The Whole Earth Catalog Online: Stewart Brand’s “Bible” of the 60s Generation

in Apple, Books, e-books | October 8th, 2011

Time to res­ur­rect anoth­er sud­den­ly rel­e­vant item we first men­tioned back in 2009…

Between 1968 and 1972, Stew­art Brand pub­lished The Whole Earth Cat­a­log. For Kevin Kel­ly, the Cat­a­log was essen­tial­ly “a paper-based data­base offer­ing thou­sands of hacks, tips, tools, sug­ges­tions, and pos­si­bil­i­ties for opti­miz­ing your life.” For Steve Jobs, it was a “Bible” of his gen­er­a­tion, a life ‑trans­form­ing pub­li­ca­tion. Speak­ing to Stan­ford grad­u­ates in 2005, in what Ken Aulet­ta has called the “Get­tys­burg Address of grad­u­a­tion-speechism,” Jobs explained why he drew inspi­ra­tion from this intel­lec­tu­al cre­ation of the 60s coun­ter­cul­ture:

When I was young, there was an amaz­ing pub­li­ca­tion called The Whole Earth Cat­a­log, which was one of the bibles of my gen­er­a­tion. It was cre­at­ed by a fel­low named Stew­art Brand not far from here in Men­lo Park, and he brought it to life with his poet­ic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before per­son­al com­put­ers and desk­top pub­lish­ing, so it was all made with type­writ­ers, scis­sors, and polaroid cam­eras. It was sort of like Google in paper­back form, 35 years before Google came along: it was ide­al­is­tic, and over­flow­ing with neat tools and great notions.

Stew­art and his team put out sev­er­al issues of The Whole Earth Cat­a­log, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cov­er of their final issue was a pho­to­graph of an ear­ly morn­ing coun­try road, the kind you might find your­self hitch­hik­ing on if you were so adven­tur­ous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hun­gry. Stay Fool­ish.” It was their farewell mes­sage as they signed off. Stay Hun­gry. Stay Fool­ish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you grad­u­ate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

The good news is that The Whole Earth Cat­a­log and some relat­ed pub­li­ca­tions are avail­able online. You can read them for free, or down­load them for a fee. We sug­gest div­ing in right here, in Fall 1968, where it all begins. Enjoy.…

Note: If you’re hav­ing prob­lems find your way around the site, check out the Twit­ter stream for the The Whole Earth Cat­a­logue. It includes links to var­i­ous online edi­tions. We’ve also added the text to our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

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Steve Jobs Demos the First Macintosh in 1984

in Apple, Life, Technology | October 5th, 2011

We orig­i­nal­ly post­ed this video back in 2009, and it seems like the right time to bring it back. It cap­tures the first of many times that Steve Jobs thrilled audi­ences with the promise of what tech­nol­o­gy could deliv­er. The video takes you back to Jan­u­ary 1984, when Jobs demoed the first Mac­in­tosh. (The event was famous­ly pro­mot­ed by Rid­ley Scot­t’s com­mer­cial dur­ing the Super Bowl. See below) A young Jobs, sport­ing a bow tie and a fuller head of hair, could bare­ly hold back his smile and some tears, and the crowd sim­ply could­n’t con­tain its enthu­si­asm, giv­ing Jobs a five-minute stand­ing ova­tion. That’s where the video ends, fad­ing hap­pi­ly and suit­ably to black. We’ll miss you Steve. Read the New York Times obit here.

For anoth­er great Steve Jobs moment, don’t miss his inspir­ing Stan­ford 2005 grad­u­a­tion talk where he dis­cussed his approach to liv­ing and urged the young grad­u­ates to “Stay Hun­gry, Stay Fool­ish.” So far as com­mence­ment speech­es go, it’s hard to beat this one.

Both video men­tioned above appear in our Cul­tur­al Icons col­lec­tion — a media col­lec­tion that fea­tures great artists and thinkers speak­ing in their own words.

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iPhone Magic by Techno-Illusionist Marco Tempest

in Apple, iPhone, Technology | June 29th, 2011

No more top hat and hand­ker­chief. Mar­co Tem­pest uses iPods and iPhones to cre­ate mag­ic for the 21st cen­tu­ry. He calls him­self a tech­no-illu­sion­ist. “I explore the bor­ders between tech­nol­o­gy and mag­ic,” says Tem­pest, “between what’s incred­i­bly real and incred­i­bly not.” Orig­i­nal­ly from Switzer­land, Tem­pest now lives in New York City. He was fea­tured in the inter­na­tion­al­ly syn­di­cat­ed tele­vi­sion series, The Vir­tu­al Magi­cian, and his work can be viewed on a YouTube chan­nel of the same name. His newest release, “iPod Magic–Deceptions,” fea­tures an appli­ca­tion he devel­oped to syn­chro­nize video play­back on mul­ti­ple screens. The App is called “Mul­ti­Vid.” You can down­load it for free here, and learn how to use it here.

