Thord D. Hedengren

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  • Moore's Law's days are numbered

    From a Moore’s Law obsessed piece on computer improvement:

    As Moore’s law runs into the sand, then, the definition of “better” will change. Besides the avenues outlined above, many other possible paths look promising. Much effort is going into improving the energy efficiency of computers, for instance. This matters for several reasons: consumers want their smartphones to have longer battery life; the IoT will require computers to be deployed in places where mains power is not available; and the sheer amount of computing going on is already consuming something like 2% of the world’s electricity generation.

  • Princess Leia's Stolen Death Star Plans

    This is my new favorite album: Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans.

    This year marks two important pop-culture milestones: The 40th anniversary of Star Wars on May 25, and the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a week later, June 1. Our new album merges both into one full-length concept album titled Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans. It’s the entire Beatles album as accurately as we could record it, only now it tells the story of Star Wars: A New Hope — in order.

    First song embedded below, because obviously there’s a video version, but you should really pop over to Palette-Swap Ninja and read more about this. And download the album, it’s surprisingly well made.

  • Want your face scanned? Travel to Australia

    Futurism posted this video regarding Australia replacing passports with facial recognition at airport starting this June:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNRJkNjSljA

    Personally, I think this raises so many privacy issues that it’s scary. What will they do with all that data? Who’ll benefit from it, and when someone steals it (because that’s bound to happen), what will the data be used for then?

    I think I’ll stay clear of Australia in the future.

  • Haunted Futures är släppt

    Haunted Futures

    Haunted Futures är en antologi om framtiden där undertecknad råkar medverka, med berättelsen Futures Past. Mina medförfattare här är desto mer imponerande, så jag tycker absolut du ska köpa ett exemplar av Haunted Futures.

    Baksidestext, typ:

    You can’t see far, and the footing is uncertain at best. Ghosts and phantoms stalk the haze around you, and their chittering will lead you astray. There are no maps to this territory, but sometimes a brave soul strides out ahead into the haunted shadows. Those who return to the campfire of the now often bear tales of the visions seared into their minds while they were out there, in the mists.

    We have scoured the earth for these most daring of travelers – the ones who have ventured out into the future and returned wraith-laden. Fifteen of them agreed to share their stories. Their enthralling accounts will seize you, and you might find it difficult to fight free of them afterwards, but any risks are overshadowed by the dazzling wonders that await. So muster your courage, and dive into the pages. Haunted Futures of all kinds await you, with open arms and suspiciously toothy smiles.

    Några länkar, i all välmening:

  • Haunted Futures is available now

    Haunted Futures, cover by Gábor Csigas

    Today was the book birthday of Haunted Futures, an anthology about the future where I happen to have a story called “Futures Past”. There are several other writers in there, all more worthy than yours truly, so you should really check this one out.

    Just check out that awesome cover by Gábor Csigas. It’s just so darn great. There was a livestream hosted by editor Salomé Jones, and while I couldn’t be on it, I must say it was a mammoth undertaking. I have no idea where Salomé finds the strength to do these things but there you go. The video should appear here if it hasn’t already.

    Haunted Futures is available on Amazon, both in paperback and as an ebook, as well as on other places. Go grab it, it’s pretty darn great.

  • Twitterrific lets you change your app icon

    If you’re an avid Twitter and iOS user, chances are you’re using Tapbots’s Tweetbot. I used to do that, but something about it didn’t really connect with me. Twitterrific on the other hand, did. It’s not without its quirks but I prefer it to other options.

    The latest update lets you change your app icon, a feature I haven’t seen before. It’s pretty cool, don’t you think?

  • It’s not you, it’s all predetermined

    Alan Moore being Alan Moore, in an interview regarding (but not limited to) the Spirits of Place anthology he’s got a story in:

    Ideas are usually generated by the act of writing itself. William Burroughs spoke of ‘the word vine’; the process by which if you write down a word, this will shape and suggest the next word, and so on. Take this thinking to its counterintuitive conclusions, it suggests that writers, far from being the god-like creators of worlds that they may imagine themselves to be, are in fact only vehicles by which means ideas can have themselves. By the same token, if we are talking about the ideas embedded in a certain location – the complex aggregate of these ideas representing that location’s ‘spirit of place’, if you will – then I think we can reasonably and realistically speak of a place exerting its influence over someone who finds themselves writing about it.

