What if.... Ponderings over technology

At work we have a copy machine that you have to sign out of when you are done, by clicking buttons on the Touch screen THREE (3) times.  First, click your name in the upper right corner, then select Log Out from the menu, then a new menu comes up asking: Are you sure you want to Log Out? and then you have to hit yes.   Isn't it amazing that something as simple as logging out is made so convoluted?  They can't blame it on safety. 
     When you drive a car and turn left, nobody stops you and wait for you to confirm once or twice that YES, INDEED, I want to turn left.  Imaging the number of accidents that would happen if you had to confirm every little action while driving a car... and response times would increase as would frustration and road rage.  What a waste of time in front of the printer.

At home we have a printer that stops working as soon as one of the colors is finished, even if there is black ink left and you only want to print in black and white.  It just won't print.  It is on strike until you have bought new, expensive color ink (or photo gloss, or whatever it might be), that you don't need for that particular print job. 
    When you drive a car, and the windshield washer fluid runs dry, the car just doesn't stop working and waiting for you to fill up more of it, regardless of where you are.  That would be inconceivable.

Sometimes when you surf the web and look at stuff, the network gets clogged, or the software slows down, and even sometimes, the program or even the computer just crashes, and you are forced to restart the computer.  
   When you drive a car, it suddenly just doesn't stop randomly or goes at tiny speed because of some outside force field or sluggish connection.  That would be pretty dangerous.

Many times you look around on the web and try to find a good restaurant so you browse their web pages, but when you go to their website you are met by 'the intro' - some awful music, slow things (usually photos) moving across the page, and you have to sit there and waste your time unless you can find the tiny semi-hidden text called 'Skip this intro'.  After that torture and time-waste is over, you can start to look for 1) opening hours, 2) address and directions, and 3) the menu.  You would think those three things are the most important information to get to your potential customers, and that at least 1 and 2 should be listed on the opening page of the home page. Oh no, you often have to guess where it is, maybe under 'Contact Us", or 'About Us', or some other non-direct heading.  And often you have to scroll down because the bottom of the page can't be seen at first sight.  For the menus, those are often under a tab, but many are hidden under headings that are tiny, and on extremely slow-loading pages (including the crashing pdf-format), or just small.
    If you drive a car, it doesn't play unwanted intro music when you start it.  It starts up, then it immediately shows you if anything is wrong with the car on the dashboard (any Check Engine light on? Doors open? No, good!).  All information is right there, ready to check out and react to.  Restaurant web pages are like Lego Men hidden in pizza dough, you can't find them or you find a little piece but you can't see the rest.

Who designs these things?  I thought designers' jobs were to make things that WORK WELL and LOOK GOOD.  The first of those things, i.e. practicality, user-friendliness, and usability is as important as that it looks great.  The funny thing is that often the companies insist that their way of doing things are for our convenience, when in reality these things cause us inconvenience, frustration, or just waste time.  Books never fail to open.  Compasses never run out of batteries. Simplicity and ease-of-use means just that, simplicity. 

Will it take 50-100 years to make the internet, printers, copiers, and computers as user-friendly and reliable as cars?  I hope not.  Of course cars break down at times, but they are far more reliable than most of our other home electronics.  I love things that work and that even if complicated, are easy to use. Don't get me started on the design of remote controls... you would think they get paid by the numbers of buttons they put on them.  How long did it take for cars to enter the phase of user-friendliness?  And maybe cars are now on their way to become less user-friendly again?  I haven't mastered the GPS in PP's car at all, because it is not at all intuitive. 

PS.  OK, you want examples of bad design offenders? Here is one...
Prune Restaurant, New York City   
You have to CLICK to enter their website.  What did they think, that you got to their website by accident and need to confirm with them that you actually want to be there?  And then click on Menu and see if you can see their partial tiny menu in a scrolling window... The prices on the lunch menu are about 4 mm tall on my screen.  That is about half as big as a black pepper corn.  Anybody that can read the ingredients on the Bloody Mary menu online ought to get a free drink, or two. Prune, shape up, and fix your website please...

I think Steve Jobs got it right in this quote:

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Pinterest = Internet Thievery, Unfairness, and Ugliness

(Long post but important)

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it.  Morals and ethics is all about this, making choices to do the right thing.  Humans are not just following insticts, we can think, decide, do or not do.  If you can steal something, should you?  If you can make money on someone else's efforts without giving them anything, should you?  If you can live without caring about others, should you?  Pinterest and many of its users do.

OK, I had not heard about Pinterest until a few days ago, and looked it up and fell in love.   Temporarily.  Very temporarily. So, I had a 20 hour love affair with Pinterest, and now we are partly separated (not totally, read on).  I know, this just happened AFTER I wrote that long thing about how we are too addicted to the internet, and I fell right into the addition to Pinterest trap. 