via Dar­ren Brown

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Steve Jobs on Life: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

in Apple, Life, Philosophy | January 18th, 2011

Every so often, we like to bring back a favorite talk of ours, and today seemed like a bet­ter day than most. Speak­ing at Stan­ford’s com­mence­ment in 2005, Steve Jobs gives the grad­u­ates a glimpse of his life phi­los­o­phy. Some pearls of wis­dom here for the young, to be sure. But if you have some more life under your belt, you’ll appre­ci­ate the mes­sage even more. The talk ends with Jobs telling the stu­dents to “stay hun­gry, stay fool­ish,” a line from The Whole Earth Cat­a­log, the Bible of Steve Jobs’ gen­er­a­tion, which became freely avail­able online back in 2009…

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Developing Apps for iPhone & iPad: A Free Stanford Course

in Apple, iPad, iPhone, Stanford | November 26th, 2010

Look­ing to design apps for the iPhone or iPad? Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty now has a course online that will help you do just that.

Sim­ply called Devel­op­ing Apps for iOS, the course fea­tures 20 video lec­tures (the last install­ment was uploaded just this week) and, some­what fit­ting­ly, they’re all avail­able on Apple’s iTune­sU.

Paul Hegar­ty teach­es the course, and he assumes that you have expe­ri­ence pro­gram­ming in C, and some famil­iar­i­ty with UNIX, object-ori­ent­ed pro­gram­ming and graph­i­cal toolk­its.

You can find Devel­op­ing Apps for iOS in the Com­put­er Sci­ence sec­tion of our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es, along with two pre­vi­ous Stan­ford app devel­op­ment cours­es, both called iPhone Appli­ca­tion Devel­op­ment.

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iTunes U Introduces Free eBooks: Download Shakespeare’s Complete Works

in Apple, e-books, Literature | October 31st, 2010

Per­haps you’re accus­tomed to down­load­ing free lec­tures and cours­es on iTunes U. Now, you have a new option. Last week, Apple began intro­duc­ing free eBooks to its media col­lec­tion. And, to kick things off, they’re giv­ing users access to 18 free text­books spon­sored by Con­nex­ions (a Rice Uni­ver­si­ty project); a series of 100 ebooks pro­duced by the Open Uni­ver­si­ty, and then, cour­tesy of Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty, the com­plete col­lec­tion of Shake­speare’s plays from the First Folio of 1623.  You can down­load all of these texts in the open ePub for­mat. And if you have an iPad (or an iPhone with a copy of iBooks), they eas­i­ly sync to the device, and make for a great read­ing expe­ri­ence. But you’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly lim­it­ed to using the iPad. I was able to read the texts in ebook read­ers cre­at­ed by Stan­za and Barnes & Noble (the mak­er of the new col­or Nook). And, using this free online ser­vice and then fol­low­ing these gen­er­al direc­tions, I eas­i­ly con­vert­ed the ePub files to Ama­zon’s .mobi for­mat and uploaded them to my Kin­dle. The bot­tom line? You can expect iTunes U to become a handy resource for free ebooks as the ser­vice matures – one best suit­ed to the iPad, but cer­tain­ly not lim­it­ed to it. And, speak­ing of the iPad, you should give this sto­ry a read. “IPad Opens World to a Dis­abled Boy.” It’s a great way to start the week…

Note: If you want a sim­ple html ver­sion of Shake­speare’s col­lect­ed works, don’t miss MIT’s invalu­able web site.

FYI. You can find more free eBooks in our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion, 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

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City Poems: A New Literary iPhone App

in Apple, iPhone, Literature, Poetry | April 20th, 2010

Writ­ing in The Guardian, Vic­tor Kee­gan, a long­time jour­nal­ist and poet, talks about his new iPhone app, City Poems. The new­ly released app will run you $2.99 on iTunes, which makes it less than open, I know. (Have you seen our free app, by the way?) But it’s admit­ted­ly a pret­ty nice con­cept for the cul­tur­al crowd, enough to jus­ti­fy giv­ing it a quick men­tion here. About City Poems, Kee­gan says:

City Poems – pub­lished today – … uses satel­lite nav­i­ga­tion to guide cul­ture vul­tures and tourists alike through the streets of cen­tral Lon­don poem by poem. After weeks of research­ing poems about the city, I realised that you can learn more about the past life of a city from poems than from most guide books and his­to­ries. Wher­ev­er you are stand­ing in Lon­don (or New York for that mat­ter) with an iPhone (or iPod Touch or iPad) in your hand it will tell you how many metres you are away from places and events that poems have been writ­ten about.

They include the exe­cu­tion of the crim­i­nal Jonathan Wild (one of the inspi­ra­tions for John Gay’s The Beg­gar’s Opera), pub­lic burn­ings in Smith­field (“His guts filled a bar­rel”) or the curi­ous sto­ries behind the stat­ues in Trafal­gar Square, which I had passed by in igno­rance for many decades…

Like I said, an intrigu­ing con­cept, and it seems as though Kee­gan has plans to bring this mate­r­i­al to oth­er mobile plat­forms. You can grab the app on iTunes here.

