Una tesis

Pues parece que, de ahora en adelante, ya podremos decir que servidor es doctor en e-learning, con la tesis Design and development of a learning analytics tool for the analysis of video learning resources in small-scale learning scenarios. Por si alguien tiene mucho insomnio, aquí la tenéis:

DesignDevelopmentLAToolDescarga

Toca dar las gracias a toda la gente que ha puesto su granito de arena (la contribución de algunos, y algunas, se mide en hormigoneras) para llegar hasta aquí, comenzando por mis directores Anna y Germán, y mi primera directora, María Antonia (uno ha tardado tanto con esto que se ha jubilado, y por eso no figura en la portada). En la página de agradecimientos hay unos cuantos nombres más, y la lista es tan larga como para no caber ahí ni en broma.

Si alguien quiere saber más, la idea es que cada vez utilizamos más recursos de aprendizaje en vídeo, que en algunos casos están sustituyendo a las clases «de toda la vida». Y con ese paso ganamos muchas cosas, pero también perdemos: la profe deja de tener delante a los alumnos, y se pierde indicadores visuales sobre cómo están entendiendo (o no) estos últimos las explicaciones. Esos indicadores no los vamos a recuperar, pero tenemos otros que quizás convendría explotar: esos estudiantes pausan los vídeos y saltan adelante y atrás por ellos, mucho más de lo que creeríais (y más cosas: aceleran y ralentizan su reproducción, por ejemplo). ¿Y si eso nos pudiese servir para entender mejor, y mejorar, los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje? Para seguir con el tema, me temo que os vais a tener que leer la introducción del PDF que tenéis incrustado aquí arriba.

Se trata de una tesis modesta, pero, quién sabe, igual pone su granito de arena (repito metáfora, lo sé) para que en algún momento el aprendizaje a través de recursos en formato vídeo mejore un poco 🤞.

Byte, junio del 86

Creo que es hora de cerrar etapa. Comenzamos a releer la revista Byte ahora hace casi dos años, en julio del 84, y con esta van 24 entradas dedicadas a 24 números de la revista, y hasta yo comienzo a tener un cierto cansancio del repaso mensual (me puedo desdecir en caso de reclamación por aclamación, pero creo que coincidiremos en que podemos cerrar el ciclo ya, ¿verdad?). Pero no creáis que vamos a abandonar la nostalgia así como así: notaréis que no incluimos la minisección de Computer Chronicles desde el mes de marzo. Pues no es porque se me haya olvidado (por una vez, y sin que sirva de precedente), sino porque, como comentamos en su momento (¡no me estáis atentos!), el programa cerró la temporada a final de marzo de 1986, y no volvió a emitirse hasta el inicio de la siguiente temporada, allá por septiembre del mismo año. Y sí, amiga lectora, amenazamos con repasar mensualmente las Computer Chronicles de la temporada 86/87 a partir de septiembre. (Y me reservo el derecho de seguir leyendo la revista y destacar alguna pieza de vez en cuando O:-).)

Y cerrados los temas organizativos, vamos allá con nuestro último Byte.

Portada de la revista Byte de junio de 1986. El tema de portada es ordenadores y música. La ilustra un teclado de piano de longitud infinita en que las teclas negras son microchips

Cuánto voy a echar de menos estas portadas de Robert Tinney… (Veo, por otro lado, en archive.org, que se van a hacer más infrecuentes, y que apenas durarían hasta mayo de 1988. Otro motivo para ir cerrando etapa.)

Abrimos número con la editorial y el estándar informático en vigor más antiguo que yo recuerde, que lleva en danza desde nada más y nada menos que 1983. Eso no iba a impedir, naturalmente, esa lacra que son los formatos propietarios…

