Wired, September 2005

ID: 050825.1616

Wired magazine makes me crazy. All I want is a digital version. I'll pay the same as the paper version. I'll accept any Digital Rights Management scheme Wired wants to impose. All I want is the same thing MacWorld and Scientific American provide: Digital editions of the magazine I can download as soon as they're released. I don't want paper, and I don't want to wait a month between the time Wired content is on the streets, and when it's available on their website.

The name of the magazine is Wired, right? Not Papyrus?

There are lots of reasons I don't want paper magazines, not the least of which is waste. After I remove and discard the plastic wrapper, and any inserts therein, I fan the magazine over a trash can to let all the loose inserts fall out. Then I quickly turn to the heavier weighted pages and attached inserts, tear them out, and throw them away. Then I'm ready to start reading the magazine. When I find something interesting, I tear it out and place it aside. Within an hour, I have a small pile of things to read online in a month. The Wired carcass goes into the trash.

But now I have a small pile of paper to keep for about a month, to be replaced with a downloaded digital version. Where do I put this? It usually ends up in a pile of other things I don't know what to do with. Like vegetables secreted in refrigerator crisper drawers, these (literal) tear-sheets slowly rot until one day I rediscover them, determine they are out of date, and throw them away unread. (A lot of vegetables go this way.)

Here's my new plan: Instead of saving paper as references to things that will be online a month later, I'll simply list what I'm interested in. No more paper. Here's the list (by page number) for the September 2005 issue:

034: Monkeying with the Web. Grease Monkey is a Firefox extension that allows users to change how others' websites appear and function. Anal-retentive, paper-fixated Web Designers — probably those working at Wired — hate it.

038: Check Your iPod at the Door. Now that word's getting out iPods are not much more than small multi-GB storage devices, everyone from the UK Ministry of Defense to the New York Department of Education wants them banned. I use mine to store contact information, and recipes, as well as music, and audiobooks. What'll you store in yours?

042: Pulse: How would you prefer to watch digital video content? Nice graph showing 57% of Wired readers would prefer to watch digital video content on their computers, versus 33% who prefer to watch such content on TVs. I wonder how many of Wired readers would prefer to read the frigging magazine on their computers.

044: Late to the Podcast Party. "For months, the secretive podcasting startup Odeo [planned to make] it easy for you to discover, create, and subscribe to fresh, independent audio content." Now that Apple's iTunes version 4.9 offers several thousand podcasts, the first question Wired asked Odeo cofounder Even Williams was, "Did Apple eat Odeo's lunch while you were still working on the secret sauce?"

046: Access Denied! Intriguing two-page spread of what's banned (besides pornography) from the internet in Saudi Arabi, Uzbekistan, China, Bahrain, Myanmar, and Singapore (who bans nothing). Lots of strange interpretations possible here. For example, what does it mean that Saudi Arabia bans most gambling and drugs sites? Pent-up demand?

058: Nixing the Compact Disc. Musicians are releasing on DVDs rather than CDs. The roomier formats allow for music videos to accompany the music. What does this mean for iPod video?

066: Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: The Finest Print Ever. This is my favorite Wired feature. (Sounds so, well, William Gibsonish.) Currently, it's Mitsubishi's Uni-ball Signo bit 0.18mm ballpoint pen; perfect(er) for writing tiny notes between the lines of text books. Sadly, our local Japanese stationery store doesn't carry them.

079: Sunglasses sans Glasses. Bausch&Lomb Nike MaxSight UV-filtering contact lenses. Comes in amber and grey-green. Drat! I just bought transition lenses.

109: The Big Picture: What We Watch. Five graphs about TV watching habits:

• Cable TV viewing surpassed Network TV around 2001.
• Time-shifted (DVR) TV watching has grown to about 30%.
• TV-DVDs now account for 19% of all DVDs purchased. (I own DVDs for every season of The Sopranos and don't even have HBO.)
• Live 8 online concerts had more than three times as many viewers as saw them on VH1, MTV, and ABC combined. (Maybe Wired can learn something about online markets here.)
• Most popular TV shows (I watch) downloaded at BitTorrent were CSI, Desperate Housewives, and The Sopranos.

129: The Dream Factory. My April 6, 2005 blog (From Mind to Matter) centered on Neil Gershenfeld's March 28, 2005 talk at the Library of Congress, From the Library of Information to the Library of Things. It was an amalgam of his October 2004 article in Scientific American, The Internet of Things, and bits of his current book, FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop — From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. Wired finally hopped aboard.

So: There you have it. Everything else in the September 2005 issue is now in the trash.

Email Comments • Show Hide Comments (1)