Baldur Bjarnason Really Specific Stories

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