Rod’s been exploring writing fiction with Twitter, exploring its “office-desk rather than kitchen-sink realism“. He goes on:

Or rather: I wanted to start from that realism, because no-one, when they write “running” on Twitter, is actually running. They’re reporting after the fact, announcing an intention, or fabricating. Which is the second interesting thing – Twitter’s performativity. Twitter is as much theatrical performance as conversation. Un-realism.

So: a story empty of character and reasonable plot, and a blank-sheet MacGuffin. A story for an audience of 85, and a tentative use of direct messages that only a few of the audience will receive.

I didn’t know it was happening until it was, if you get my drift; messages from a commute slowly turning into narrative as the day went on. Seeing it all joined together is both a revelation and a dilution: a story laid out, but divorced from the trickle that made it so compelling.

(Rod also tips a hat to my Twit 4 Dead bots, which is very kind of him. I’ve slowly been poking at a new set of zombie-hunting narrative bots; the new ones have a few new features to enable better storytelling – notably, the ability to have responses specific to one another, rather than only specific to the situation. The main use is so that they can tell Ellis to shut up, but I’m thinking I’d like to apply the acting framework to an original work. That might be a long way off, though. But: thoughts worth jotting down).

When I was reading Brandon‘s round up of the year’s games at Boing Boing, I stumbled upon this fantastic quotation about one player’s experience of Scribblenauts:

For example, a friend at work solves most problems with a jetpack and a lasso, instead of a grappling gun. In his heart he’s a cowboy, and in mine I’m Batman. That the game lets both of us express that is awesome.

– comment by ‘Periphera’

I’ve already linked to this in my delicious stream, but the more I think about this, the more I love it.

I loved that the way players approach problems in the game is tied to their own imaginations – I know that my solutions in that game are.

But as I thought on it, I loved the delineation of the world – into people who are Batman, and people who are cowboys.

Batman’s a toolsmith; not only does he rely on his tools (as will as prowess) to solve problems, but he manufactures new ones to fit the task. His toolkit becomes more diverse as the problems he solves do, and he’ll use any and all available technology to influence what he builds. So he’s one kind of hacker, if you like: he’ll glue anything and everything together, pick up tiny fragments of techniques, languages, platforms, patterns, and bodge them together. (Toolsmithery is a practice and metaphor I’m very fond of for hacking/coding – the first part of building anything is building the tools you need. My dad’s a model engineer, and has spent as much time building tools as building a steam engine, I reckon).

The cowboy is more pragmatic. He has one tool – a lasso, or a gun, or perhaps just a prairie stare – and he uses that to solve all problems. He’s still using wit and ingenuity, but channeled through the single tool that he’s master of. Again, another kind of hacker: one favoured tool that they’re master of, and can be applied to all problems; the best of the bash/Perl hackers I’ve met are much like this.

I talked to Webb in the pub on Friday about this. He instantly asserted that he’s a cowboy. That fits. I’m pretty sure I’m a Batman.

And now I have another lens to view the world through.

Dave Eggers on “keeping shit real”:

Because, in the end, no one will ever give a shit who has kept shit ‘real’ except the two or three people, sitting in their apartments, bitter and self-devouring, who take it upon themselves to wonder about such things. The keeping real of shit matters to some people, but it does not matter to me. It’s fashion, and I don’t like fashion, because fashion does not matter.

What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

The whole article is great.

Since its inception, ETech has been a vibrant gathering of the alpha geek tribe, bringing together some of the most innovative people and projects across the technology community. So it’s with regret that O’Reilly Media has made the difficult decision to discontinue ETech in 2010.

I only went once, but the lineups at ETech never ceased to impress and excite me. Recent years always looked particularly awesome: genuinely emerging, futuristic, and an understanding of “technology” that stretched far beyond the web. The ripples from that conference each March stretched far into the year ahead, even for those of us who couldn’t always go.

Hopefully, we’ll find somewhere else to highlight the genuine outbreaks of the future that we all so dearly need (and, I’d imagine, desire). The tech community is in a different place – and state – from when ETech began all those years ago, but there’s always more future to be pointed to and illustrated.

Formatting media to FAT16/32 is something you often need to do – usually for storage media such as USB or Micro-SD that’s going to be used with embedded systems, such as MP3 players or homebrew cartirdges. All theese systems tend to assume you’re running a DOS file system.

As a Mac owner, that means you’re going to use Disk Utility to format your removable media. This isn’t so hard: you simply pick the “FAT” option from the format type in Disk Utility, right?

