I was recently playing around with an Arduino and Baltic Lab’s Baudot Code for a quick experiment. I do want to continue doing some work on this to understand some of the issues in Strachey’s code for the Manchester Machine as in David Link’s article on God Save the Queen in Computer Resurrection #76. I […]
Monthly Archives: January 2025
Playlists, Bots, and Hollowing Out
I have been reading Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria / One Signal Publishers, 2025), which is an interesting trip into the work of Spotify playlists. I got it on a hunch and it plays out very well against the previous Spotify book that I […]
You have not Read Your Favourite Book about Your Favourite Song
I was reading You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song (McDonald, 2024) today while doing some initial research for an overview paper. I had high hopes for it, but found that it was very one dimensional. Questions about culture and algorithms are largely pushed to one side and limited to a few things with […]
Go at Your Own Pace and Be Social?
I was recently re-reading Paula Bialski’s Middle Tech (Bialski, 2024), an ethnographic account of her time at a German software company that explores culture of Good Enough in software. It is an engaging book that seemingly moves against the Move Fast and Break Things culture, but I am wondering if it holds water there as […]
