General

Reviving The Blogroll Exchange

December 23, 2018 General
Revival of Blogroll

Surely the idea of a blogroll has missed some of you today. The early age of the Internet after the dot-com bubble burst ushered users into the participatory ‘Web 2.0’ era. This was also the time when internet users began collaborating and sharing content and ideas through wikis, social networking, blogs, and so on. In particularly with the blogs there is a small but significant feature called the ‘blogroll’ which is a collection of useful links, not exclusive to blogging per se, but the act of ‘blogrolling‘ would mean collecting, displaying and reciprocating with links on the respective blogs. As many would have imagined this traditional source of sharing ideas and uniting thoughts has taken a beating in all the meaningless social media narrative going around, although, with some help from outside, I am looking to revive it on my website here.

The Idea of Blogrolling

A blogroll makes it easier for like-minded blogs to thrive in a diverse Internet ecosystem. The newspaper media has changed the culture of blogging by transforming the platform into a content management system but there are other individuals who utilize their blogs in delivering content that’s relevant to the specified markets. I, being one of those individuals, look at blogging as a means of connecting a majority of design enthusiasts in developing a close relationship with the principles of human-centred design, and the cultures which are being invariably influenced by the advent of technology. For me, personally, I think blogrolling would help me to connect with other individuals who believe in fundamentally reciprocating my thoughts and acknowledging each other’s commitment to their respective streams of thought and audiences. In a nutshell, it’d help to create a community, exchange thoughts and ideas, and build a rapport with the hidden world.

What’s a Blogroll?

A blogroll is a list of links provided on a blog to other websites, especially to other blogs or sites with regularly updated content. It helps blog authors to establish and build a blogger community although in Web 1.0 terminology, a blogroll would be equivalent to a list of hyperlinks on a personal Web page.

Reviving The Blogroll

Needless to say, but I was once a part of a thriving community of designers and it was the most enriching experience of my life. That reality was permanently altered by social media, although social networking alone has significantly connected people more than ever before it has also become synonymous with sharing content en masse at the cost of sacrificing privacy. It might have also affected our ability to produce meaningful content and the frequency with which we produce such content. Blogrolling aims in not just connecting bloggers but also to motivate them in continuing to publish fresh and content on a range of intellectual topics. Hopefully, in the near future, the blogroll feature would make an emphatic comeback and it’d exist on this website too. And someday we might judge our websites on the basis of who’s listed on our respective blogrolls.

Stoop Offers A Unique Newsletter Experience

December 13, 2018 General
Stoop logo
Stoop inbox on the App Store

Just like the rest, I’ve subscribed to a decent number of email newsletters, prominent amongst which are the UX Booth, UX Daily and Indi Young’s awesome effort on content and information architecture called ‘Indi in your Inbox’. Personally, newsletters have provided me with an advantage over normal news and Google or other such websites, in fetching the important ingredients while keeping the ‘noise’ out. The other obvious benefit is the delivery of content to your inbox where one could treat it like any other email and if the content no longer engages you like before you could unsubscribe it with a few clicks. The downside of this transaction is the sharing of your email, and perhaps, without your knowledge, even to third-party vendors depending upon what its privacy policy states (who reads them anyway). So while you might get the academic content you desired you could also end up with deleting or marking more spam than before. There’s always that infamous Gmail trick to filter out spam and to direct newsletters to their specific labels but it’s tedious so why live with all the hustle and bustle of technology when help is around? I am referring to Stoop that I recently put to good use to manage the surge of my newsletters.

I have reviewed apps such as Shazam & Duolingo for their uniqueness, and I am trying to categorise Stoop as a newsletter aggregator app. It’s a smart concept with the benefit of providing the user with a unique ‘yourname@stoop.email’ email and the newsletters come to the inbox inside the app. On the ‘Discover’ tab, it gives a carousel view of popular newsletters, to staff picks and even featuring publishers who regularly publish quality content, although for subscribing to their newsletter it will take you to the publisher’s web page from within the app. Basically, no more sharing your email credentials and living under the fear that your personal info could be compromised, Stoop inbox provides all the answers!

PS4 HDD Upgrade For Endless Gaming

December 2, 2018 General

My first PS4 came in mid-2016, it was the Uncharted 4 Limited Edition 500GB HDD console and coinciding with the final release of Nathan Drake’s adventurous saga. I was excited and proud to lay my hands on it not only because it was my first PlayStation 4 console but it represented the ethos of the Uncharted series, a gaming experience which I had always loved and still love to this day! It’s nostalgic in some sense since I picked up this game for the first time on my PS3 in the last decade.

