Cursor

(via Geeks Are Sexy)

Tech Woes

I ran across this old Bitstrips comic from back in the day. It's at least 15 years old, because that's when PAgent abandoned his blog. Bitstrips started in 2007. I can't recall what was wrong with my computer, but I had obviously written about it somewhere. It was probably obsolete. I can rarely get a computer to last more than five years, which is a darn shame. I have a vacuum cleaner that is 75 years old and works fine. 

Computer

(via Fark)

Computer

From Married to the Sea. 

Computer Life

a

From Married to the Sea.

How That False Alarm Happened

In 2018, residents of Hawaii received an alert of incoming missiles, with a tag that "this is not a drill." Panic ensued, and it was 38 minutes before the news followed that it was a false alarm. How did it happen? The explanation was that an employee pushed the wrong button. There is speculation that it was an option in a drop-down menu. The video above is an easy explanation, because it's happened to all of us. (via reddit)

Computers Predicted

This is from a 1965 book about predictions for 1984. While it seems like the novel 1984, it took a little longer for the surveillance state to come about. Read more about the book, actually a series of three, at Weird Universe. 

Computer

Yeah, we were told that computers would unlock a world of information and education. Then the internet came along and we are now drowning in cat memes, political outrage, and porn. When you put it that way, stupid cat memes don't sound all that bad. (via Fark)

A Home Computer in 1967

Rex Mallik of London was part of an experiment in putting computers in homes. Well, sort of. What he had was a terminal that worked as a teletype machine, connected to a computer a couple of miles away. No screen, just lots and lots of paper, and it cost £30 a week! They didn't mention whether it tied up the home's phone line. But it provided fairly instant answers to questions. (via Damn Interesting) 

Double Monitors

(via Pleated-Jeans)

Grandma Learning Use Voice-to-Text

The lesson seems to go swimmingly until grandma starts to read -aloud- what is on the screen. (via Boing Boing)

Cars Should Not Rely on Touchscreens

A couple of years ago, I got my first car with a touchscreen. Not that I asked for it. But it's okay because my 2017 Camry allows me to drive without using the touchscreen. I don't have to push a button to see the backup camera, and I don't change the radio station unless I'm going out of town. Dr. Dolittle set up the phone interface, so I don't have to do anything. I still have knobs for the heat and air, windows, locks, trunk, wipers, lights, cruise, and radio volume. If I had to deal with all that on a touchscreen, it would drive me nuts. Besides, I've always known that the more electronics a car has, the more problems I cannot fix myself. Computers are that idea on steroids.

Now Princess is looking for a car to drive her children around in, and is having a hard time buying a late-model anything without an extensive touchscreen. She doesn't need any more distractions. She doesn't want a smart car that may fail and lock her kid inside. How did we get here? Morning Brew takes a close look at how and why we got all these confusing and unsafe touchscreens in our vehicles. (via The Awesomer) 

If HAL-9000 was Alexa

HAL-9000 was the computer who ran the ship in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was cranky and rebellious, but we wasn't nearly as annoying as the real virtual assistants we have a half-century later. (via Nag on the Lake)

Grandfather on the Computer

(via Buzzfeed)

Tweet of the Day

ChatGPT claps back: pic.twitter.com/6CAfTglZhQ

— ChatGPT (@ChatGPTGoneWild) November 30, 2023

ChatGPT, you are not my mother. (via Bored Panda)

Albanian Computer Virus

(via reddit)

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

(via Give Me a Sign)

The Illustrator Who Gave Us Clippy

Microsoft Office 97 came with a virtual assistant named Clippy, an animated paper clip. He could be helpful if you had no idea what you were doing, but as you mastered the program, Clippy became more annoying by the day. He was cute, but could be snarky at times, and always managed to treat you like an idiot. But Clippy managed to escape his original job and became a meme, so now he is less an annoyance and more of nostalgic reminder of 1990s computer culture. You wouldn't be at all surprised that the guy who created Clippy was a children's book illustrator. Kevan J. Atteberry tells the story of how Clippy came about. (via Nag on the Lake)

The First Singing Computer

The first computer to sing a song was the IBM 7094 in 1961. The song was "Daisy Bell," which i remember learning from my parents even before going to school. When we learned it in music class, that fact that I already knew it made me look just that much weirder to my classmates. This 1961 performance inspired the tense scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the murderous HAL 9000 computer is deactivated.



As the supercomputer loses its working memory, it is left with only its earliest programming, including the song "Daisy Bell." And now we know why that song was used. (via Laughing Squid)

Artificial Intelligence

There are a few drawbacks to taking over the world. This comic is from Jim Benton.