Baldur reflects on his family’s history in radio broadcasting, his path to interactive media and writing books and how he moved away from listening to tech podcasts.

Content warning: some coarse language

Podcast case study: Accidental Tech Podcast (listener)

Find Baldur at baldurbjarnason.com.

Read a transcript of the episode as a styled PDF or in plain text.

Links and Show Notes

Fourth Generation 00:00:00

• RSS
• Perl
• Interactive media
• RÚV is the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service.
• World War II
• British invasion of Iceland
• Allied occupation of Iceland
• Attack of Pearl Harbor
• Telegraphy
• Axis powers
• Hotel Borg
• Vox populi (or vox pop)
• Web development

Interactive Media Environments 00:08:13

• Software widget
• Graphical widget
• COVID-19 pandemic
• HyperCard
• Macintosh SE
• Solitaire
• Tetris
• What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)
• Comparative literature
• Computer science (or ‘comp sci’)
• University of the West of England (UWE)
  • Bower Ashton campus map
• BBC Radio
• Dot-com bubble (including reference to the dot-com crash)
• Adobe Flash
• Sandbox (software development)
• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
• ebook
• Amazon Kindle
• iPhone
• iPad

Defamiliarisation 00:15:43

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Cryptocurrency (or ‘crypto’)
• Popular culture (or ‘pop culture’)
• The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin
  • Recordings of public lectures in the Internet Archive
• Processor (computing)
• Musical genre mash-up!
  • Pop-punk
  • Post-punk
• Neosurrealism
• Accidental Tech Podcast
• Jason Snell
• Defamiliarisation
• Viktor Shklovsky
• Bertolt Brecht
• YouTube
• Line Goes Up – The Problem with NFTs
• Defunctland
  • Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History
• App Store (iOS/iPadOS)
• Tom Abba
• *This is not the future of the book
• Out of the Software Crisis by Baldur Bjarnason
• Open source

Pick and Choose 00:31:03

• Round table
• Narrative journalism
• 20 Macs for 2020 was released in multiple formats:
  • a podcast on Relay FM;
  • a series of written blog posts at Six Colors; and
  • a YouTube playlist hosted at 512 Pixels
• Facebook
• Twitter (rebranding to X)
• Revenue sharing
• Threads (social network)
• Bluesky Social
• Mastodon (social network)
• Algorithm
• Patreon
• Whisper (software)
• Descript
• Substack
• Email list
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• du jour = ‘of the day’, e.g. ’soup *du jour’ = soup of the day

My Computer Identity 00:44:05

• Mac (computer)
• Macintosh Performa
• Microsoft Windows
• macOS (previously referred to as Mac OS X and OS X)
• Pro Tools
• Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• User interface design
• Apple simplified System Settings for macOS Ventura, moved many items from AppleInsider
• System Settings (previously named System Preferences)
• Disk Utility
• Linux
• GNOME
• Safari (web browser)
• ARM architecture family
• Amy Hoy
• User experience (UX)
• ChromeOS
• Software bug
• Netscape
• Jamie Zawinski (a.k.a. jwz)
• HAL 9000

Plumbing of the Web 01:01:05

• HTML
• XML
• Markup language
• Static websites
• Flat file
• Client-side
• iBook G3 ‘Clamshell’ (or what Baldur’s dad refers to as the ‘toilet-seat iBook’)
• NetNewsWire
• OPML
• Domain name
• Stacking the Bricks (podcast)

Credits

Recorded and edited by Martin Feld, using Audio Hijack and Ferrite Recording Studio

Original podcast theme music by Alex Canion

Contact

• Website: rsspod.net
• Email: martin@loungeruminator.net
• Mastodon: social.lol/@martinfeld
• Micro.blog: micro.blog/martinfeld