Music and MIDI Have you noticed the stir going on in the electronic music industry? Take keyboard synthesizers. A significant drop in price has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in capability and sound quality, opening the doors of musical exploration to multitudes of newcomers. We've also seen computer technology claim new territories in music through the advent of MIDI (musical instrument digital interface), a data communications protocol that lets you join synthesizers and computers into small networks for composition or performance. MIDI has stimulated the entire music industry by providing a standard for hardware and software to be used for the production of music. Creativity, efficiency, and productivity are enhanced by the development of computer-based tools aimed at the mystical process of music generation. The current specification for MIDI has been in existence for four years. It came about through the cooperation of music synthesizer manufacturers around the world, notably those from Japan and the United States. Essentially, a large group of manufacturers got together and decided to add serial data channels to all future electronic music instruments so that events generated on one instrument could be played on remote instruments connected via the MIDI cable. Layers of sound, for example, can be produced from a single keyboard controller by driving multiple sound modules equipped with MIDI inputs. By inserting a personal computer into the middle of all this sound generating equipment, composers can record and manipulate scores much as word processors do text. The Good News So we now have a data communications standard for moving music event data between a computer and sound-generating hardware. We can buy instruments from different manufacturers and interconnect them at once. Older versions of music synthesizers, having no compatibility to any other device you might be using, were doomed to eventual obsolescence as newer products were released to replace them. Now it's different— what you get tomorrow can be integrated with what you have today, and it's reasonable to consider building an elaborate system over a period of budget-controlled time. A variety of good MIDI software is now available. We find software that can act as a kind of digital tape recorder for music data; programs that edit, store, and retrieve libraries of synthesizer voice parameters; and software that can display, print, and edit scores rendered in traditional music notation. It's a heyday for musicians of all persuasions. Or is it? The Bad News While the MIDI specification goes a long way toward unifying the tasks necessary to the production of music, it does not suggest any format for the storage of MIDI data files. Thus, developers of music software are on their own to adopt a structure for disk files containing MIDI performance data created by the software. And that is precisely what has happened during the development of today's MIDI music software: Each program on each computer produces a data file that cannot be instantly read by any other combination of hardware or software. Furthermore, few, if any, file-converter utilities are available to assist transportation of data between environments. (Of course, there is always the issue of differences among the underlying DOS formats for individual computers.) A Data File Standard Utility programs that convert music files from one manufacturer's product to another must be seen as only an interim measure. A better approach would see all the important players get together (in a fashion similar to the one that led to the MIDI 1.0 specification) and hack out a target format for file interchange. If software developers could produce a musical equivalent of the DIF standard used for database files in the business world, users operating in different computer and synthesizer environments would benefit immensely from expanded access to the large body of music data now being stockpiled. This tactic would also let existing products "speak'' to future programs designed to use the target file format. A number of obstacles present themselves when attempting to derive a convenient, universal method of organizing music data files. That's not to say that no one is trying. Besides continuing development on the academic level at universities like Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and MIT, commercial concerns like Roland and Electronic Arts have worked hard in an effort to establish useful guidelines toward the goal of increased music data sharing. In its own way, each organization has faced hurdles, including: • Some computers have a lot more memory, speed, and display resolution than others. How can a file produced on a more powerful computer be rendered on a less capable machine? What should a minimum configuration consist of? • Should graphic data for displaying common music notation or some derivative be included with MIDI performance data? Since both types of data might exist independently, and, given that some software does not recognize both, should these two kinds of data be kept in separate, parallel files? • Should we go further and attempt to design a full-blown operating system for music that could be ported to various computer architectures? This is ambitious but could produce long-term benefits. Naturally, other important points need to be ironed out. At this time, we invite software and hardware developers to plug in their irons. The success of the MIDI standard offers hope for a standard for file interchange. At the moment, the consumer is getting shortchanged by the inability to move data between music processing programs. The audience for computer music software is growing larger and more sophisticated, and it's up to the leaders in music technology development to provide software standards. We at BYTE want to encourage all concerned to investigate the work already done and then have a series of formal conferences involving a variety of sources. It's not going to be easy, but it has to happen (and soon, too, because I have a lot of music data on IMSAI-8080 cassettes waiting to be uploaded to my Amiga). —Roger Powell, Contributing Editor

