A Tokyo sono affascinato dalla linea di treni leggeri Yamanote, che fa il giro della parte interna della città. È anche una suddivisione simbolica, un confine fra le due macro-aree della capitale giapponese: i quartieri residenziali (la "mano della montagna") e la città bassa. Tanto che l'altro poarte, la città bassa o Shitamachi, ospita anche un museo della vita quotidiana delle classi lavoratrici piccolo-borghesi. Un museo attaccato al laghetto di Ueno, dove c'è il piccolo albergo tradizionale a gestione famigliare in cui sono solito andare quando visito privatamente Tokyo. La prossima volta, chissà...

Money quote: "The historic separation of Tokyo into two distinct regions has persisted even to this day, though the definitions of the city’s boundaries have expanded. Yamanote (meaning “mountain’s hand”) was the hilly area populated by the rich and the powerful, including Tokugawa vassals and the military elite. Conversely, Shitamachi (meaning “under city” or “low city”) was flat and marshy, and distinctly lower class.

The first floor of the Shitamachi Museum contains a reproduced living space, showing how the latter’s everyday people once lived. "

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/shitamachi-museum

Si dimette l’inventore di Linux: il suo pessimo carattere rischia di rovinare l’azienda - il mio articolo (a pagamento) per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/09/27/tecnologia/il-pap-di-linux-fa-un-passo-indietro-dopo-anni-di-mail-piene-di-insulti-ho-bisogno-di-aiuto-6kgt7yfVXxcTNCfTZqIIcN/premium.html

La fotografia computazionale non ci farà sbagliare più una foto - il mio articolo per Wired.it

https://www.wired.it/gadget/foto-e-video/2018/09/27/attimo-deciso-computazionale/

Come risolvere il problema dei font sfocati su macOs Mojave - il mio articolo per Wired.it

https://www.wired.it/gadget/computer/2018/09/27/font-sfocati-mojave/

Jamie Zawinski è uno dei fondatori di Netscape (Mozilla e poi Firefox, per intendersi) nonché creatore degli XScreenSaver, che sono un classico (totalmente gratuito) per macOS e soprattutto per Linux e Unix/Bsd. Ecco, qui il nostro uomo spiega perché non esiste - e non deve esistere - una versione per Windows.

Money quote: "Sometimes people ask me why there is no Windows port of XScreenSaver. The reason is that Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge. They are a company with vicious, predatory, anti-competitive business practices, and always have been. They also happen to make terrible products, and always have. I do not use any Microsoft products, and neither should you."

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/xscreensaver-windows.html

Qui una spiegazione su Wikipedia sintetica di cosa siano e come funzionino gli screensaver in questione

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScreenSaver

e qui "Dna Lounge", il night club molto cyberpunk (modo elegante per dire che ha uno spirito tardo anni Ottanta) che Zawinski gestisce a San Francisco. Ci sono stato, è un posto epico.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_Lounge

Qui, infine, il nostro uomo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

Su Medium una catena di cinguettii di twitter di Stephen Sinofsky (che ormai si esprime solo così: ah!, la nevrosi che lo arde da dentro) annotati e amplificati per portare avanti il ragionamento su Amazon e la sua evoluzione. Interessante.

Money quote: "A funny thing happens…"

https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/amazon-4648bdf511c

È un sacco di tempo che non scrivo per Il Post. Per questo ci tengo particolarmente. E poi perché la storia del primo Boeing 777 per me è speciale

Money quote: "Pian piano, uno dei giganti dell’aria, il primo della sua razza, è andato a dormire. Per sempre."

https://www.ilpost.it/antoniodini/2018/09/28/buonanotte-vecchio-triple-seven/

Dopo Vivian Maier, che secondo me era già di per sé una (geniale) forma di speculazione, arriva questo Barry Gfeller che è morto e sepolto lasciando però una tonnellata e mezzo di foto scattate di qua e di là. Ti fa capire però che quelle della Maier erano migliori.