    It goes on, obviously. There’s also a glorious rant in there on kids today and how entertainment has stolen imagination from them.

  • Love it or hate it, The Outline hits a nerve

    The Outline’s Joshua Topolsky:

    On the design front, it’s true that some people love the way The Outline looks, and some hate it. But no one is neutral about it. No one says “eh” when they see it. And no one thinks we’re another anonymous blog populated by random people churning out random content. But perhaps most importantly: The web is ugly. Media brands are ugly. They all look the same. They all use the same tools. They all try and replicate a form that is ancient by any conceivable metric. They all rely on someone else’s idea about what storytelling looks like.

    I’m in the “hate it” corner, although that’s too strong a word obviously, but he’s right. The Outline not only has good content, it’s also a publication that make you react upon first glance.

    Topolsky also fires a salvo at the banner industry in his piece. You should read it if you’re interested in online publishing and the future of media.

  • How much caffeine is too much?

    The Atlantic tries to figure out how much caffeine is unhealthy to put in you body. Yes, it’s about coffee. The number 400 mg is thrown around as a limit:

    Four hundred milligrams amounts to around four cups of coffee in the old-style sense of the phrase, an eight-ounce mug in a diner. It’s more like one Starbucks venti.

    If this was the case, almost everyone in Sweden is overdosing caffeine on a daily basis. Granted, the piece also states that more research is needed and that it’s most likely individual.

    Personally I feel I’ve had enough coffee when I’m starting to feel sick.

  • Cyberpunk's future

    From a great piece on cyberpunk, what it was and what it might become, over at Killscreen:

    Cyberpunk was, and remains, noir brought into the digital age; the black and white reinvented in neon and then LED. Given it was Edgar Allen Poe who introduced the first detective story, it seems natural that the procedural and the gothic interconnected.

  • WPSE – ett nyhetsbrev om WordPress

    Du har väl inte missat WPSE, mitt nyhetsbrev om WordPress? Det kommer ett nytt nummer varje torsdag och naturligtvis är det gratis att prenumerera. Här kan du läsa det första numret, om du missade det.

    Teckna en prenumeration på wpse.se, och berätta gärna för andra som gillar WordPress. Ju fler vi är som prenumererar, desto bättre blir det.

  • Facebook Instant Articles are flailing

    I wanted to write “failing”, but I see too many of those blasted things whenever I’m on Facebook that it just wouldn’t be true. Anyway, from a Digiday story on the matter:

    Many publishers are deeply unhappy with the monetization on these pages, with major partners like The New York Times throwing in the towel and many others cutting back the amount of content pushed to the IA platform.

    It goes on like that. Now if someone would please kill off Google’s AMP so that we could have a shot at an open web, wouldn’t that be nice?

  • No you may not, Linkedin

    Fuck no.

    Linkedin wants to do what?!

  • A month with Stephen King's short stories

    Max Booth III decided to read all of Stephen King’s collected short works in a month.

    But oh my god, you guys, Stevie King has written a lot of short stories. More than I certainly remembered, at least. Right off the bat I realized there was no way in hell I’d be able to include his collections consisting entirely of novellas, which would eliminate from my to-read list the following: Different Seasons, Four Past Midnight, and Full Dark, No Stars. Apparently many people view Hearts in Atlantis as a story collection, which is insane to me since it’s obviously a novel, so I also crossed that one off the list. This left me with the following to read in the month of February: Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Everything’s Eventual, Just After Sunset, and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.

    It’s a pretty good column, although parts of it reads like a puff piece for the author’s Stephen King podcast. All that aside, if you’re interested in King’s short stories, which any sane person who loves to read should be, this one’s for you.

  • The mystery of Go Ask Alice

    I’d never heard of the book Go Ask Alice, but the mystery surrounding the author made this piece an interesting read:

    Despite the popularity of Go Ask Alice, the mystery of the diarist’s identity has never been truly solved, and none of her relatives have ever come forward to claim a share of the royalties. Yet the book was largely treated as authentic by reviewers in the 1970s, and touted as such for the television adaptation. Only Publisher’s Weekly threw shade, remarking that it “seems awfully well written,” to be real.