El producto del mes era esta descripción-que-no-review del Macintosh Plus, que introducía la altísima tecnología de ser capaz de acceder a las dos caras del disquete (doblar la capacidad de cada disquete no es poca cosa), pasaba a un mega de RAM y añadía SCSI para conectar discos (hablan de discos capaces de transferir 320 kilobytes –el énfasis es suyo– por segundo). A cambio, Apple es Apple, se caían de la configuración MacPaint y MacWrite, que pasaban a costar 125 dólares de nada. Teniendo en cuenta que el Plus salía a 2600 dólares de la época (unos 8500 actuales, actualizando la inflación), no sé yo si a Apple le venía de aquí.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION by Phillip Robinson The Macintosh Plus It has more memory, double-sided disks, and an SCSI interface Editor's note: The following is a BYTE product description. It is not a review. We provide an advance look at this product because we feel that it is significant. A complete review will follow in a subsequent issue. The Macintosh introduced personal computer users to technology that has now become commonplace: bitmapped displays, 3 /2-inch floppy disks, and iconic desktop environments. The Macintosh Plus adds welcome double-sided drives, a megabyte of RAM, an industry-standard SCSI interface, a numeric keypad, and a larger, faster ROM of operating system routines. The Mac Plus is also much faster than the 512K Mac, partly because of new software routines and partly because of the additional RAM. One feature that the 512K Macintosh had— free MacWrite and MacPaint software— is missing from the Mac Plus. Both programs are available separately for $125 apiece. System Description Most of the technical details in BYTE's February 1984 description of the original, skinny (128K-byte) Macintosh are still apt descriptors for the Mac Plus. It is a desktop, 7.8336-MHz 68000based microcomputer in a small-footprint case containing a built-in 3Viinch floppy disk drive and a 9-inch diagonal, bit-mapped, monochrome display of 512 by 342 pixels. It doesn't have any expansion slots, and it...

Nos paramos unas páginas más adelante para una rara avis, un anuncio de un ordenador MSX en Estados Unidos:

Anuncio a doble página de un ordenador de Yamaha, en elegante color negro. Se trata de un MSX, como reconocerá un lector español, entre otras cosas, porque hay un cartucho conectado al ordenador. El ordenador tiene un lector de disquetes de 3,5 externo, un ratón, y se puede ver que está conectado a una disquetera. También podemos ver una impresora, imprimiendo una partitura musical

Notará la lectora que MSX solo aparece en el texto del cuerpo del artículo, porque la marca, en Estados Unidos, apenas era reconocida. Nótese también el marcado acento musical, destacando la síntesis FM, el software musical y el soporte de MIDI.

En la sección cosas-que-no-aparecerían-hoy-en-una-revista… ¡curvas de Hilbert!

HILBERT CURVES MADE SIMPLE by Michael Ackerman This one-subroutine BASIC program uses only global variables IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in fractal shapes, you are probably familiar with the Hilbert curve. It was among the first of many wild but "self-similar" shapes that astonished mathematicians around the turn of the century. Hobbyists have discovered the beauty of David Hilbert's creation, and several have written programs to draw it on the high-resolution screens of personal computers. Unfortunately, most of the programs that produce the curve are quite complicated. The demonstration program that comes with the Apple Pascal system contains a procedure that itself contains two more procedures. I had a difficult time following the program's logic. Niklaus Wirth, author of the Pascal and Modula-2 programming languages, includes a Hilbert curve program in his book Algorithms + Data Structures Programs (Prentice-Hall, 1976). While this program is easy to understand, it contains four procedures that call each other again and again. 1 decided that there had to be a simpler way to...

Atención, por cierto, a la firma del artículo: alguien que se estaba licenciando… en historia, claro.

Y, en el apartado quién-ha-escrito-este-artículo… Robert Moog. Sí, ese Robert Moog. Hablando de síntesis digital, claro:

