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 agai...

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 ...

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 .

Monday Aug 27, 2018 Oil company CEO drives an electric vehicle on weekends.    reuters.com 🔗🔗 🔗 🔗🔗🔗 🔗 🔗🔗 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Below is an 18-minute short film distributed by public television service ITVS, tracing the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag. Wherein voice actor Werner Herzog plays the protagonist. "Dhey told me it's out dhere - dha Pacific vortex paradise. You may be thinking hey shut up end enjoy dha sunset you idjiot. Vell I don't care vhat you think. No one needs me hyere anymore. Not even my maker. Do you know hyer by any chance? Have you seen hyer?" "Sometimes dha vorld was even too great for me. And sometimes dha vaiting drove me mad. Vasn't she beautiful? She vas also searching for hyer maker. I didn't need a maker anymore. I only needed hyer." This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Friday Aug 24, 2018 Since electric vehicles spend most of their time at the owner's home and workplace, many employers are offering charging spots to keep workers happy.    usatoday.com Thursday Aug 23, 2018 "It is somewhat ironic that the electric robocar might cause the vanishing job of full service gas station attendant to return."    ideas4brad.com "Digital platforms allowed communities to gather and form in new ways, but they also dispersed existing communities, those that had watched the same TV news and read the same newspapers."    technologyreview.com Wednesday Aug 22, 2018 "Algorithms alone can't meaningfully hold other algorithms accountable."    reallifemag.com Tuesday Aug 21, 2018 The Netflix Series 13 Reasons Why has kids asking their parents for cassette players and tapes. One parent reports his kid is "fascinated with the b-side." Science teachers say the analog tech teaches kids fine motor skil...

Forest thinning done wrong, removing old-growth trees, makes forests more fire-prone. As this reporter from 1875 witnessed, a fire races across a prairie then calms considerably upon forest entry: TULARE -- In the forest between the Middle and East forks of the Kaweah , I met a great fire, and as fire is the master scourge and controller of the distribution of trees, I stopped to watch it and learn what I could of its works and ways with the giants. It came racing up the steep chaparral-covered slopes of the East Fork cañon with passionate enthusiasm in a broad cataract of flames, now bending down low to feed on the green bushes, devouring acres of them at a breath, now towering high in the air as if looking abroad to choose a way, then stooping to feed again, the lurid flapping surges and the smoke and terrible rushing and roaring hiding all that is gentle and orderly in the work. But as soon as the deep forest was reached the ungovernable flood became calm like a torrent entering...

(* Denotes one bliki appendage, below .)   The Honest Ads Act has not passed into law, but if it did it would bring parity between online and offline media platforms. (Broadcasters and newspapers are already held to the standards that the Honest Ads Act would hold online platforms to - a disclosure of who paid for each political ad.) Driverless cars are not subject to the driver tests that human drivers are. Even though 50 different companies create their own driverless car technology, their own firmware and software that stitches together the radar, lidar and ultrasound that together comprise the "Autonomous Vehicle" AV's vision. Sales tax is applied to any purchase a consumer makes in a real store which rents space. But it's not applied to an online purchase in most states. Update 1 : A new law has limited the number of taxi drivers from picking up passengers at San Francisco airport SFO. This law does not apply to Uber and Lyft drivers. KQED: In Latest Blow to S...