Money quote: "“Ultimately, Gfeller drove over 100,000 miles across 44 states and six Canadian provinces between 1977 and 1996," says Mike O’Neill, a political strategist who first learned about Gfeller in 2016. After Gfeller died, the collection made its way from his estate to a Canadian charity. Sixteen years later, the charity asked O’Neill to help find a buyer who could donate the work to a museum. They didn’t have to look far. Fascinated, O’Neill purchased the collection himself in 2017. He's now begun to digitize the prints, and is searching for a long-term home for Gfeller’s archive."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barry-gfeller-photograph-collection

Perché Apple e Google vogliono che usiamo meno i nostri smartphone? Perché così ci sentiamo più sicuri. Ma pensa te!

Money quote: "With few exceptions, when a product harms people, consumers tend to use it less often or find better alternatives. The feature fight between these two tech rivals benefits everyone. The move to help users create healthy habits with their devices is an example of competition making products better."

https://medium.com/behavior-design/the-real-reason-apple-and-google-want-you-to-use-your-phone-less-37b2b7f1384

Se vogliamo conquistare Marte, prima dobbiamo creare dei guanti adatti allo scopo

Money quote: "This is nothing new for humans. We’ve built one world by hand, we can probably build another — even in harsh UV light, subzero temperatures, and a lethally low-pressure atmosphere. But if opposable thumbs were key to the evolution of human civilization, and humanity can’t be naked against the Martian elements, then it’s an unexpected and unglamorous factor that will determine whether or not we succeed: gloves."

https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/the-gloves-well-wear-on-mars-b5cb0f637e44

Questa cosa è psichedelica. Folle. Meravigliosa. Pannocchie colorate!

Money quote: "Soon, their questions were answered. Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee farmer from Oklahoma, liked to experiment with ancestral corn varieties. After breeding several varieties together, the result was vibrantly-colored corn. The colored kernels ranged from vivid red to pale blue. Often, a single cob had a multitude of colors, each kernel the seed of a distinct plant. Through friends distributing the kernels and internet word-of-mouth, the lovely corn gained prominence on the seed scene. Though Barnes passed away in 2016, seed companies around the world still sell his jewel-like corn."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/glass-gem-corn

E se mi volete in voce, eccomi ospite a Talos dove racconto la complessa storia dell'Eternauta

Achtung podcast!

https://rbe.it/2018/09/28/talos-la-complessa-storia-delleternauta/

La meravigliosa arte dell'hacking.

Money quote: "A few days ago on 25th April, while researching, I found that a lot of individuals and companies are putting their sensitive information on their public Trello boards. Information like unfixed bugs and security vulnerabilities, the credentials of their social media accounts, email accounts, server and admin dashboards — you name it, is available on their public Trello Boards which are being indexed by all the search engines and anyone can easily find them."

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/discovering-the-hidden-mine-of-credentials-and-sensitive-information-8e5ccfef2724

Long read: storia di uno degli uomini che hanno rivoluzionato la fotografia. Yoshihisa Maitani, al cuore della rivoluzione Olympus

Money quote: "In 1954, Maitani was a 21-year-old automotive engineering student at Waseda University and a passionate photographer who spent his days wandering Tokyo with a Leica IIIf. So enamored with cameras was he, that the young man created and patented his own camera design before he’d even left school. At this time, Olympus had been manufacturing cameras for just twenty years. The brand needed expertise and know-how to grow, and Olympus was actively hunting for talent in Japanese universities. When Eiichi Sakurai, the creator of the first Olympus camera, stumbled upon Maitani’s camera patent, he immediately insisted that the younger man work for Olympus. In a lecture, Maitani related the wrinkle in the story.

“In those days a student who refused to work for the first company to offer him a job was regarded as a disgrace to his university. I had received a job offer from an automobile manufacturer, but I pretended that I hadn’t and so went to work for Olympus instead.”