DIGITAL MUSIC SYNTHESIS by Robert A. Moog The many different shapes of the waveform of the present MUSIC IS ONE of the most information-rich (wide-bandwidth) forms of human communication. A compact disk, for instance, uses nearly 1.5 megabits per second to faithfully transmit a stereo recording, as opposed to the several hundred bits per second needed to transmit a written message as fast as you can read it. Only video, the faithful transmission of which requires over 50 megabits per second, has a significantly higher information density. Music is also a highly structured form of human communication. The hierarchy of a piece of music may be as deep as that of the federal bureaucracy: Notes, phrases, lines, sections, and movements are carefully arranged to heighten and clarify the intent of the music. These two general properties of music, wide bandwidth and complex structure, happen to match the information-handling capabilities of today's personal computers. In addition to the personal computer's wide bandwidth (or high speed) and information-organizing and -processing capabilities, you can access a growing list of instruments, accessories, and components designed specifically to produce musical tones in response to high-level digital instructions. These devices owe their existence to rock 'n' roll, the consumerization of digital audio, and dramatic advances in LSI (large-scale integration). They employ a wide variety of sound-producing techniques, each with its own set of features and limitations. This article discusses the general attributes of musical sound and how to produce it, the capabilities of specific sound synthesis techniques, how musicians are using these techniques, and what you can expect the future to bring to digital music. The Properties of Musical Sound Music is an arrangement in time (and, to a lesser but still important extent, in space) of a collection of sonic events generally called notes. This is actually a subjective description of music. We hear individual notes only because our ears and mind pick acoustic information apart into events that we perceive to be distinct. What actually exists outside our ears is an ongoing series of vibrations of the air. The graph of air pressure versus time is the waveform, an unbroken pattern, present even in the quietest of soundproof rooms. The ratio between the height of a sound waveform that you can barely hear and one that is so loud that it begins to hurt is about one to a million. That's about 120 decibels. Music, speech, and other normal sounds occur in the upper 60 dB of your hearing range. You can describe any waveform that tends to repeat as a collection of frequency components, each one of which has a sine waveform. This is the spectrum of a sound. Thus, any sound has two complementary, equivalent representations: its waveform and its spectrum. The waveform is the sound's time-domain representation; the spectrum is its frequency-domain representation. Together they are capable of fully describing a sound. The relation of the waveform to the spectrum is...

Y siguiendo con el tema musical de la revista, algo que ni me sonaba: fractales musicales. Ilustrados (sonificados, mejor, sí) con código en BASIC para el MSX de Yamaha de hace tres capturas. En 1986 lo de los fractales era una cosa tremendamente nueva: el libro de Mandelbrot, The fractal geometry of nature, se había publicado apenas en 1982.

MUSICAL FRACTALS by Charles Dodge and Curtis R. Bahn Mathematical formulas can produce musical as well as graphic fractals FRACTAL GEOMETRY has exerted a strong influence on a remarkable variety of disciplines in recent years. The sciences are using fractal structures to study a diverse range of phenomena from turbulence to bone structure. In the arts, fractal geometry provides computer graphics with unprecedented possibilities for creating a new universe of visual forms, many of which have an astoundingly realistic, natural look. In music, you can employ the same principles to take advantage of a panoply of new relationships. In The Fractal Geometry of Nature (see reference 1), Benoit Mandelbrot is careful to point out that the realistic and natural-appearing fractal graphics are not modeled on photographs of nature; rather, they are graphics of mathematical relationships that come surprisingly close to resembling occurrences in nature. So it is with examples of computer-aided composition. They do not sound like rock, or bebop, or symphonies. Rather, they embody abstract relationships that assume the characteristics of certain kinds of music. There are a number of parallels between computer graphics and computer music. Discussions about fractals and computer graphics usually distinguish between the high-resolution pictures made on powerful institutional computers and those made at home. The same schism exists between highest-quality sound synthesis and home synthesis. This article discusses some of the basic techniques of computer-aided musical composition and includes some programs for generating musical fractals on home computers. [Editor's note: The programs WHITE. BAS, BROWN. BAS. lOVERF.BAS, VARIATN.BAS, and RANDOM. BAS are written in MSX BASIC using MUSIC MACRO commands for the Yamaha CX5-M music computer. Their source code is available for downloading from BYTEnet Listings at (617) 861-9764. They are also available on disk [see page 445). | The output of the software shown in this article is a list of commands for the computer's internal synthesis hardware rather than actual music. Other details can be found in the text box "About the Programs" on page 196. A Longstanding Relationship Since the time of ancient Greece, Western music has embodied propor- tions and abstract numerical relationships. There are many examples. A famous motet of 1436, Nuper Rosarum Flores by Guillaume Dufay, uses the same relations of tempo between its sections as the ratios in size between parts of the Florentine cathedral for whose dedication it was composed. Numerology played a part in certain choices of elements in some of the religious music of |. S. Bach. In our own era, Bela Bartok, the great Hungarian composer and folk music expert, used the Fibonacci numerical series to govern pro...

Sin haberle dado al código en BASIC, no sé yo si se tratará de la cosa más armónica del mundo. Buscando algo más sobre el tema, en 1987, la revista Nature publicaba una carta, Is there such a thing as fractal music? Y una búsqueda rápida en Scholar muestra que se sigue escribiendo sobre el tema.

