The Offline Report

Paper is technology. Cassette Store Day is October 13th. Paper’s not a bad technology. It is really a good technology for the storage and retrieval of information. After 500 years, we still can turn the pages of Leonardo’s notebooks. From the 1990s, Steve Jobs had some memos on a NeXT Computer in his house. Even with his tech [abilities], we couldn’t retrieve that, because the NeXT operating system no longer can retrieve the documents that well. So every now and then, one of the lessons I learned is take notes on paper in a notebook. They’ll be around 50 years... --Walter Isaacson, Leonardo Da Vinci biographer, as told to Kara Swisher on Recode We all keep notes digitally these days. When I tried to do Steve Jobs’ period in the 1990s — when he was in the wilderness between his stints at Apple, he worked at NeXT Computer — we went back to try to get all the emails and memos. He couldn’t get them out of his machine. The operating system couldn’t retrieve them anymore. But paper is a

Sunday Oct 18, 2018 High tech trash bins arrive at Civic Center:     sfexaminer.com Sunday Oct 24, 2018 Joe Mathews pens another tree-thinning OpEd.    sfchronicle.com Sunday Oct 14, 2018 "Chatbots that don’t disclose that they’re not human will be illegal in California starting in July, under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last month."    sfchronicle.com Uber and Lyft drivers dread possible "deactivation" and "some say they don’t know why they got the ax, and lack a clear path to plead their case."    sfchronicle.com Sunday Oct 7, 2018 New social network: Wave of salons aims to bring back human connections     sfchronicle.com Sunday Sept 16, 2018 Bruce Schneier's new book says governments "must act swiftly" to mandate a more cyber secure infrastructure. The title is 'Click Here to Kill Everybody'    technologyreview.com John Fowles' The Tree is a humble revolt against usefulness:     theguardian.c

A textbook for college Magazine Production classes explains that a magazine brings the reader, temporarily, into its world. Through its masthead, artwork, article tone, advertisers, even weight and glossiness of paper, a magazine creates an atmosphere. A media producer wanting repeat business is smart to heed this point. "Television," Jerry Seinfeld tells Norm MacDonald in the latter's video podcast, "is a place medium." MacDonald was probing the motive behind a tv set backdrop piece for the long-running CNN show "Larry King Live." Adapted for the digital era, "peak TV" and beyond, some are calling strides to create place experiences the "Be Here Now 2.0" movement. In the first hours and days of a personal digital detox quest and its concurrent activity, intentional attention span lengthening (IASL,) it can be a struggle to read or peruse within the bounds of even your favorite magazine or newspaper without clicking away. The Ea

Saturday Sept 15, 2018 "It started happening in the early 1990s, Fennell says, when laws were passed requiring that infants be placed in the backseats of cars - and turned to the rear - as a way to prevent airbag injuries."    sfchronicle.com Thursday Sept 13, 2018 From 2016: 98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads at you:     washingtonpost.com Krugman: "By 2011, unemployment was still over 9 percent, but all the Beltway crowd wanted to talk about was the menace of the debt."    nytimes.com On August 3, 2018, @facebook went down for 45 minutes. Here's what happened, according to @Chartbeat : - Overall traffic went up 2.3% across the world - 11% increase in direct traffic - Huge increase in other app opens: 22% - Search up 8% #ONA18 #ONA18engagement — Stacey Decker (@staceyrdecker) September 13, 2018 Tuesday Sept 11, 2018 "Facebook Inc. disclosed it gave dozens of companies special access to user data, detailing for the f

Wednesday Sept 5, 2018 The story of a house: how private equity swooped in after the mortgage crisis:     ig.ft.com 🔗🔗 🔗 🔗🔗🔗🔗 🔗 🔗 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .