Baldur Bjarnason

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