December 2024

File over app

Steph Ango, on Mastodon:

The accounting tool Bench shut down with no warning 3 days before the end of the year. They had raised $110m in venture capital.

The app is no longer accessible. There will be a way to export your data, but it’s not available yet.

File over app is not just for individuals.

File over app is why I use Obsidian, iA Writer, and (sometimes) AnyType. If my data isn’t sitting on my hard drive in a format I can read, it’s not mine. While I have to use cloud-based services for work, like Slack and Google Docs, I don’t entirely trust them.

I think the Web 2.0 era, despite at least one early cautionary tale, made us entirely too comfortable storing our lives on other peoples’ hard drives. I’d like to see that mindset reversed. Tools like Obsidian—and the larger shift towards more open, decentralized social media technology—feels like a step in the right direction.

Your favorite movie is vertical now

A friend recently shared this video from Kendra Gaylord, describing how your favorite movie is vertical now, courtesy of #AI —and what is lost in the process:

In movies, every time something is filmed, it’s memorializing a lot: the actors, the location, the way we talk and write and joke. Even though it’s fiction, it’s still a document, and if you mess with that document too much, it doesn’t represent all of those things anymore.

One of the most perverse revelations here is that the AI-generated version felt more realistic to people simply by virtue of being vertical; the same aspect ratio in which we experience social media videos. Our window to reality is portrait-shaped.

minidisc.pics

A grid of six minidisc cover designs. They are colorful, and have interesting graphics: a white and black geometric pattern, a red pixel-art version of the Mona Lisa, yellow and green polka dots, etc.

Matt Sephton shared something pretty cool: someone named asivery built a site devoted to the MiniDisc, showcasing all the different #MiniDisc packaging designs (and players) from the early ’90s through 2013 or so. Photos taken by Dan Marker-Moore.

When I think of ’90s–00s packaging and industrial design, the first thing that comes to mind is the bright, translucent colors that everyone started using after the #iMac came out in 1998. Reviewing the collection here, it’s interesting to note the presence of a lot of translucent Bondi blue several years before Apple made that color ubiquitous.

I rarely use physical media anymore (does anyone?) so it’s hard to compare, say, a CD case design from 2002 with a contemporary one. Nevertheless, I’ve had a sense that industrial #design has been getting more austere—i.e. less interesting—for a while now: curves, color, and translucency giving way to boxes, grayscale, and shiny surfaces.

minidisc.pics is a cool reminder that there was a time when tech products didn’t just look sleek and powerful, they looked fun.

Into Eternity

Michael Madsen’s #documentary Into Eternity takes a look at the Onkalo long-term nuclear waste facility, located on the west coast of Finland. Onkalo—“hiding place”—is designed to last for at least 100,000 years; an ambitious proposition, considering that the oldest man-made structures on Earth are less than 10,000 old.

Ensuring structural integrity for tens of thousands of years—or, as one official points out, just the next hundred—is no small requirement, but the designers also have to consider one of the most challenging #design problems in the world: how to communicate with unknown civilizations with whom we may have very little in common. What if, thousands of years from now, someone stumbles on Onkalo and doesn’t realize the danger? Imagine a 19th-century archaeological expedition encountering nuclear waste buried by ancient Egyptians.

A bit on the artsy side, but still, a fascinating—and often beautiful—look at where some of the worst stuff on earth is kept away.