Remembranes

Is there a word for failing to fail? Here's a Hmm:  What if Flickr Fails? is getting a sudden burst of readers fourteen years after Flickr didn't fail. Also, according to my blog's stats, this post has had eleven reads. 

Cool is forever. Dig: New Livestream Brings Microfiche Digitization to Life for Democracy’s Library. Watch it happen live. Particulars:

The livestream features five active microfiche digitization stations, with a close-up view of one in action. Operators feed microfiche cards beneath a high-resolution camera, which captures multiple detailed images of each sheet. Software stitches these images together, after which other team members use automated tools to identify and crop up to 100 individual pages per card. Each page is then processed, made fully text-searchable, and added to the Internet Archive’s public collections—completed with metadata—so that researchers, journalists, and the general public can explore and download them freely through Democracy’s Library.

📅 Live activity occurs Monday–Friday, 7:30am-3:30pm U.S. Pacific Time (GMT+8)—except U.S. holidays—with a second shift coming soon.

How the future might come true. I've re-written most of Four Roads to the Intention Economy, because I keep getting encouraging news about the prospects.

It was slow as mud, but worked full time and I loved it. Anyone else remember Ricochet, the wireless ISP that served the Bay Area for the last few years of the prior millennium?



2 responses to “Remembranes”

  1. I remember Ricochet! The cool story I recall is that two guys used Ricochet modems to work from the lobbies of downtown offices, like they were co-working spaces. Those guys created a browser-based email client that they ultimately sold to Yahoo, and became their v2 interface.

    1. Thanks! Ricochet was what made it possible for me to keep our home computers online when we were away, and to screen share with them when we traveled. Our two-device home network was Farallon’s PhoneNet (AppleTalk over phone lines), but useful enough for us to be in France or Australia and still see and send faxes and do other stuff remotely by tunneling in through Compuserve. The speed wasn’t much better than dial-up, but it worked. (Our only problem was that living on a ridge overlooking the bay in San Carlos, we rang the bells of 90 different Ricochet sites, including one 60 miles away in St. Helena. The system wasn’t ready for that. We had to get our gizmo locked into just a single nearby one.)

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