again, tilting at windmills

Physicists in Spain are celebrating the 400th anniversary of publication of "Don Quixote" in a very small way: they wrote the first paragraph on a silicon chip in letters so tiny the whole 1,000-page book would fit on the tips of six human hairs.

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Edited by author 04-05-2005 09:58 AM
This'll wup those used bookstores's butts

Amazon.com has purchased Booksurge and clearly plans to get in the print on demand business. Does this mean I can order all my books to match my living room colours? Oh, god, this is going to be just great!

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Cellphone novels...
...are big in Japan. Of course, so is tentacle porn.

Several mobile websites offer hundreds of novels -- classics, bestsellers and some works written especially for the medium.

It takes some getting used to. Only a few lines pop up at a time because the phone screen is about half the size of a business card.

But improvements in the quality of liquid-crystal displays and features such as automatic page-flipping, or scrolling, make the endeavour far more enjoyable than you'd imagine.

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File under: did you know?

That Byron's daughter is widely thought of as the first computer programmer? The children of poets rock. (Especially of poets named George Gordon, ahem.) (Thanks, K!)



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Yeah, Alex, War and Peace on a cell:

http://www.manybooks.net/titles/tolstoyletext01wrnpc11.html