The Apple Watch is a nice little device, and it’s known to have motivated even lazy people into taking better care of themselves through the “gamification” of exercise. However, it can happen that the Workout app doesn’t properly track exercise minutes (and, to a lesser extent, burned calories), and while Apple provides an official checklist…
Category: Technology
ABS Podcast – Episode 5: Planned Obsolescence
Did you think I wasn’t going to publish the podcast anymore? WRONG! I’m back, and with a mammoth episode for good measure: a whopping 57 minutes that will guide you through the intricacies and nuances of how everything man-made gets old, and how we can learn to avoid the frustration caused by being unable to update…
Voxer: free walkie talkie app for smartphones
(For those of you addicted to the podcast, don’t worry! It’s not over yet. I haven’t had a chance to make any more episodes lately but I will resume shortly.) I often talk to people about Voxer, a free app for smartphones that I find incredibly useful. I am going to describe it in a little…
ABS Podcast – Episode 4: Patch For Episodes 1–3
Welcome to a brand new episode of Avian Bone Syndrome Podcast! This is a “patch” episode, tying up a few loose ends from episodes 1–3. In particular, this episode covers lunar eclipses, daguerrotypes, and the filter bubble around you on the Internet. Don’t forget to “like” the new Facebook page for Avian Bone Syndrome! Links…
ABS Podcast – Episode 3: Privacy Today
Episode 3 of Avian Bone Syndrome Podcast deals with a very complex topic: privacy. In this time and age of always-on network access, the concept of privacy is quite different. Join me on a journey that starts at an Italian supermarket and leads you to learn about the not-so-obvious ways that big corporations are tracking…
Photography: a time capsule everyone can contribute to
On this fine Sunday morning, I discovered a website that I’ve immediately fallen in love with. It’s called Vintage Everyday, and its tagline reads “bring back nostalgia and memories”. And it does, oh if it does, although technically it’s not even nostalgia: most of us simply don’t remember those times because we just never lived in…
Orwell vs. Huxley: two dystopian worlds, compared
In 2009 Stuart McMillen, famed Australian comic artist, published a drawn rendition of a short passage from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death. The passage compares the radically different worlds depicted by Orwell in his “1984” and by Aldous Huxley in his “Brave New World.” Both novels show an Earth whose inhabitants have been rendered…
Add money to your likes: Flattr’s microdonation system
Many social networks today employ the concept of “favoriting” items: images on Flickr, Instagram and 500px; songs on SoundCloud; videos on YouTube and Vimeo; tweets on Twitter; repositories on GitHub; and so on…. When you “favorite” or “like” something, you’re essentially telling the author that you’d like more of that. Yet, when it comes to creative…
Get rid of those apps in iTunes that you never sync anymore
If you’re like me, you’ve had an iPhone, iPod Touch and/or iPad for a few years now and have probably amassed a fairly big collection of apps, both free and paid. Until last year’s iOS 5, this meant having to keep a local copy of each and one of them on the computer you used…
Italian luddites: the downfall of a country living in the past
If you were to describe my country, Italy, as a country fearful of change, you wouldn’t be too far off from the truth. If Italians could live under a bubble preventing time from passing, most of them would jump at the opportunity. I have come to the conclusion that most of my fellow countrymen are…