Y un par de cosillas más de hardware para cerrar. Primero, al Atari ST, que seguía avanzando…

The Atari 520ST by Eric Jensen A good engine for bit-mapped graphics at an attractive price The Atari 520ST is a very appealing machine. It is a good engine for bit-mapped graphics, with a good user interface and an attractive price. Still, the review machine had too many rough edges to serve as my primary machine. It is far from portable. A two-drive system put seven boxes on my tabletop and required four wall outlets. The processor and each disk drive have separate power supplies and the four power switches are inconvenient. I don't like leaving the power supply plugged in while its output is turned off. It draws some power, and I worry that the system will be susceptible to power-line glitches even while turned off. The practical solution seems to be to use a switched outlet box. Hardware The hardware appears clean. The 8-MHz clock rate (a bit faster than either Macintosh's or Amiga's) probably translates to about half a million typical instructions per second. There is no other special display support hardware, and none is needed for windowing applications. The display appears to be properly interleaved with the processor so that they do not have to wait for each other. The display generator is an interesting compromise. For the monochrome display, it fetches a word of data and shifts it out a bit at a time to determine the color for 16 successive pixels. For the color displays, it fetches either two or four words in sequence and shifts out a bit of each to develop a color lookup-table index. Again, there are 16 shift cycles before the next words must be fetched. Thus you have neither the situation in which all the bits describing one pixel are in one word, nor that in which the most significant bits for all pixels are contiguous in memory. As long as this arrangement is hidden under GEM— as it should be for almost all users— this is fine, but there are a couple of cases in which it could be inconvenient. If you were to use multiple planes of memory (with a degenerate color map) to represent multiple overlayed images, then the images would be inconveniently intertwined. If you have to mask out an irregular region in a picture, then you have to know not only the number of words in a scan line but also the spacing between words, which may not be the same in the image and the mask. The 512K bytes of RAM is enough for most programming, although the operating system for the reviewed machine used more than 200K. | Editor's note: The latest production units for the 520ST and 1040ST have TOS in ROM.| In addition, the screen uses at least 32K more. The displays are very crisp and clean, with enough resolution to draw pictures of good quality. The 12-inch screens provide almost twice the area of the 9-inch Macintosh screen. The SMI 24 monochrome monitor provides a 640- by 400-pixel display. This allows 22 lines of 110 characters in the directory font, or 20 lines of 77 in the standard font used in BASIC windows (allowing window borders), which is enough to do a fair job of emulating a dumb terminal. There are about 77 dots to the inch horizontally by 65 vertically, which is fine enough resolution to make the jagged edges of diagonal lines fairly unobtrusive. You can run the SCI 224 color monitor in two modes (640 by 200 pixels with 4 colors or 320 by 200 pixels with 16 colors). The lower resolution mode is the operating system's initial choice. This keeps the aspect ratio of icons the same as on the monochrome monitor and simply doubles their sizes. The jagged edges are noticeable here but not particularly offensive. I was very impressed by the lack of colored "shadow" edges on

…y después, que el viejo hardware se resistía a morir, y como muestra este botón en que se revisan interfaces MIDI… para el Apple II y para el Commodore 64 (🥹).

