Author: Christopher Fahey
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Talking to Myself with SimulScribe
Illustration from a 1940’s Bell Labs project investigating human speech synthesis and recognition I recently signed up for SimulScribe, a new service which replaces your existing voicemail system with one that: Transcribes the voice message into text (using a speech-to-text (STT) engine)… wraps the voicemail message into a WAV file… and then emails the raw…
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My Map from Memory
I’m getting some traffic today from kottke, so I figured I’d actually show y’all what the heck it is he’s talking about when he wrote: The first time I saw a world map drawn from memory was at Christopher Fahey’s apartment. I forget how long it took him to draw, but it was remarkably accurate…
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Come to my Classy SXSW Panel
UPDATE, 3/11/07: My post-mortem on the panel, and links to many other people’s opinions on the panel, are now posted here. I am running a panel entitled High Class and Low Class Web Design at the 2007 South by South West Interactive conference. It will explore the same subjects I discussed in my series of…
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One Year of Blogging
I just realized that I have been blogging for over year now (one year and 24 days, actually). I still can’t believe I waited so long to get started. It’s been such a rewarding experience for me that I now think everyone should have a personal or a professional blog. I really do. If you…
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Aura of Inevitability (or: When a Technology’s Time has Come)
New technology products often take us by surprise. In 1992, for example, we couldn’t possibly have dreamed of how the Internet would transform the world by 1997, only 5 years later. The best innovations are things “you never knew you wanted but cannot live without” kind, inventions that come out of nowhere. YouTube, for example.…
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Stop Surfing!
Not me. I’ve had enough of the term “surfing” when talking about “what we do when we use the web”. It was a terrible metaphor when it was first invented, and it’s only gotten worse. This morning on the radio I heard a journalist describe a terrorist using a computer to view terror videos with…
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I Would Prefer Not to Set Preferences
I would prefer not to. Everybody likes preferences, right? Maybe not. Maybe some people would prefer not to have to deal with it. Apple users, for example, are given a fraction of the number of preference-setting options that Windows users get. In OSX, for example, you can choose several different ways for the dock to…
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Performative Diagramming
The cover of Bill Moggridge’s excellent Designing Interactions features a sketch/diagram that looks intriguing at first glance. But then when you actually try to figure out what it means, you’re stumped. I tried, but I couldn’t even scratch the surface. Inside the book itself, we learn that the diagram is based on sketches that Bill…