A lot of press coverage this week on Facebook’s corporate name change to Meta. An interview with Mark Zuckerberg at The Verge shows some of the thinking behind the announcement. What do you do when you have billions of customers who are using your service on a platform you don’t control, and where your ability …
Author Archives: cafedave
two more months of MS Teams
For four years I’ve been studying, and using Microsoft Teams on and off. This has been a good way for various uni small groups of students to collaborate and share files, but one thing had confused me. Often when working on a folder of files, to find the most recent one, I would want to …
medium and message
This picture of a quilt, where someone had sewn together a representation of graphs of temperature data and UK COVID deaths reminded me of the way that the chosen medium influences the nature of a conversation. And done! A year of temperature minima and maxima, and UK COVID deaths, recorded in fabric. Data visualisation has …
clickbait and netflix
Compelling argument on Slate about Netflix heading the way of all social sites as they follow the way of all sites that are seeking to monetise attention.
average face
Noah Kalina has been taking a photo of his face every day for over 20 years. Here is a rolling average of these photos, shown at 2 months per second. It’s a bit of a confronting demonstration of the passage of time.
working from near home
Sydney is again in lock-down (or as we’re calling it, a stay-at-home order), so this article on working from near home by Cal Newport is a little further in the future. After over a year of working mostly outside the office, if anything, it has brought me greater appreciation of the workspaces that I’ve had …
unlikely databases
There’s a search engine dedicated to death notices and obituaries in Australia – the Ryerson Index.
privacy online
A recent ad for some of the iPhone’s new privacy features is a reminder of how much your online activities are mined by various third parties to build online profiles of you. And yes, I recognise the problems with embedding this as a youtube video. Related is this Twitter thread on privacy, via Haoran(some swearing …
Organisational cost of insufficient sleep
Working on the amount and quality of my sleep has been a personal project for at least a few years, but there’s plenty of research to suggest that organisations should also be thinking about employee sleep.
explaining finances
I presented the treasurer’s report at our church congregational meeting. When I do one of these, I try to explain the standard documents so that people can read the reports and make sense of them. I’ve tried a couple of times now, and what I find works is to help people zoom out and see the …