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The iPad eBook Reader: Some First Reactions

in Amazon Kindle, Apple, e-books, iPad | April 4th, 2010

Yes­ter­day morn­ing, I head­ed to the Palo Alto Apple Store, spent an hour wait­ing in line, then final­ly gained entrance to the store. And who entered along­side me? Steve Jobs! An aus­pi­cious begin­ning. I left with a 32 gig iPad, took it home, and start­ed play­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly with the eBook read­er. Here are my very ear­ly impres­sions:

15 months ago, I bought a Kin­dle and returned it. I just could­n’t read with it at night (a non-starter for me), and fig­ured that Apple would even­tu­al­ly get it right. Well, they large­ly have. The iPad ini­tial­ly feels a lit­tle heavy. But, it’s actu­al­ly no heav­ier than your aver­age hard­back book. Plus it’s fair­ly easy to hold. Score one for the iPad.

Then, when you fire up the eBook read­er, you instant­ly like what you see. The fonts are crisp, and the images are in col­or, which means that you can read chil­dren’s books, comics and oth­er graph­ic inten­sive texts. Plus, you can change the size and kind of the font. You can adjust the bright­ness of the screen. And, in some cas­es, you can even alter the back­ground col­or of the screen. (Most of this you can’t do with the Kin­dle.) All of this con­tributes to a read­er-friend­ly screen that’s easy on the eyes. And, yes, I can read with this device at night. (Read­ers make oth­er good obser­va­tions in the com­ments below.)

How about buy­ing books for the iPad? Well, it’s pret­ty easy. Both Apple and Ama­zon sell books for the device, with prices gen­er­al­ly rang­ing between $9.99 and $12.99. Rather notably, they also offer access to a siz­able col­lec­tion of free books in the pub­lic domain. (You can get more free­bies here, too.) Over­all, Ama­zon has a much larg­er inven­to­ry, and their books tend to be cheap­er. But oth­er­wise these are pret­ty sim­i­lar ser­vices. And, because Apple now has a far supe­ri­or device, you have to won­der whether this is the begin­ning of a big shift in the book mar­ket. In five years, Ama­zon might not be quite the behe­moth it is today — some­thing that’s prob­a­bly let­ting Steve Jobs sleep eas­i­er than Jeff Bezos at night.

A final point worth men­tion­ing here: Nei­ther com­pa­ny will let you have true own­er­ship over the books you buy. Both ven­dors lock down their books, dic­tate the oper­at­ing envi­ron­ments in which you can read them, and con­trol the user inter­faces that shape the read­ing expe­ri­ence. (PC World has more on that here.) You don’t have much ulti­mate con­trol over the under­ly­ing file. So the upshot is that you had bet­ter like the iPad (or Kin­dle) read­ing expe­ri­ence before decid­ing to amass a large and cost­ly library.

Now for a few ran­dom obser­va­tions:

1) The  video gen­er­al­ly looks great (unless, of course, it’s pro­duced in Flash). I was real­ly impressed with the qual­i­ty of YouTube videos, and Net­flix movies (free app here) stream over the iPad rather bril­liant­ly.

2) On the down­side, I found typ­ing on the iPad to be rather dif­fi­cult — even more so than typ­ing on an iPhone. The device is large enough that it’s hard to stretch your fin­gers to reach var­i­ous keys. Maybe I will get a hang of it. But, for now, it’s unwieldy.

3) The New York Times and Wall Street Jour­nal have devel­oped new apps for the iPad, and they deliv­er a pleas­ant read­ing expe­ri­ence, to be sure. But I don’t see this sud­den­ly mak­ing con­sumers any more (or less) will­ing to pay. The con­cept of the iPad sav­ing the news­pa­per indus­try seems fair­ly over­played, I’m sor­ry to say.

4) Is this a must-have device? Or just nice-to-have? Right now, I’m inclined toward the lat­ter (and so is Slate). Aside from the eBook read­er, your home com­put­er or smart phone can accom­plish most of what the iPad can. How­ev­er, the iPad will rapid­ly dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself. It will become a nice low-cost, portable com­put­er — one that lets you store data in the cloud, and pro­vides access to a large vol­ume of cheap or free soft­ware (at least more than your aver­age con­sumer nor­mal­ly gets). Give it a year. Wait for the flood of apps to come. Wait for inno­v­a­tive soft­ware devel­op­ers to extract the poten­tial of this machine, and wait for Apple to make the iPad lighter, cheap­er, and even faster. Right now, it’s not a game chang­er. But it will be down the line.

Are you a new iPad own­er? Have any thoughts in gen­er­al? Or par­tic­u­lar­ly about the eBook read­er? Add them to the com­ments below, or send them our way. We look for­ward to hear­ing what you have to say …

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.