Das Weblog von Stefan Grund, der im Netz als @eay unterwegs ist und hier seit 2003 über Medien, Popkultur und Technologie schreibt. Mehr » 

#geschichte

Make Something Wonderful

Close-up of the book cover of Make Something Wonderful, held by me.

Ok, somehow I managed to get a copy of „Make Something Wonderful“ by The Steve Jobs Archive, which is currently going for $200-500 on eBay, for 86 Euros. 🥳

If you didn’t take a look already, here’s the wonderful digital version of the book, which is not available in stores, but was only given to selected Apple and Pixar employees. And here’s a detailed look by Arun Venkatesan at the physical and digital book.

Cool to have this at home now.

“The fire equivalent of an ice age”: Humanity enters a new era of fire

Willkommen im “Pyrocene”! Der Klimawandel begünstigt im zunehmenden Maße die Ausbreitung und Häufigkeit von Waldbränden, die wiederum neben gesund­heits­schäd­licher Luftverschmutzung und wirtschaftlichen Schäden durch die freigesetzten Emissionen, klar, den Klimawandel begünstigen.

The East Coast, along with the rest of the planet, has entered a new fire era, or — as Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, calls it — the “Pyrocene.”

Sooner, rather than later, it may all start to feel normal. There will be a smoke season, just like there is now an allergy season, Pyne said. Fires will become a part of the rhythm of our everyday lives.

Springboard – Doku über die Geschichte des ersten Smartphones

 
(YouTube Direktlink)

A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades imagined and tried to build the modern smartphone. Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. This is the story of the Treo.

Sehr schöne, 30-minutige Dokumentation von The Verges Dieter Bohn über PDAs, Palm und das erste Smartphone.

In der aktuellen Episode von The Talk Show spricht John Gruber mit Bohn über den Film, der viele weitere spannende Eindrücke und Anekdoten ergänzt.

The Case Against Crypto

Stephen Diehl erklärt mit Blick in die Geschichts­bücher sehr anschaulich, was das Problem mit Crypto­currencies ist und warum man die Finger von Bitcoin & Co. lassen sollte:

Crypto coins are simply speculative gambling products that only create a massive set of negative externalities on the world. It is introducing artificial volatility into markets untethered to any economic activity and creates an enormous opportunity cost where the only investment opportunity is as an economically corrosive synthetic hedge against all productive assets. This is not innovation, this is technical regression and flirtation with ecological disaster in a time when we cannot afford to gamble our planet’s fate on pyramid schemes and dog memes.

[Crypto] cannot create or destroy real money because unlike a stock there is no underlying company that generates income. So if you sell your crypto and make a profit in dollars, it’s exactly because a greater fool bought it at a higher price than you did. So every dollar that comes out of a cryptocurrency is because a later investor put a dollar in. […] For every winner there are guaranteed to be multiple losers.

Ich habe meine Cryptocurrencies aus genau diesem Grund und wegen der katastrophalen Ökobilanz vor einem Jahr abgestoßen.