Pinterest is a great way to collect links and thumbnails to all the interesting things you find on the web so you can find them again, or to make pinboards of images for inspiration, education, or useful things. It is exploding on the internet right now.  So far so good, and that is what I loved about it.  So much interesting stuff!!!   

But then I clicked on an image to find out more and it linked back to Google Images, or I got a 404 error, or it linked me to Tumblr's home page, and something was obviously not right.  Where did the image come from?

When I signed up for Pinterest I read the rules for the site, and it says that you have to have the right to pin anything made by you or that you have the copyright for, so you can't pin things copyrighted by others.  But people do, 99% of people in Pinterest do, maybe more, and very few even give credit and source for each image.  A typical pinned image is a photo of a gorgeous room with the note "I love this". No facts on where that image came from.

That can't be right, I thought, obviously this image wasn't taken by whatever house wife in Florida that pinned and loved it.  Then I started googling "Pinterest copyright" and found a large set of recent articles about how Pinterest is avoiding by getting into trouble by making all its users, not themselves, legally liable for any copyright infringement.  (Their own blog shows how upset some people are by this. Other info here, good post here, more, )

Pinterest takes no responsibility at all, and in fact, by using it you agree to give all the images you have pinned (and thereby downloaded to Pinterest as high-resolution photos, mostly illegally in my opinion) to Pinterest for free. Pinterest then have the right to sell these photos and make money of them, even if they are copyrighted by someone that had no idea that you pinned their gorgeous photo or art or craft idea, etc.

So, say that I pin my photos which are under Creative Commons license on Flickr to my board on Pinterest, and as soon as I have done that, I have no longer any control over them.  Pinterest could sell them to Target to use in their advertising and I would get zero dollars, and I would not be asked for permission.  This is so wrong!!!

Similarly, if a user pins an image of a new Porsche, Pinterest now has the right to use that image, even if it is copyrighted by Porsche. Simply put, Pinterest is fooling everybody, and stealing from everybody. And they let their users get away with it, and the users let Pinterest get away with it.  Just like drug addiction... They need each other, the users and the company.

Pinterest's solution is that anybody that finds their copyrighted image pinned onto Pinterest by a user can contact them and have it removed from Pinterest's website.  So it is up to the owner of the image to search the internet and complain. (This is unimaginable hard...)  Imagine this happening with actual items.  Someone comes into your house, robs you, and goes away with some of your stuff.  Now you have to look for your things wide and far, and they are not marked with your name, address or anything.  And if you find your things, then you have to fill out an online form and eventually you can get the stuff back.  And in the end, the stealing doesn't get punished at all.

In fact, Pinterest doesn't care that its users pin lots of copyrighted things, and if there is a problem (say, they get sued by Modern Museum of Art for some art images a user has pinned), then the user will have to pay the legal bills for both herself AND for Pinterest's lawyers.  It is all in the user agreement, and very clear.  How can this be right?  How can this be ethical?  The user could be a company too, so if McDonalds pins a photo of a burger, they could get sued.... but Pinterest wouldn't.  How crazy.

 So, removed my pins and boards and now I am only 'liking' things I see on Pinterest, so I can use the links and cool ideas here on the blog, after getting proper permission and linking to the original source.  I am all for sharing, but it has to be FAIR with PROPER credit.  It is very well explained on the Link with Love website, who made a special pinnable image for Pinterest (see left).  So, this is what I believe and think we should do, all of us.  Link with love, be fair, don't steal, and read more here.

So, what should Pinterest do, to get it right?  Well, only store thumbnails, like Google.  Demand that all photos are tagged with source (url), and source information (name, company, etc.), and mark all photos with the proper copyright license [public work, creative commons, all rights reserved, etc.].  And Pinterest should not have the right to use any of the pinned images by anybody. 

I predict that Pinterest will be hit with a giant lawsuit by some media company like Martha Stewart Magazine, AP, or an art organization on behalf of their members soon, and then it will be in big trouble. The company is doing everything according to US law right now, but only by putting all responsibility and liability on the users, most of which probably have no idea that they are doing something illegal or deeply unethical. As one user said "it is just a picture, who cares?"  This is just seriously wrong. It reminds me of gun manufacturers or cigarette makers that provide deadly weapons and then take no responsibility at all, because 'who could have predicted that someone would shoot with it at another person?", etc. Sigh...

A new word learned: Linkrot

I just saw a new word, and one that makes immediate sense: LINKROT

This is when old web pages and other things online eventually have many non-working links because the pages it links to have changed through time.  The web is in flux, it is not a constant thing, like pages in a book.  So the links rot away, with time, like a dead tree in the forest. 

Share and Like - maybe a profound thought or maybe just a rant....

