17 
17 
My uncle just sent me this photo of my great grandfather Simon Stern’s shoe repair shop in Milwaukee. It just took me about 15 hits of the delete button to erase the red squiggly line under that.
Check out that cash register!
3 
I met Rachael Morrison when we both spoke about the future of printed books at the Adult Education lecture series in Brooklyn in October. She is an artist and a librarian who is currently working at smelling all the books at the MOMA library. I was intrigued by the way in which her project questions how we relate emotionally to media that is obsolescing. In this week’s New York Magazine’s Reasons To Love New York issue, I wrote about her under this “reason”: Because We’re Home to a Woman Who Spends Her Days Smelling Books
Sometimes, Morrison told me, she day dreams about some future person finding her scent notebook. “Assuming all text has gone digital at that point, I wonder if he or she will think it’s strange or even gross that books once had a smell,” she said. “What will my notebook smell like?”
22 
In “What the Internet Killed” Newsweek offers up an elegiac look at some old technologies that died long before we expected they would. My book, Obsolete is basically a longer riff on the same idea. Yes, that was a plug. What, do you think I’m blogging for my health? It’s Christmas, dear readers. Buy it. If you’re in NYC, I’ll even sign it for you. If you ask me nicely. And are willing to meet somewhere warm and listen to me talk about my dog site until you are ready to fake an asthma attack just to change the subject.
But I’m not sure anyone really has the kind of attention span needed to read a book. Maybe they did back when I wrote the book, but that was, like, a year ago. I mean, I can hardly focus long enough to read my own blog posts any more. Because my brain is always like…Wait, hold on. I just need to Google something for a sec. Wait, what we were talking about? I hope it had to do with dogs.
7 
Homage to the hidden beauty of something like a video game cartridge. I’m starting to understand my mother’s obsession with art incorporating the games of her youth, like punchboards—an old version of Lotto. Is this so different? 20x200 - Print Information | Atari, by Hollis Brown Thornton
17 
In the 1800s, there was no wireless Internet. Full stop.
So how did people communicate with customer support in India? The Atlantic tells the story of the Atlantic Telegraph Submarine Cable, which the US Steam Frigate Niagra dropped to the bottom of the ocean in 1858. The US ship met up half way with a British ship, which was also towing a cable. The two met up and spliced that baby together! Magic!
Sadly, Alexis Madrigal informs us that it stopped working after just three weeks. But the cable lived on in the living rooms of the wealthy, thanks to the fact that Tiffany’s sold off chunks as souvenirs.
Before Underwater Internet Cables: The First Submarine Telegraph Line: The Atlantic
16 
Bridgwater’s Pub in Philadelphia is hosting a “Type-IN” manual typewriter festival on December 18th. There will be a typing competition, complimentary ribbons and envelopes, a machine swap, and a repair man on hand to take questions. I’m more of an electric typewriter kind of person, but this sounds like an event like none-other. Count me in. (Via Makezine.com blog, with thanks to Laura Tallardy for passing it on!)
27 
A commenter pointed me to a site that has some nice gifs that capture a moment in the way I was talking about a couple of posts ago. I wanted to find a relevant photo to post from the site. Found this one. Why is someone taking a photo of a VHS tape? To remember what they looked like? I don’t know. But it’s an interesting movie. Or is it an image? I guess it’s a moving image. (Thanks to Tegan Lee for turning me onto the site).
(image is “Voyeur” by wakest of this)
30 
I wish we could take gifs of our own lives. Something more than a still photo, but less than a whole video that will require editing. Recording something that spans time longer than the frozen moment in a photo. Wouldn’t that be a logical next step for photography? And yet, gifs seem so…old. A paradox indeed.
From Motherboard.TV
The internet of yesterday is no more. Long gone are the days of HTML frames, kitschy border graphics and blinking scrolly-text. But from the ashes of the anarchy that was Web 1.0, there is one flavor of imagery that has lived on long past its own expiration date. The animated GIF’s role in today’s internet isn’t steeped purely in nostalgia, however. What was once a ubiquitous embellishment on the web pages of commoners and corporations alike is now so much more. Come with me as we explore the many faces of these versatile, digital zoetropes.
More here
(Source: motherboardtv)
9 
Record players, typewriters and sewing machines used to come in lovely carrying cases. If my current music player (my iPhone) had this kind of cute encasement, perhaps I would stop losing it in the abyss of my shoulder bag.
intweetion: 1970s Schneider space age portable record player
37 