Four MIDI Interfaces by Roger Powell and Richard Grehan MIDI interfaces for the Commodore 64, IBM PC, Macintosh, and Apple II family Let's assume you have a personal computer and you want to connect it to a MIDIequipped keyboard or other instrument. One of the first things you will need is interface hardware to send your MIDI signals through your computer. The MIDI specification requires a current-loop serial interface operating at 31,2 50 bits per second, so it is going to take something more than just retrofitting an RS-232C port. In this article, we will look at four MIDI interfaces currently available for some of the most popular microcomputers. The TDS-AP for the Apple 11+/ lie and the TDSC-64 for the Commodore 64 are from Syntech Corporation. The MPU-401 for either the IBM PC or the Apple 11 machines is from RolandCorp. The MIDIMAC for the Macintosh or Mac Plus is from Opcode Systems. The interfaces all include at least a high-speed UART with some sort of clock-generation circuitry, a buffered output stage, and an optoisolated input stage. (The MIDIMAC is an exception; it requires no special UART, since the Macintosh's serial ports can operate well above the speed required by MIDI.) However, most of the interfaces we'll look at in this article add extra features such as drum machine trigger signal outputs and tape synchronization inputs and outputs. Of course, if you are an Atari ST owner, you are probably reading this with a bit of smugness, because the Atari ST has built-in MIDI ports. TDS-AP Syntech Corporation's TDS-AP is a MIDI interface on a board that plugs into the Apple II+/IIe. It includes a pair of DIN jacks— one for MIDI in and one for MIDI out— as well as five mini phone jacks: tape in, tape out, foot-switch, clock out and start/stop. The tape-in and tape-out jacks allow for synchronization with a tape deck. If you have a multitrack tape recorder, you connect the tape-out signal to a line-in signal on a track of your tape machine; this track will become the click track. You then program whatever MIDI software you're running to output a sync tone and record this on the click track. Now connect the line-out signal from the click track to the tapein port on the MIDI interface, and the sync tone that you have just recorded becomes the master clock for the system when you begin to record onto the other tracks of your tape recorder. You can opt for some hcmds-off event control by attaching a footswitch to the TDS-AP's footswitch jack. For example, we tested the interface with multitrack recording and sequencer software that enabled us to halt the recording process by pressing the space bar or footswitch. If you have both hands busy on a synthesizer's keyboard, it's much easier to operate a footswitch than an Apple II's space bar. The clock-out and start/stop lines of the interface can be used to drive a drum machine. The clock-out line connects to the clock-in line of the drum machine, and pulses on this line control the machine's tempo. The start/ stop line— just as its name implies— provides trigger signals to begin and halt whatever sequence you have programmed into your drum machine. Of course, you could also use the clock-out and start/stop lines to control a sequencer. The clock-out and start/ stop lines add features that may not be immediately apparent. Not only do they permit you to control drum machines that are not equipped with a MIDI interface, but they provide a direct control path to a drum machine that might otherwise be at the end of a line of daisychained MIDI devices (and would therefore suffer from signal-transmission delays). They also alleviate the problem that arises if you don't have enough MIDI-thru connectors available and are unable to hook the drum machine into the MIDI circuit at all. The TDS-AP's documentation is a small 10-page pamphlet filled mainly with simplistic diagrams showing how to connect the interface to a tape deck, a drum machine, and a sequencer (they presume you already know how to connect the MIDI ports to whatever musical instrument you're using). We were happy to find an elaborate description of the procedure you must go through to create a click track. We rate the documentation as adequate: It provides you with

Pues eso. Hasta aquí nuestro repaso a la historia de la informática de consumo de mediados de los 80. Con un poco de suerte (falta decidir si buena o mala, claro 😬), volvemos en septiembre con más Computer Chronicles.

PS Por cierto, por la más pura casualidad me he encontrado esta entrada de obm de 2008… en la que me leía una revista de 1998. Esto mío viene de largo. A lo ¿mejor? ¿peor? es crónico y todo.

¿Nos cargaremos la neutralidad de la red en Europa?

He visto poco comentario por ahí de esta declaración (PDF) que firma ACT (la Asociación de Proveedores de Video Bajo Demanda en Europa, que agrupa a empresas como Paramount, Disney, Warner o, en España, Mediaset y Atresmedia, y de la que no forma parte Netflix) y que también cuenta con el soporte de Euroconsumers Group (en España, la OCU es miembro), la European Games Developer Federation (el socio español es Desarrollo Español de Videojuegos, que cuenta con miembros como Gameloft, Socialpoint o Ubisoft Barcelona) o la European Magazine Media Association (son miembros Conde Nast UK, Axel Springer o el grupo de The Economist) o la Internet Society.

La declaración muestra la preocupación de que la Comisión Europea, con la excusa de la nueva Digital Networks Act, cuyo primer borrador se presentó en enero, se coma buena parte de la neutralidad de red, «el principio por el cual los proveedores de servicios de Internet y los gobiernos que la regulan deben tratar a todo tráfico de datos que transita por la red de igual forma indiscriminadamente, sin cobrar a los usuarios una tarifa dependiendo del contenido, página web, plataforma o aplicación a la que accedan» (wikipedia dixit).

