Minitel!

A working Minitel! This one was built in 1985 and is still going strong, cared for by Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, who spoke recently at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program weekly seminar. They have an awesome new book out about the Minitel that hit on many of the issues I also ran into studying related technologies in my dissertation back in ~2003.

But, as they told me, all the specs for the Minitel were released when it came out in the 1980s so all the service providers could connect to it. Those specs are still available today, so they have a working Minitel and an Arduino device sending it some data. Wow! Super cool.

Minitel, front

Minitel, back, and Arduino device

Closeup, Arduino device

Pokémon GO and Cultural Locations

This is not new, but I have an example of a problematic Pokémon GO stop near my apartment (besides the one that is in the wrong location and the one that was removed IRL), one where the cultural info is wrong in the game but the correct information is just a block away. (And yes, I know these are all from Ingress.)

The stop is "Laughing Man", as you see here in this screen grab:

However, just a short block north is a plaque about the sidewalk tiles in the neighborhood, and it's not a man, it's Geneva, and there is a fair amount of information about her that could have been included in the in-game description. This is another problem: there's no in-game way to rectify erroneous information. Granted, allowing people to submit any old thing would be a disaster and Niantic would need real human filterers (not just machine learning), but allowing people to submit any old thing is how they got the data in the first place for Ingress.

Detectives on the Periphery, and, Volvos

Four detective shows I've been into lately, as two of them came back into rotation on PBS: Shetland, Hinterland, and also the two versions of Wallander (UK and Swedish).

They are all fairly similar in a lot of interesting ways. Moody straight male detective who has difficulties with relationships, wife is maybe in the picture in a difficult way (but this is his fault, not hers) or has passed away but he is still having issues, they all have daughters with whom they also have a difficult relationship, they all take place in the periphery of the English (England) world: Shetland in Scotland, Hinterland in Wales, and Wallander in Sweden, and lastly they all make really interesting and wonderful use of moody, artistic cinematography.

Amusingly, they all drive Volvo wagons, which are Swedish, except in the Swedish Wallander where, at least in S3, he drives a VW. (Technically in Hinterland he drives a small Volvo SUV but it's just a pumped-up wagon with the name SUV.)

Hinterland, S3E1