Chris McCormick

Nearly three years ago I wrote:

Prediction: within 3 years the stylus will be the killer feature of Android tablets.

Since then I've felt a little embarrassed remembering that post. Grand claims, ha ha!

With the recent announcement of Apple's "Pencil" I feel somewhat vindicated. I got the details wrong but I think broadly speaking that hand-drawing, sketches, doodles, will feature strongly in the future of human-to-human communication. Maybe even more strongly than typed messages for some people.

• I'm thinking about the 16% of people worldwide who can't read or write, but who are rapidly adopting hand held technologies where they can draw.

• I'm thinking about the tens of thousands of years of human beings using sticks as a technology for making marks upon a surface.

• I'm thinking about the popularity of emoji, the universality of pictographs, the cross-cultural and language-independent nature of the medium of drawn communication.

• I'm thinking about my kids and how the second thing they learn after talking is drawing.

Maybe one future is a world in which many of our planet's population do a significant fraction of our communication through the medium of doodles.

miniCast is a self-hosted web app for listening to podcasts.

I wrote it while learning ClojureScript. The back-end API is written in PHP. My friend George came up with the name and design.

My HTC Desire Z Android phone from 2010 died. I am taking this as a re-ware design/lifestyle provocation. As such I am now running an even older smartphone - my development iPhone 3Gs from 2009. Do we even need a modern smartphone for our day-to-day computing needs?

Things I have learned:

• No, we probably don't.
• "Add to Home Screen" for web apps remains an amazing innovation that is now in Android's Chrome browser too.
• I missed my ebook reader so I wrote a web app called MindReader.
• Most other things I do on a smartphone are available via the browser now.
• I'm un-Googling. I've moved my contacts list & calendars to my own CardDav/CalDav server running Radicale.
• The "touch" experience of the iPhone 3Gs is still aesthetically superior.

Here's a screenshot of MindReader self-hosted ebook reader:

In other news my HP Folio 13 screen also cracked a couple of nights ago. It has been a really wonderful machine and I am sad to have to upgrade.

My favourite thing about it has been its rectangular shape in each dimension. It will live on in our house as an HDMI media box under our television.

She SSH'es into her father's machine from her Raspberri Pi. Presumably like any good hacker she used social engineering to obtain his password. She then uses the ps or top command to find the process ID of the "Sublime Text" editor he is using - the number she reads out. She then uses the OSX say command on the command line on his computer to make it speak to him:

$ say "Dad watch out"

Given his reaction it appears he doesn't consider the possibility that anybody has remote access to his machine and he also doesn't seem to know about the OSX say command, hypothesizing incorrectly that the kids have set up a timed MP3 file. Finally, she uses the kill command on his machine to kill the "Sublime Text" process, closing down the windows he is working on.

Ha ha ha, adorable!

Hy is a Clojure-like LISP that compiles to Python bytecode. Blender is a popular Free and Open Source 3d modelling program. This is a little livecoding experiment I put together with the two of them.

Source code is on GitHub.