Para ACT1, naturalmente, esto implica que sus empresas queden expuestas a pagar para tener mejor salida a la red (por una conexión por la que las telecos, por el otro lado, ya nos cobran a los consumidores). Lo mismo pasa con los de los videojuegos o las asociaciones de prensa. No es que yo quiera ponerme ni del lado de Mediaset ni del de Disney, precisamente, pero la OCU me resulta un poco más cercana, y la Internet Society aún más… La IS, precisamente, ya se quejaba del tema en enero, y sus argumentos, en mi opinión, quedan fuera de toda duda: no hay un problema que resolver, corremos el riesgo de estropear el funcionamiento de internet y vulneraríamos la neutralidad de la red (y todo por echarles una mano a nuestras amigas las telecos, añado yo).

En fin. Que a ver si estamos atentos, controlamos a nuestros legisladores y conseguimos que el lobby de turno no nos la cuele.

  1. Netflix decidió hace un tiempo ya que es lo suficientemente grande como para no tener que preocuparse por estas nimiedades: si alguna teleco pretende degradar su servicio a cambio de un rescate cobrarles por algo así, ya se encargará su ejército de clientes de quejarse directamente. ↩︎

¿Mastodon y Bluesky en el navegador? alpaca.blue

Hace apenas unos días hablábamos de OpenVibe, el cliente de Bluesky y Mastodon para Android, y hoy volvemos al ataque con un cliente web: alpaca.blue, cliente gratuito que hace exactamente lo que dice hacer: usar una cuenta de Bluesky y otra de Mastodon desde un solo cliente (responsive, además, claro: funciona perfectamente bien desde navegador de móvil).

Captura de pantalla de la aplicación web alpaca.blue. La interfaz es la típica desde los tiempos de Twitter

¿Inconvenientes? De momento, uno grave y uno leve, ambos visibles en la captura de pantalla. El grave: no tiene soporte para bookmarks 😢. El leve: no tiene modo oscuro.

¿La esperanza? alpaca.blue es de código abierto (aquí el correspondiente repo de GitHub), con lo que ambas cosas deberían ser solventables…

(Añado un inconveniente para los alérgicos a la IAg: podemos ver en el repo de GitHub cómo el creador de alpaca.blue, Laurie Voss (cofundador de npm Inc, nada menos), usa Claude para el desarrollo.)

obm 23

Pues eso. Que aprovechamos la resaca de San Juan para celebrar que este modesto blog le ha dado su vigesimotercera vuelta al sol. Comenzamos antes de que WordPress se llamara WordPress, en el alojamiento de miarroba.com (siguen vivos, y dice su web que se pusieron en marcha en el 2000).

Con los bots de IA volviendo locos a los motores de analítica, imposible saber si se nos lee mucho (bueno: sabemos con seguridad que no se nos lee mucho 😅, y lo que es imposible saber es lo poco que se nos lee), pero seguimos escribiendo: hasta 44 entradas separan esta entrada de la celebración cumpleañera anterior (no esperen los lectores tanta productividad para la temporada 26/27), incluyendo la del RSS, la de cuando nos pasamos de Spotify a Tidal, la de los auriculares para dormir, la de la charla de Jeff Minter, la enésima (para n=6) versión del qué software gastas o la de la aplicación de mixtapes que no llegará a existir nunca.

En cualquier caso, que happy birthday to us, que esperamos seguir aquí el año que viene y que muchas gracias a los cuatro lectores regulares del blog :-).

PS Inspirándome en el blog de Dani Latorre (que «solo» cumple veinte años) me he ido a archive.org a buscar la captura más vieja que tienen de obm, y ahí tenéis, en todo su «esplendor», la primera entrada de obm, tal y como se veía en 2009 (ha llovido), con esa plantilla emulando las pestañas del Chrome de la época.

La primera entrada de este blog, tal como se veía en 2009. El aspecto está claramente inspirado en la interfaz de Chrome en aquella época, con pestañas azuladas para las páginas de lo más buscado, las fuentes de obm y el acerca de. Un widget señala que feedburner nos daba 701 lectores, y otro lista las entradas más populares del blog: convertir videos a formato 3gp, tu nombre en japonés, tu nombre en élfico, el poltergeist de la batería del Aspire One, módem USB vodafone con 3G, acer aspire one, batería jumbo, tu nombre en star wars

Qué nostalgia los 700 lectores en Feedburner (Feedly que estamos al borde de los 200, pero no es lo más creíble del mundo, opino) y la lista de entradas más populares (que, mucho me temo que, si tuviésemos estadísticas fiables, seguirían estando ahí)…