So you may have read my idea on the ‘Inattention Age‘. This is of course in response to the concept of the Attention Age, which intellectually I find to be the wrong term entirely.

The Attention Age Wikipedia page is the first hit in Google, so it is a term that is defining itself. I created a Wikipedia page for Inattention Age and it was flagged for deletion in about 5 minutes as the mod googled the term and found nothing about it. Annoying but fair enough, I thought, so I have to get the idea out.

Ironically, due to the Inattention Age, the idea is unlikely to gain traction unless it comes from a ‘source’, and by source I mean some highly visible spokes-thing; a person or website. The volume and speed of updates assumes things will get lost in the wash, information needs a source that is publically weighty enough to give it traction.

That’s the way it has always been of course, politicians, stars, tabloid opinions hold sway, no matter how vapid, due to the fact they get ears and eyeballs. As an infrequent blogger, very much Z-list, my opinion online carried no such weight, again annoying but fair enough.

So how do ideas, concepts, new ways of looking at things get out into  public thought? They explode though a source or seep through the everyman. The latter is what the Internet allows, and bless the Internet’s cotton socks, it sometimes works. This is proven again and again by memes that take over, however briefly, those eyes and ears.

I’ve had conceptual ideas before that I felt made no ground, such as my concept of digital history degradation, where your online past is virtually forgiven or forgotten after a period of time. That concept was, of course, postulated by others as well and it has seeped out. I like to think I was a part of that.

If someone asks you ‘What’s the point of the Internet?’, or some subset of the Internet like blogs or Twitter, then you can answer to allow seepage. The Internet allow ideas from the everyman to get out, to be ignored or taken up, no matter how thoughtful, vapid or outright crazy, the Internet is present for the everyman.

Long live the freedom of the un-commercial and uncensored Internet.

Wow. Seriously spammers? Just WTF.

The Inattention Age overlaps and builds off of the Information Age, characterized by the increasing commoditization of attention as it relates to the increasing abundance of information available, particularly on the Internet. The Inattention Age is marked by the ability of individuals to create and consume information instantly and freely as well as share it on the Internet using social media, often while performing or between other tasks. The period this idea characterises is believed to have begun with the success of Web 2.0 technologies and social media around 2007, but represents the post Web 2.0 era of 2010-onwards.

3.5″ display
960×640 pixels
326 DPI
800:1 contrast
IPS instead of OLED
Apple A4
40 hrs of music instead of 24
6 hrs 3G browsing instead of 3

It’s a huge leap and I’m getting one as soon as it launches.

Pick a new 8 letter password from http://clubefl.gr/games/wordox/8.html

Mix up the letters a little using the basic number/letter swap. Include at least one number, for added security use the symbols in place of letters, !@#$%&*, but not all websites allow this.

E=3 4=A I=1 or ! L=1 O=0 or @ T=7 and so on – for a guide see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

Now that you have your new password lets change the old one

1. Go to yahoo.com (or .ca or .co.uk, whatever as it makes no difference)
2. Click the mail icon
3. Login
4. Look in the top right for where it says options, click it
5. Look on the left side for Account Information, click it
6. Enter your current password again
7. (Switch to the ‘classic view’ if you need to, stupid Yahoo has not updated its site fully yet)
8. Look on the left for ‘Change your password’, click it
9. Enter your current password, enter a new 8 letter password.

So yes it is faster, takes less room and is all round smarter. How do you install it? The basic way is throw this disk into the drive and double click, OS X will take you through the upgrade process automatically. Make sure you have around 6GB of disk space free before you start, ideally 10GB.

Disconnect your external USB/Firewire disks but do connect your printers and peripherals; OS X will check these and install drivers for them automatically during the install process. Remember that Rosetta, Apple’s backward compatibility option allowing you to run PPC (G3/G4/G5) apps on your Intel hardware, is disabled by default. If you need it customise your install to include it.

If you want to take the better but more advanced route OS X is different than all the other versions so far, no ‘Erase and install’ option exists, or at least no automatic way. Here’s how:

After booting from the Snow Leopard disk choose Utilities > Disk Utility from the first Installer screen, and then manually erase the drive; you can then exit Disk Utility and proceed normally with installation.

Slightly more complex but considering this is designed as an upgrade to Leopard and the functionality is still included, I’ll let Apple off for that.

So I’ve got mine, have you yet?

Seriously, buy it now using the coupon code memday09

The posts table was marked as crashed, I found out using myPHP, and it needed repairing. I did that via myPHP again and everything is all working.

