Author: Oliver Wrede

  • The issue with software-defined services

    The issue with software-defined services

    30 years ago the idea of “using” instead of “owning” was all the rage as a way to move into a more ecological future. To have products used by many people would allow to offer its services with smaller ecological footprints. This in par became true for car sharing services today. But the main use…

  • Artificial Intelligence everywhere

    Artificial Intelligence everywhere

    Disclaimer This following text was generated using GPT-4.Don’t take it too seriously. It is just a test. Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands out as a revolutionary technology that’s altering the foundation of how we live and work. The impact of AI on the global economy far-reaching and it is touching every industry sector. What is the…

  • Greedy Apple is not interested in a good customer experience

    Greedy Apple is not interested in a good customer experience

    As Tim Cook has told the investors and shareholders: Repairable devices reduce sales of new devices and that is holding down revenue in a saturated market. So this parts pairing scam that Apple uses to prevent anyone to replace parts in a broken device is a way to force customers to buy new hardware instead…

  • Note Taking Apps

    Note Taking Apps

    The website https://noteapps.info/ provides a comparison of various note-taking software. It covers 35 best note taking apps analyzed over 295 features. Apps are compared based on various factors like compatibility with operating systems, tagging, syntax, attachments, offline work, cross device syncing, and price among others. While the list of apps is impressive it does not feature…

  • Posting to WordPress with Obsidian

    Posting to WordPress with Obsidian

    The note taking and personal knowledge management tool Obsidian has a community plugin, that allows publishing of Obsidian notes to WordPress. It does not however support updating an Obsidian note from a changed WordPress post. It does not yet do pages, inline images or custom fields. But it seems the developer Cheng Liang is working…

  • New Seminar about Information Topologies in Winter Semester 2023/2024

    New Seminar about Information Topologies in Winter Semester 2023/2024

    The new project seminar for the students of the department of Design at Aachen University of Applied Sciences will be about “Information Topologies”. Information Topology deals with the organization and arrangement of information spaces. Often, the goal is to make information intuitively accessible and easier to find or learn, or to design a general strategy…

  • Posting to WordPress with Tinderbox

    Posting to WordPress with Tinderbox

    I am a long time Tinderbox user. But while having purchased a license many years I never have been able to fully use it for my purpose. It can do a lot of things – if you have the time to dig into it. Now Detlef Beyer has added an early prototype plugin to be able…

  • Facebook & Instagram destroy your attention span?

    Facebook & Instagram destroy your attention span?

    Just yesterday I wrote about Tim Berners-Lee complaining about what the web is like today. Today I found more commentary that supports this view. Big players like Facebook, Instagram introduced means to kill the ability of users to use URLs to create meaningful relations. On Facebook users are just allowed to express meaning in the…

  • First Web Browser

    First Web Browser

    The World Wide Web was invented as a hypertext document repository by Tim Berners-Lee who was working at the CERN research institute in Geneva. The OS Tim was using was NeXT (a predecessor to the MacOS X of today). There is a emulation of the first web browser in a NeXT UI (following links apparently…

  • Search beats Navigation

    Search beats Navigation

    Search has become one of the primary ways to access information online. There are six major drivers that have caused this departure from »orientation and navigation« tools as the main design challenge. Search has become one of the primary ways to access information online. There are six major drivers that have caused this departure from…

  • OPML Editor (Frontier in disguise?)

    OPML Editor (Frontier in disguise?)

    Over 24 years ago I learned about a Mac application called »Frontier«. This application taught me, that the Internet is actually a programmable environment. Frontier was a genius concept invented by Dave Winer, because it was not only a script language (called „UserTalk”). It also came with an object database and an editor to edit…

  • Information war of the right-wing conservatives

    This article by Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) in The Guardian talks about how a couple of single right-wing conservatives in the USA use money, technology and the Internet to manipulate public opinion: And they already have set course to repeat their manipulative endeavor in Europe: Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media With…

  • HTC Vive is a tech breakthrough

    HTC Vive is a tech breakthrough

    We have some HTC Vive VR systems at the Department of Design at the Aachen University of Applied Science. This system is a game changer for consumer grade Virtual Reality applications. I have to admit that I am awed by the engineering feat that Alan Yates and Valve have pulled off with the HTC Vive. I was not…

  • John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence

    John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence

    John Searle is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His Talk at Google is focused on the philosophy of mind and the potential for consciousness in artificial intelligence. This Talk was hosted for Google’s Singularity Network.

  • New seminar in winter semester 2016/2017

    Tomorrow the winter semester 2016/2017 starts. I will be an offering new seminar called »Forecast« that researches design for information systems that can be used to understand developments and future situations.

  • Documentary »Hello World! Processing«

    Hello World! Processing from Ultra_Lab on Vimeo. Hello World! Processing is a documentary on creative coding that explores the role that ideas such as process, experimentation and algorithm play in this creative field featuring artists, designers and code enthusiasts. Based on a series of interviews to some of the leading figures of the Processing open…

  • MIT MediaLab research departments

    The MIT MediaLab has an interesting structure in its research departments:

  • Watching the Republican Presidential Candidate Race

    Watching the Republican Presidential Candidate Race. The GOP party is now witnessing the result of their constant “dumbing down” of the public about politics and political reasoning. It makes it much harder for candidates to create momentum with rational arguments about political issues. It opened a chance for a candidate that is unfit for a…

  • Kids should learn programming!

    Blogger Nico Lumma recently published a rant on Handelsblatt about Germany (and probably other countries) are wasting time by not letting children learn to program in school. There have been initiatives like http://code.org/ to promote »coding« as a basic skill of the future: … or a recent German version »Jeder kann programmieren« … And maybe…

  • Fargo: Outliner for Bloggers!

    Finally! Fargo is an online tool for writing in outlines to a WordPress blog. Very good. Outlining has been underestimated as a writing tool – but there was barely any way to edit content without a desktop software – like OmniOutliner – this way. I was using Userland Software (Frontier with Manila – later Radio)…