Notes From Afar
Over the last few years there has been a resurgence in printed journals and magazines. Not mass market, mass media publications, but independent, high-quality curated works created by passionate people.
Another Escape is a wonderful example – well written, with fabulous photography and beautifully designed and typeset.
The latest issue is curated around the theme of wilderness, and delivers a fascinating escape from the day to day.
The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.
I’m reading You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier, this passage really resonated with me.
“Children learn through play. Adults learn through art.”
I’ve just watched the 2015 John Peel Lecture given this year by Brian Eno, and it was the most thought provoking hour of television I can remember seeing in along time.
A fascinating discussion of art, culture and humanity – Eno is clearly a deep thinker as well as a musical genius.
The show is available on the BBC iPlayer until the end of October and I urge you to take an hour to watch an think about the points Eno makes before it disappears. The BBC have also made a transcript available as a slightly more permanent PDF.
Eno quotes a number of books during his lecture, BBC 6 Music have kindly tweeted a reading list.
“It was a pleasant café, warm clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. ”
I received my Kindle Voyage earlier this week, and thought I’d share my first thoughts on Amazon’s latest eReader. At first glance the Kindle Voyage looks like a slightly more compact Paperwhite, but there is much more to the latest flagship eReader from Amazon.
The screen of the Kindle Voyage sits flush with the body, in fact the screen forms the front of the Voyage. The screen is no longer recessed as with the Paperwhite as the Voyage uses a capacitative touchscreen rather than Infra-Red, this makes for a much more attractive and responsive device.
The screen is glass but has been specially etched to prevent reflections and, Amazon say, to replicate the texture of paper; I’ve seen no reflections so far, and whilst I might not say the texture is that of paper it is very nice – nicer than that of the Paperwhite.
Of course the main headline for the screen is it’s significantly higher resolution, which at 300ppi is retina territory. It’s a staggeringly good screen, with wonderful crisp letters, great contrast and not a hint of a pixel no matter how hard your look, and the front-lighting is now completely uniform across the screen. The Kindle Voyage now has an ambient light sensor and can automatically adjust it’s lighting to match the lighting where you are reading. There is also a nightlight setting making the Voyage dim more slowly to allow your eyes time to adjust.
Reading in bed last night it was like holding a piece or magically glowing paper — quite wonderful.
The Kindle Voyage sees the triumphant return of hardware page turn buttons, but these aren’t your usual click plastic affairs, oh no these are very different , Amazon calls them PagePress:
PagePress is a custom-designed force sensor made of carbon and silver, which reacts to a subtle increase of pressure, triggers a page-turn and provides a haptic response only your thumb can perceive. Because PagePress has no moving parts, the haptics provide you with the most minimal indication that you have pressed the button, to reduce distraction from reading.
At first I tapped them, as you would regular touch screen devices, which doesn’t work. They require a slight pressure or squeeze with your thumb or finger and responded perfectly once I’d adjusted my technique. To paraphrase Steve Jobs “I was squeezing them wrong”.
The level of pressure and feedback can be adjusted within settings allowing you to fine tune to your preference or switch them off completely.
PagePress works perfectly for me, I was worried that the combination of my larger hands and the Voyage’s slimmer bezels might make them tricky to use but I’ve had no issues at all.
The body of the Kindle Voyage is made from magnesium and coated in a non-slip rubber coating. This make it light and strong and a complete and utter fingerprint magnet, luckily I seldom look at the back.
The Kindle Voyage is by far the best eReader I’ve owned and used; combining a lightweight, easy to hold body with an incredible high resolution screen. Highly recommended.
Something went wrong around the start of the twenty-first century. The crowd was wise. Social networks replaced individual creativity. There were more places to express ourselves than ever before … yet no one really had anything to say.