Planet Chris

Simone Giertz sits at the breakfast table, intently reading a book. A robot sits next to her. The robot picks up a box of cereal and turns it upside down over Simone’s bowl. Cheerios skitter across the table. It then tips over a box of milk, picks it up, pours more milk on the table. Simone doesn’t lift her eyes from the book. The machine grabs a spoon, dips it into the air above Simone’s cereal bowl and brings it near her mouth. She leans in to grab a bite of nothing, stil...

There are a lot of tools out there that do great, advanced things but present them as well as they could be presented.  I wont knock cURL for anything — it’s an amazing tool many of us can’t live without;  what I will say, however, is that it’s nice having tools on top of cURL for better presentation or extended functionality. I recently discovered httpstat, which is a single python file which (simply) graphically displays request event timing, fro...

Last week I spent in Germany at an event sponsored by the government agency for unemployment covering the issue of digitalisation of the job market and the subsequential loss of jobs. When the agency approached me to give a keynote on the upcoming “fourth industrial revolution” and what machine learning and artificial intelligence means for the job market I was – to put it mildly – bricking it. All the other presenters at the event had several doctor titles and w...

I wrote about this on Friday. I think Twitter is going to be a great way to watch the debate tonight. Here’s how you can get Twitter on your big screen and watch the debate on Twitter: if you have a “fourth generation” AppleTV, you can add the Twitter app to it using the AppleTV app store if you have an older AppleTV, you can mirror your phone to your TV and watch the debate on your phone’s Twitter app if you have an Xbox One, you can add the Twitter app to it if you ...

    With the tools getting more user-friendly and affordable, virtual reality (VR) development is easier to get involved in than ever before. Our team at Clearbridge Mobile recently jumped on the opportunity to develop immersive VR content for the Samsung Gear VR, using Samsung’s 360 camera. The result is ClearVR, a mobile application demo that enables users to explore the features, pricing, interiors and exteriors of l...

Indie Web Camp Brighton 2016 is done and dusted. It’s hard to believe that it’s already in its fifth(!) year. As with previous years, it was a lot of fun. The first day—the discussions day—covered a lot of topics. I led a session on service workers, where we brainstormed offline and caching strategies for personal websites. There was a design session looking at alternatives to simply presenting everything in a stream. Some great ideas came out of that. And there w...

It’s SXSW 2004, the heyday of the Web Standards movement, at a panel called “Accessibility for Everyone!” Jeffrey Veen appears on stage and leads with the following statement, “I don’t care about accessibility.” Wow. I imagine this went over like a lead balloon. A statement so apostate to the culture at the time I’m surprised he wasn’t ushered out of the room by pitchforks. But when you read beyond the (clickbait) headline, you get a glimpse o...

…there is no thought, “I have attained something.” When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind Now that I’ve spent over a year relearning how to program, it’s getting to the point that I can spend some spare time applying the system of shuhari to something I never learned: drawing. The cynical me says if President George W Bush can do it, how hard can it be? But...

I went on a walk through the Chelsea Art Gallery district yesterday afternoon. One of the galleries I visited was the Petzel Gallery and they have a show up by the New Zealand artist Simon Denny. The show is called Blockchain Future States and it compares Blockchain efforts like Ethereum and Digital Asset Holdings to the board game Risk. Given the comparison to Risk, I thought the name Blockchain Nation States would be more appropriate for the show. As I was walking out of the gallery, I sa...