We live in times where we can share more personal things with each other than ever before because of all online tools. We can tell the world what we like and dislike, favor and unfavor, and give thumbs up and thumbs down.  We can rate movies, books, give mojo (= good) on comments on Daily Kos, and have thousands of favorites of photos on Flickr.
 
Some of us (not me) have many, many friends on Facebook, and maybe even more followers on Twitter.  We send out messages via e-mail with links and attachments to great articles we find, funny cat pictures, and YouTube videos.  We skype each other while doing other things, chopping up time and conversations into small, disjointed pieces. We get the same from others, click on links, laugh and send things on.  We blog, put up pictures online, and hope to be found by whoever in the internet noise.  I am all involved in this, and I think it is a great example of the me, me, me-culture that UTNE Reader highlighted a while back. It is all about us, or is it really?


Media, social and traditional, online and in print, and on FM radio are all part of this.  It is not only chopped up time and factoids, and not only distraction and lack of attention, but really, the problem is bigger.  People don't think and do not really communicate much anymore in a way that is really true to who they are.  At least I believe so, because I do not think we all only care about Youtube videos, a LOLcat or something that just went viral.  I think we care about more things, and have our own thoughts.  The problem is that those own thoughtful thoughts are never really developed in this deluge of other stuff.

And isn't the problem here that for so many of these things, most of us don't really say what we think and feel about things anymore?  It has become too easy to send and share your Likes, that nobody really know what it means to really LIKE and LOVE something, because that is never written down.  When do people have time or take the effort to send long heartfelt e-mails or letters?  When do people talk on the phone about deep things?  When do we really share the real profound thoughts we might have, and if we do, how?

I think today's communication is rather shallow, except the ones we have with close friends. Most interaction and chatter online is rather meaningless, especially when all you do is to click Like/Dislike and Rating buttons.  If you write a short review, then you tell people what you really think.... not when you give a book a 4 out of a 5. But who has time with things like that?  So much easier just to click.

For all of you who have sent me videos, links, and photos, please keep sending them.  I love it, and I don't mean to criticize you.  I am just the same, I do all of these things.  I just got thinking about this and wanted to share it with you, readers of this blog.  And yes, there are some of you readers that send me wonderful, long letters, but I think you are a rarity. I like to write letters too, both by hand and on the computer.  The problem is lack of time. At dinnertime we have the most wonderful in-depth and convoluted conversations here at home.  But I see in society (American and Swedish) a tendency to become less and less personal, less focused on "who I am", and more about being one tiny fish going in the same direction as everybody else in the big general Gulf stream traffic on the internet.
(link to a great letter here)

The me-me-me-society is really not about ourselves, it is about trying to share something and be liked by many many people (who know very little about you) at once, so who dares to express something in a complete sentence with complete words that might be personal or honest? It could be used against you, in many different ways. Better to play it safe by just clicking on a Like button, right? But it that really fun?  Is that really that important?  Is that really liking something, for real?  I think we should all be more real. For real.

PS.  Of course this all applies to texting (SMS) too.

Eagle reality show

About 10 km from where we live is an eagle nest with a video camera on it - you can check out the Duke Farms Eagle Cam here. (And yes, there is a really annoying ad first that you have to ignore, but I hope that pays for the camera and isn't just annoying.) Right now they are laying on their three eggs, with the first egg due to hatch in about a week. 

Bird feeding online

I have search the net for webcams with bird feeding. Here´s some favorites.

Pennsylvania, US: http://bucksbirdcam.com/

Atlantic rainforest, Brazil: Wildlife focus

Dalarna Sweden; winterfeeding

Store Mosse, Sweden: eagle feeding in winter (not active right now)

Estonian website: http://www.looduskalender.ee/en

Yesterday I took some screenshots from Brazil, see more pictures here.

Have fun!

Where am I? Where do I want to go?

I have a new on-line toy. If you haven't seen Biogeomancer, try it! You can search for any place name in the world and get the it mapped on a Google map, and get the latitude and longitude coordinates too. Amazing, I just found out there is only one 'ärla' place in the whole world. A place I know very well. And 'Vattungarna', which means 'the small water islands' or something like that, occurs in three places, all in the Baltic archipelago, twice in Sweden and once in Finland. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

You can zoom around, move the map, check it mapped on satellite or as a topographic map and find new names of places that you have never heard of before such as (in Swedish): Inre Håkansskär, Tjockö, Velen, and Flaten. For you English-speaking, how about these (from United Kingdom): West Ella, Horkstow, Scunthorpe, and Swinhope. Happy geography hunting!

Design for Web Icon

I was thinking that we could create a web icon (the 16x16 picture next to the url) for the blog. Here it is:


It shows a sink pipe with orange gooey stuff coming out of it, as well as two letters that are in the blog name.

Well?