Remember to do backups folks, you never know when something is going to go wrong.

While I do this I’m going to update pretty much everything, including the theme. I’ve already done this with WordPress. It’s a good idea to keep that patched at all times. I’ve also done it with my plugins, so the theme is my next big step.

I use a modified version of Cutline, so I’m going to have to take the modern version of Cutline and hack it to work with CreationRobot. This will take time so please bear with me if you see some oddness or Cutlines default graphic at the top of the page here. The title graphic will probably be the last thing I change.

Anyway, lets blow off the digital cobwebs and get going.

Cutline 2.2 is UGLY. I’m going to investigate other options because I’m not using that terrible theme. Grey URL links? You thought that was a good idea? Really?

My profile on intense debate is http://intensedebate.com/people/jackdaw.

“On February 21, 2006 (the paper was only published recently), the venerable space telescope spied a UFO in an area of space where there should have been nothing at all.

Stranger still, the object disappeared almost as mysteriously as it arrived, about 100 days after the initial observation. It got very bright over time, to the 21st magnitude, then faded just as fast. Kind of like an explosion… Not much else is known about the celestial phenomenon, and it hasn’t reappeared since 2006.” Gizmodo.

The mystery object did not behave like any known kind of supernova. It is not even in any detectable galaxy. “The shape of the light curve is inconsistent with microlensing,” say the researchers. They recorded three spectra of it — and its spectrum, they write, “in addition to being inconsistent with all known supernova types, is not matched to any spectrum in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database” of vast numbers of objects. “We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class.” Sky and Telescope.

Some deep space explosion? Star wars? Bueller? Who knows.

Via Sky and Telescope.

In the words of Alan Kogut from the Goddard Space Center, “The universe really threw us a curve. Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming ‘noise’ six times louder than anyone had predicted.”

Of course, there is no sound in space. What NASA’s ARCADE system received was actually deafening cosmic radio background, and the source is completely unknown at this time. Normally radio telescopes pick up electromagnetic chatter in the 10 MHz and 100 GHz, coming from what are known as “radio galaxies.” But according to our existing models and theories, the signal shouldn’t exist, as there are “not enough radio galaxies to account for the signal.”

As detailed by Jesus when this story initially broke earlier this year, NASA said that to create this signal, “you’d have to pack [radio galaxies] into the universe like sardines. There wouldn’t be any space left between one galaxy and the next.” That’s obviously not the case.

The discovery, while amazing, also carries with it a substantial negative. Remember all that cool stuff about dark flow and the edge of the universe from earlier? Well, the BOOM complicates our efforts to detect it more accurately.

Originally via Gizmodo.

The most celebrated inscription at the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used to be the biblical phrase chiseled into marble in the main lobby: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” But in recent years, another text has been the subject of intense scrutiny inside the Company and out: 865 characters of seeming gibberish, punched out of half-inch-thick copper in a courtyard.

It’s part of a sculpture called Kryptos, created by DC artist James Sanborn. He got the commission in 1988, when the CIA was constructing a new building behind its original headquarters. The agency wanted an outdoor installation for the area between the two buildings, so a solicitation went out for a piece of public art that the general public would never see. Sanborn named his proposal after the Greek word for hidden. The work is a meditation on the nature of secrecy and the elusiveness of truth, its message written entirely in code.

Recovering your iPhone

You need -

iTunes installed and working (Windows or Mac)

iPhone USB connector cable

A bust iPhone

Internet

Nice to have –

A backup of your iPhone from before you tried jailbreaking it.

1. Make sure your iPhone is NOT plugged into your computer, run iTunes.
2. Press and hold the top button for a few seconds, hold the home (bottom) button, now wait for your phone to turn off and keep holding the home button.
3. Connect your iPhone to the computer with iTunes running. Keep holding home until the connect/ed to iTunes graphics come up.

That’s it, now follow the onscreen instructions from iTunes. This will recover your iPhone. Be careful out there kids!

Sounds like an amazing place. If only I were rich.

Isolated Sleddale Hall near Shap, will be put up for sale by water giant, United Utilities, with a starting price of £145,000.

The ramshackle building, known as Uncle Monty’s Cottage in the cult movie, still contains many of the original features used during filming.

It will come under the hammer with Savills on 16 February.

The farmhouse has been unoccupied for many years and is only accessible via a dirt track, it is almost two miles from the nearest public road.