Almost. It turns out that most of the time, that’s not enough; that just specifies the way the partition is formatted. You’ve also got to make sure the way the partitions are described is set up correctly. And it turns out that, by default, Disk Utility likes to put FAT partitions into Apple-style boot records. That’s no good at all!

Lots of embedded devices don’t just expect FAT, they expect FAT on top of a traditional windows Master Boot Record. Once you combine the two, you’re more likely to have success. To do that, simply find the “options” dialogue in Disk Utility:

and then make sure you’ve chosen “MBR (Master Boot Record)”:

That’ll give you a Windows/DOS-style partition and partition map. Sorted!

This has taken me far, far, far too long to figure out. Given how long it took, I thought it only fair to share it.

When I moved house recently, I managed to find my copy of Katharine Whitehorn‘s classic Cooking In A Bedsitter. Almost everyone I’ve shown it to has loved it, and asked for me to put more of it online, and so Easter Weekend seemed as good a time as any to dog-ear some pages.

Whitehorn’s book was first published in 1961, and targets the early twenty-somethings moving into small bedsits with the advent of first jobs; her goal is to point out that you can cook perfectly well – even rather entertainingly – with a single gas ring and no sink, but you’re not going to be cooking like mother – and you’re going to have to be a little bit creative.

What follows is a selection of simple, cost-conscious and clearly explained recipes for the first-time bedsitter cook. They are accompanied by Whitehorn’s barbed tongue and voice of expertise, although she barely lived in a bedsit, and didn’t really enjoy cooking, as this interview with Rachel Cooke from last year’s Observer details.

There are two sections to the book. The first, “Cooking To Stay Alive” is a crash course in cookery, storage, inventive use of space and savvy cooking. The second, “Cooking To Impress”, looks at how to cook for parties or groups or, most importantly of all, objects of affection. It’s here that Whitehorn’s pragmatism combines with a saucy barb and, frankly, makes me laugh very hard.

Anyhow, it was hard not to copy out the whole book, but I’ve tried to be reserved to give you an idea of what you’re missing. Do buy the book – it’s still in print, although without the delightful cover of the Penguin edition – if only for a slice of cultural history, when bedsits weren’t last resorts and we were still learning what to do with tinned food. Also, because it’s funny, as I hope you’ll see. I’ve tried to not quote the recipes as much as the text, if only to make it worth your while buying it.

p.13, introducing the notion of cooking in a bedsitter:

“it is a sad fact that the better the room itself and the house in which it is found, the worse the cooking problem tends to be. In a large squalid rooming house, where the landlord calls only to collect the rent and where the cleaning, if any, is done by an indifferent slut with no standards to maintained, adventurous cooking is perfectly possible… if you fill the whole house with the smell of burning onions you will be cursed but not evicted; and nothing will look much worse whatever you spill on it”.

p.14

“it is a common fallacy among the better class of landladies that one can exist entirely on tea, biscuits, and good books, without the need for food, beer, the wireless, or the companionship of the opposite sex”

“plenty of our troubles are of our own making. So many of us go into bedsitters, at least in the first instance, with the attitude of ‘me all alone in my little room with my little pan and my little spoon’ – and small pans, of course, make things ten times harder when you have only the one ring on which to cook everything you want to eat. Much better to think ‘me with my enormous appetite and my huge stewpan’.”

p.15, on learning to think like a bedsitter cook:

“The first thing a bedsitter cook must do is abandon the notion of ‘meat and two veg’, in favour of the idea of a simmering cauldron. Meat, yes; vegetables, certainly – thought it might be one or it might be four – but meat and vegetables deliberately chosen to be cooked together, so that the dish is all the better for one food sharing its flavours with another. And that brings us, inevitably, to the casserole.”

p.19, on arranging the room:

“You can save yourself a lot of trouble by deciding that one corner of the room is to be wholely given over to food. College girls who hide their cosmetics in their desks usually look as if they didn’t bother about their faces; by the same token, if you care about food, don’t hide it.”

p.20, explaining just what you really need to run a small kitchen:

“A good many cookery books start out by requiring a vast battery of equipment without which the simplest dish is doomed to failure. (I always burst into tears when I get to the bit about the little porcelain ramekins). But here it is not a question of the best possible tools, but the fewest… the right simple tools will stop you longing for the other, complicated ones.”

p.51, an early recipe illustrating just how simple some of the recipes are – and just how basic the ingredients:

Sausage and Smash

4 pork or beef sausages
a little fat
1 tin condensed vegetable soup

Fry sausages over medium flame 10 minutes; pour contents of tin into pan, and stir until heated, 3-4 minutes.

p.55, a recipe from the rather creative section on what you can do with bacon:

Dixie Casserole

2/3 rashers bacon
1 small tin sweetcorn
2 eggs (optional)
1 dessertspoon flour
1 cup milk or less

First hard-boil eggs if you are using them. Then fry bacon until crisp; pour off fat till about a tablespoon remains. Add flour, over gentle heat, till fat is absorbed. Add liquid from tin, gradually, and then milk until you have added one cup in all. Stir until it thickens; add corn, bacon, and halved hard-boiled eggs. Simmmer 10 minutes.

p.63, introducing the section on vegetables:

“If meat costs 3s. 6d. a pound we think it cheap; if vegetables cost 3s. 56d a pound, we think them dear. Moral: eat vegetables.”

p.79, introducing the section on Beef:

“Most cookery books begin with the portrait, in profile, of the Planned Cow. This amiable beast is covered with dotted lines, like a map; and the idea is to show the uninitiated where their piece of beef should come from. I am sorry to deny my readers this pretty sight. But the trouble with the Planned Cow is that it looks so totally unlike the nameless red hunks that actually appear on the butcher’s slab. It is really more use to know what it looks like when you buy it than to know what it looked like when it was somebody’s mother (or son).”

p.100, on curry:

“Curry finds itself in this section because it is useless to try to impress anyone with a curry nowadays unless you have spent several years out East and are prepared to talk about it, as well as cook, for hours on end. When it comes to really elaborate curries it is much better to be on the receiving end, and fortunately most people who live in bedsitters know at least one Indian or Pakistani who is delighted to make a curry for an admiring friend. moreover, they are apt to know their proportions only in terms of .01 grains of saffron per half sheep, so that they will often make enough curry for you and everyone on the staircase to feed off for a week.”

p.143, introducing “Cooking to Impress”:

“Impressing visitors can usually be done in two ways: the Lavish and the Casual. For you in your bedsitter the lavish is impossible… instead you must concentrate on the apparently effortless meal – the attitude of ‘just a little thing I seem to have cooking in this pot’… if your guests are not to see you looking flustered over your cooking, this in practice means they had better not see you cooking at all.”

p.145, outlining a few important things to do first:

“3. Get yourself looking nice. In a house you can disappear and finish dressing – in a bedsitter, no. Besides, you want your friends to think that dark-eyed look is all Soul, not just mascara; and they won’t, if they see you putting it on.”

p.147 – “Who Are You Trying To Impress?”. Visitors come in four categories:

“1. The troglodyte in the next bedsitter.
2. Couples, or mixed singles, who are accustomed to kitchen food and drawing-room standards. They have forgotten what it was like to cook in a bedsitter (if they ever knew), and it is your business not to remind them.
3. Your parents, or your parents’ spies – who are there to reassure themselves that you are eating adequately, get to bed early, know no vicious young men, and breath plenty of clean fresh air.
4. Delicious little parties à deux.”

p.148 – Cooking for a Man:

“Elementary rules: avoid all whimsy and complication in the food.”

and later on:

“Don’t apologize much if anything goes wrong; don’t flap, whatever happens, and NEVER ask ‘Is it all right?'”

“Ah,” said a friend when I showed them that section; “that sounds a lot like sex.”

Of course, the elementary techniques described do not always apply:

“There is one class of man for whom a quite different routine is needed: the richie who has up till now bought you expensive meals in smart places – often your only decent meal that week – and now, to your horror, wants to get to know you better in your own surrounds. You don’t want him to think that you can’t be bothered to cook for him, or can’t stand him around the place, or else he will naturally never ask you out again. But equally, neither the food nor the atmosphere must be so inviting that he decides to give up eating out altogether in favour of eating in. The dodge here is to reverse the normal procedure, and fuss up and down constantly… he will quickly conclude that your own surroundings hold little promise for him, and go back to taking you to Boulestin’s, or of course luring you back to his own lush flat. Well, at least he has to see to the food there.”

p.149 – Cooking for a Girl is somewhat different, Whitehorn explains:

“You, as a man, can get away with more roughness than a girl can. But if you are seriously luring the girl, you have a dilemma: you certainly don’t want to give her the idea that you are struggling to impress her, but of course she will be touched and appreciative of any sign that shows you have remembered who it is you are feeding. The right compromise is to imply that you set yourself rather high standards of food; but add, almost as an afterthought, something of purely feminie appeal, like sticky chocolates or her own special brand of Turkish cigarettes.”

p.173 – The final chapter, on “Drink And Parties”, was “contributed by a man” – specifically, Whitehorn’s husband, Gavin Lyall.

