Unemployed Blacksmiths and Novelists Support Group

It was all foretold in Finnegans Wake. It could have been, anyway.

There’s just no end to human ingenuity. Now you don’t even have to buy an e-book reader to suffer Internet interconnectivity. Ubimark has developed a way for readers to evoke Web connections from a print book by way of cellphone camera and browser. Have a look at the following item (short article & video), “Putting the Web inside the printed book.”

Ubimark, iPads and Vooks Read more

Apocalypses on all sides

Me again. It seems Thailand is having its own little Apocalypse, back there where you folks are now. What with the Red Shirts, and the Yellow Shirts and the Multi-colors and one thing and another. The past few days have seen the hopes of all right-thinking people taking a roller-coaster ride. Meanwhile, it’s plain to see some other people believe it’s to their advantage to have civil society explode into real strife, and to heck with the good of the … Read more

Beepification

Leary here. I see Collin is worried about where this world is headed. And well he might be. Much of what he says about the iPad is true, but he doesn’t foresee the half of it, or the other snazzy devices coming just around the corner.

Anyway, I was reading some old notes the other day, stuff from way back at the start of my second half-century. I see that one day in Bangkok in 2010 I was riding the Read more

From absent presence to omnipresence: “I am my iPhone” (local DTAC slogan) to “We are my iPad”

In Thailand, the iPad mostly remains a rumor of digital utopia on the other side of the world. But travelers to those distant parts are beginning to arrive back here with their über-gadgets.

And they are harbingers of epidemic social change. These carriers of the current Digital Grail—and soon, I suspect, they’ll include everybody in the world with a few hundred dollars to spend—behave as though they carry new-born children, and they’re prone to dropping these items on the … Read more