A closer look at the PS4 Limited Edition Uncharted 4 console. Words aren't enough. #playstation #ps4 #uncharted #design

The Background 

Despite the odds, in which I wrote a Reddit post on my ordeal a long time ago, to my utter shock, I recently ran out of disk space! I received a notification that the system was unable to download a crucial update of ‘Shadow of Tomb Raider’ to lack of HD space and I hate deleting my games lest I want to return to it in the future. However, it was shocking also because I never realised in the 2 years since owning this console that I might have played a lot many games! Then considering my older PS3 lasted out its life on a mere 120 GB without having to delete a single game, I think I might have grossly misjudged the size of PS4 games which I learned are normally somewhere between 30-40 gigs.

Since I have loved building Legos I have zero hesitation in tinkering with electronics, so I decided to upgrade the PS4 HDD and get myself some room for gaming. It did some reading to understand the technicalities and it turned out to be a simple 30-40 minute job, while the best part is that Sony does not consider an HDD upgrade as a violation of their product warranty terms. So I thought it best to leave some learning from my experience here for the sake of the future.

Continue reading…

Instax Mini Puts Fun Back In The Photos

November 23, 2018 General
Instax Mini 90 Neo Classic
My Fujifilm Instax Mini 90 Neo Classic

I love taking pictures, so I recently bought an Instax Mini 90 Neo Classic to add to my repertoire and cannot but totally appreciate the quality of the results, that reminded me of the days when I was shooting with my 35 mm manual Pentax MX SLR (results below). Back in the day, it meant that I had to wait a good 2 weeks before I could see the results of my labour and the only help I received from the uncertainty of the picture I was about to take was a green LED indicator from the viewfinder that blinked if I had the shutter speed and the aperture matching with the ISO of the film roll. Phew! Then one had to deposit the exposed 35-36 shot film roll at a studio and await the results. Eventually, it was fun to arrange the prints into albums that consisted of memories accumulated over a period of time.

Faith Under Fire
Pentax MX photos from my trip to Northern India.

Before Instax Mini & The Digital Age

The digital cameras brought the convenience of looking at the result at the same time as we are shooting the picture. Another big advantage of the digital cameras was the comfort of adjusting the ISO settings during the shoot. So, while taking pictures became easier and cheaper it took away our ability to essentially take photo prints since storage was convenient on the cloud or HDs. The manual cameras gave us the prints and the option to scan & digitize them, however, the Instax range of cameras have not only brought back the fun of point-of-shoot photography it also prints the picture instantly like the good old Polaroid, but notwithstanding the smaller print size. The Neo is a smaller camera and need I say, retro-styled, and it also makes it easier to lug around. With the only drawback (if you will) being that the film cassette can only accommodate 10 colour or BW shots.

I’m ecstatic by how quickly one could navigate the techniques and get along with capturing memories on the Instax Mini, and since the cassettes are inexpensive I could shoot without the headache of worrying about the creativity or the outcome. The prints look really trendy & they have definitely put the fun back into the photos. Not the albums, here’s looking forward to a wall overflowing with beautiful memories!

Energia/Buran

Buran – The End of The Space-Race Age

November 15, 2018 General

Exactly on this day, 30 years ago, the Soviet Union under the Buran programme (meaning “snowstorm}, or “blizzard”) launched the Orbiter K1 (or OK-1K1), a reusable spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in response to NASA’s space shuttle program. If the Sputnik marked the beginning of the space race, then the Buran ended it conclusively, and in the process proved once again that the Soviets could match, or even surpass, the technological prowess of the west on their own. As history suggests, NASA’s Space Shuttle programme had an enormous payload capacity, several times that of the previous US launch vehicles, which made the Soviet military suspicious about its military purposes which provoked them to build one of their own reusable spacecraft. But unfortunately, 1988 was the first and the only time that the unmanned OK-1K1 would lift-off and land in a fully automated mode, a first for any space shuttle variant. On the other hand, the Buran-class spacecraft used the expendable Energia super-heavy lift launch vehicles fitted with the RD-170 liquid-fuel rocket engines, considered the most powerful in the world even today. 

Despite its structural resemblance to NASA’s spaceplanes, the difference between the two orbiters was evident in the payload capacity in which, the Buran proved to be more efficient with a volume of over 90 tons which was due to the use of the Energia vehicle. All things considered, in spite of the ‘Cold War’ rivalry the Soviets developed a pretty advanced space vehicle to surprise the west again; who could forget the supersonic Tupolev Tu-144, the ‘Concordski‘. Quite disappointingly though, this fabulous spacecraft met with a climactic ending when the Buran OK-1K1 was destroyed in 2002 with the roof of its hangar at Baikonur collapsing and crushing underneath the lasting memories of the space-race era.
Buran vs STS Stats

A quick comparison of the OK-1K1 vehicle and the Space Shuttle

Featured Photo: Scale drawings of Russian cosmoplan complex Energia/Buran