“It should be news to no one that red wine goes with red meat and most game; white wine with fish, veal, and the sweet courses. More to the point, perhaps, is that white wine goes with carpets; red wine only with floors you can wipe clean or don’t need to care about.”

p.175, on Parties:

“There are only two rules for parties: the carpet rule redoubled in spades, and don’t mix the drinks.”

p.177, on serving Spirits:

“Spirits cost money. Pubs reckon getting 32 measure from one bottle (so you can work out a rough idea of their gross profit), but I shouldn’t go giving your friends pub-sized measures if you want them to stay friends.”

p.178

“There is nothing against having beer for the men and gin for the women – if you can keep the men away from the gin.”

As I said earlier; it’s a wonderful book, and the recipes in it vary from useful, fast snacks to ingenious dishes that might well become staples in time. And it’s worth it just for Whitehorn’s wonderful, barbed tongue.

In case you didn’t know.

I’m sure this is the zillionth post on the internet about Google Chrome, but a thought struck me and I’ve not seen it articulated like this yet.

Tom Scott makes an excellent point about one reason for Chrome’s existence in his blog post on the topic:

Google want to offer much richer and, more importantly, faster web applications.

The current browsers, including Firefox, just can’t cut it. JavaScript isn’t fast enough (thereby limiting the UX), browsers are single threaded and they aren’t stable enough. If Google want to challenge Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter) in the desktop space they needed a better platform. Of course others have sought to solve the same problem – notably Adobe with Air and Microsoft with Silverlight. Google’s solution is I think much neater – build an open source browser that supports multithreading, fast JavaScript execution and stuff Google Gears into the back end so it works offline.

I think that’s all very sensible, and very true. But there’s also a much simpler strategy at work – a strategy around their brand.

Google need users on decent, standards-compatible browsers, to make the most of the rich web; they don’t want to be working around IE all the time. Forgetting the advances of a much better, JIT-compiled Javascript engine, they just need people to stop using IE.

The greatest coup Microsoft pulled with Internet Explorer was putting the word “Internet” in its name. It sits there, on the desktop of every new Windows computer, and it says “Internet”. So you click it.

Chrome is a browser from Google – Google, who, for many people, are now the Internet. It’s their first port of call, it’s their homepage; many user-testing surveys comment on users typing URLs straight into Google.

What better way to beat a browser with the word “Internet” in its name – a browser that seemingly can’t be beat no matter how hard we try – than the Internet Company itself making a browser?

Many of us linked to Clay Shirky’s great talk at Web 2.0 last week, where he described the “cognitive surplus” bound up in millions of man-hours spent watching TV. We read it, and nodded, and grudgingly admitted he was right. I mean, he has a point.

I’m somewhat envious of Chris’ slightly more considered reaction:

“I’m a bit shocked at the general protestant work ethic undercurrents. It’s not a cognitive surplus; it’s a way of coping. The real question is why these people are creating Wikipedia when they could be sleeping instead. We’re processing hundreds, if not thousands of times more information per day than previous humans – how are we meant to make sense of it all if we have no downtime?”

Envious in that some days, I wish I had the balls to say “hang on a sec“.

Chris makes a good point. He also got me thinking a bit about the issue. And I think it’s important to note than when Shirky says “television“, he has a very particular meaning of that word. He’s describing a combination of the medium itself and a particular use of that medium.

Specifically: he’s describing consumption without choice. So to all of you fans of The Wire worrying that he implicated you, don’t worry.

To my mind, Shirky is describing the (depressingly commonplace) reality wherein the television is not something you turn on, but something that is on.

I was talking to Alex about how much TV we watch a week, and whilst we thought it was quite high – six to seven hours, tops – I pointed out that most of that is television we have actively chosen to watch. This week, it’ll be Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, Pulling, Peep Show, and of course, The Apprentice. But that’s about it. We rarely ever turn the TV on “just because”, and if we do, it’s usually me doing it – and the first thing I reach for is the EPG. On top of that, we probably won’t even watch that all in real time, but PVR it to watch when’s more convenient.

We are very much in control of our television watching.

We are not the kind of customers TV companies would like us to be. These days, TV is designed to be sticky; something you consistently choose not to turn off. Trails, stings, picture-in-picture; all are designed to stop us “touching that dial”. For a network or station, there’s no difference between changing the channel or turning the box off. Everything’s designed to keep you there.

This is how it’s been for decades, and why, in houses around the world, the TV is a constant presence; once you’ve turned it on, it entices you to keep it on, and so rather than making a choice of next action… you keep watching.