The young designer’s first assignment would find him designing nothing. Instead, he was sent to the Olympus factory for a period of “practical training” in which he was rotated to a different department every six months for two years. At the end of two years, he returned to the design department and was told, rather simply, to “Try designing something.” With this unusual degree of freedom, he set about designing a camera that would cost one quarter the price of the least expensive Olympus camera."

https://www.casualphotophile.com/2018/01/12/yoshihisa-maitani-the-man-who-made-olympus/

Semplicemente spettacolare: una museo-mostra-evento di arte digitale imperdibile (se siete a Tokyo)

Money quote: "The building is located at the Odaiba in Tokyo bay and was co-founded by the urban developer MORI Building Co.,Ltd. and digital art collective teamLab, which is known for engaging museum-goers with colorful and mesmerizing exhibitions created with cutting-edge digital technology."

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514f794d544e78457a6333566d54/share_p.html

Soprattutto dall'Italia il successo di Jerry Seinfield è meno visibile. Ma è misterioso anche per il mondo della televisione americana e lo star system. Ha vinto tutto, di brutto, negli anni Novanta senza che nessuno capisse come ha fatto. E poi si è tirato da una parte, fa le poche cose che lo divertono veramente perché in sostanza ha guadagnato molto e non ha bisogno. Costruisce la sua leggenda, ma molto sottotraccia. Ma la lezione fondamentale è come ci sia arrivato.

Money quote: "Stop fiddling with your website and checking your Facebook page. Close the door and write."

https://writingcooperative.com/jerry-seinfelds-3-1-billion-dollar-writing-trick-b800385458db

Entro certi limiti penso che ci meritiamo l'estinzione di massa. Decisamente.

Money quote: " In February 2013, he wrote a blog post ennoscriptd ‘How I Stopped Eating Food’, in which he reported feeling like the ‘six-million-dollar man’ after just 30 days of replacing food with a ‘thick, odourless, beige liquid’ made up of ‘every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial’.

The response was overwhelming. Readers of Hacker News, a website popular with programmers and tech entrepreneurs, were the first to latch on to Rhinehart’s Soylent post, encouraging him to share the recipe online. When he did, it quickly spawned an animated Reddit thread in which DIY Soylent adopters reviewed recipes, discussed magnesium sourcing, and compared bowel movements. Within three months, Rhinehart decided that demand was sufficient for him to quit his tech start-up and form his own company in order to supply Soylent to the masses. By the time Soylent 1.0 started shipping in May 2014, the company had already accumulated a backlog of more than 20,000 pre-orders, adding up to more than $2 million dollars in sales and – at a conservative estimate – a collective saving of 2,875 years."

https://aeon.co/essays/how-many-of-us-would-opt-out-of-food-if-given-the-chance

Pensiero positivo per oggi

Singapore vuole eliminare il Singlish, il dialetto nato a cavallo tra cinese, malese, tamil e inglese. A prescindere dai desideri dell'elite tecnocratica della città-stato, la valutazione sul significato i questa classe di dialetti e i sottostanti rapporti di forza che li generano, è necessaria e dobbiamo guardarla bene, vista la trasformazione multiculturale del nostro Paese avviata ormai da venti anni. Prima che se ne approprino e ne parlino solo Lega e m5s.

Money quote: "Singlish can broadly be categorized as a creole, which is a full language that arises suddenly, usually with one language as its base, but with unique grammatical features and many words from at least one other language. This kind of language comes about when people who don’t speak the same language are suddenly living in the same place. Many creoles came from the slave trade: one person speaks one language, another speaks a second language, and they’re both moved to a place where they have to work together and live together and communicate. The base language is usually the language of the ruling class or imperial power; it’s a language that those two slaves need to understand a little, but they bring elements of their own languages into it. At first, this kind of language is classified as a pidgin, which is sort of a shorthand that exists solely for necessary communication alongside other full languages. But in some cases, it evolves into a full language of its own, one that can handle all the tasks any other language handles, at which point it’s called a creole."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/singlish-singapore-government-campaign

Il video più bello del mese
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCoH2AORcEQ

Pesciolino: Steve Jobs, il padre che ami ma che non vorresti - il mio articolo per Macity.

https://www.macitynet.it/recensione-pesciolino-libro-della-figlia-di-jobs/