(Incidentally: whilst TV has always been a medium of choice for me, radio is something I often listen to “just because”. Radio’s incredibly sticky… and yet it’s less obssessive about being sticky, I guess because the likelihood that you’re already doing at least one other task – driving, working – is high. Radio’s always been designed to multi-task).

The thing that I have in common with the Wikipedia editors, when I sit down to watch an episode of Doctor Who is that I’ve chosen to do so. Wikipedia won’t edit itself, and you can’t just do it passively; have to actively decide: “I am going to edit some Wikipedia“. The truth of the web – something we can’t say for TV – is that it’s easier than ever to switch from the passive mode (“I’m just browsing some Wikipedia“) to the active mode (“that’s a mistake; I should change it“) – and even back again (“ooh, that link looks interesting“). There’s no possible passivity in creation, but it’s possible to return to a more active state having created.

And so the world Shirky describes as preferable to the constant passivity of TV is not one of constant production, constant creation, but one where “passive” and “engaged” are two ends of a sliding scale – and that it’s the inner of that scale, not the edges, that is most commonly inhabited.

“…the thing that makes participation valuable is that someone’s there to read it.”

And the more I think about this, the more reductive I think it is to describe the TV/not-TV perspective as being one of choice/not-choice. Indeed, most of us fall into neither the “hardcore” all-choice category – constantly running things and editing pages and creating stuff – nor the “totally passive category”; rather, we hover around the middle, scaling up and down to either end. That’s something that’s often forgotten in all the 70-20-10 discussions, where someone invariably flashes a pyramid up in their slide deck: the thing that makes participation valuable is that someone’s there to read it.

The thing that makes being a ten-percenter worthwhile is the seventy percent.

And we’re not all ten-precenters, all of the time; the ten-percenters are going to stop creating for a moment, and become part of their audience. I think that’s something we lose track of in all the “culture of participation“: when do we stop to take in all the things we’re participating in? Chris put this well:

“how are we meant to make sense of it all if we have no downtime?”

I don’t think we can.

This isn’t all to say that Shirky’s point is invalid, or that he’s incorrect – far from it. More the thinking that there are subtleties contained within his talk – and the ideas it stands for – that need to be considered sooner rather than later, before we all start parroting the same lines in our own presentations. By exploring what we understand our own work ethic to be – and examining the choices of how we spend our time – we can make better judgment and make better consideration of how other people spend theirs.

“Only once you can automate the boring processes and provide free time do people have to worry about what to do with their free time.”

The other interesting thing that came out of my chat with Alex was the importance of remembering what the pre-industrial society looked like. Alex pointed out that the Victorians essentially invented the concept of “personality“. Prior to then, shaping one’s individuality was harder simply because there was less free time; the rural lifestyle shapes the individual around the seasons, the environment, the wider group. Only once you can automate the boring processes and provide free time do people have to worry about what to do with their free time. Gin filled that niche for people who really didn’t know what they wanted to be, let alone do. TV is the same: it was progress, and at the time of creation, there were fewer more compelling alternatives.

It’s only recently that the barrier to creativity/productivity has been lowered to the point that it’s a viable alternative to watching TV. Compare the number of people with blogs to the number of people who published zines thirty years ago – a big part of the barrier to making a zine is the amount of time necessary to assemble it, photocopy it, and distribute it. Now, anyone can throw up a website in an evening and potentially have more readers than many of those zines. Since the 1970s, creating-for-pleasure has become much easier, and it’s worth remembering that when we try to illustrate the diversity of alternatives to passive staring at the TV…

Just a brief post here to unashamedly promote the work of some friends. As the title hints, Dopplr – the little startup that could – is now out of beta and releasing on time. It’s a great site – a product that exists not to make you travel more, or travel less, but to make that travel more pleasurable, by fostering coincidensity.

Now, I don’t travel a great amount, so I put “smaller” trips than most people in. Somebody once laughed that I put trips to visit my parents in. But that’s where other useful functionality of Dopplr comes in handy: it lets my trusted friends know when I’m not around. Sometimes, I’m telling you I’m away, not that I’ll be there.

And it’s super-handy if you don’t travel much, but you have foreign friends – it’s already engineered several “oh, you’re passing through London?” meet-ups for me, that otherwise I’d never have had.

So, Dopplr: if you’ve not been playing with it in the beta, take a look. It’s wonderfully put together, with lots of tiny touches that make all the difference. And if you’re not sure that it’s quite for you… think again; it might come in handy. The only thing you need to get your head around: it’s not about your friendsters. It’s about your friends. Proper, real-life friends. You need the people you know on it – but once they are, it makes the business of global friendship so much easier…