Alarith Uhde

I prepared a "tier list" exercise for my class today and it was quite nice! Students seemed to enjoy it, and the results were very rich for follow-up discussions.

I think this can be a great alternative to "clicker" systems; it does take more time, but promotes more thorough engagement with the […]

We still see only very small percentages of Linux desktop users overall, but if (if!) a transition is happening, it's not going to happen steadily/linearly. My guess is a very slow increase for a very long time (✅), followed by a steep increase in a short time.

Is this the moment? Not sure […]

My NAS/Kodi box is a thin client attached to a TV. It mostly worked but had this problem that whenever the TV went into standby, it would not recognize the TV's speakers anymore until reboot. So the only available audio output was the thin client's internal speaker, which was a bit annoying.

I […]

It's great if everything is not focused on the US anymore, but the appropriate response is not to now make it all about Europe instead.

I get increasingly annoyed by the Europe smugness on here. I might have posted something in that direction myself before (sorry), but it's really not helpful and often only wishful thinking. Yes, lots of things work better in Europe, but fascist parties are on the rise as well, thanks to a made […]

@floe @sigchi I don't expect much better reviews for my regular CHI submissions either 😉

But yes, it's a shame and maybe a DIS provocation is the only alternative I have in mind.

"Voice commands" have been embedded into our vision of computing for a long time: Star Trek did it and it does the whole anthropomorphization thing that tech loves.

But from a practical standpoint it's a bad interface: Think of a handful of people sitting in an office yelling at their computers […]

@tante Silent Speech Interfaces can fix the noise issue, but this is of course not the only reason why voice interactions are not a good fit for most of the suggested use cases

Calling linear regression "one layer neural network AI" going forward

Maybe the main purpose of ads is not to promote products anymore, but to traumatize/enrage/... users just enough so they pay to make it stop

There I was, thinking I coined a new term when it was already there all along:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Japansplaining

Taking a Fresh Look at the Fediverse On the search for open and decentralized alternatives to commercial social media platforms many have given Mastodon and/or the Fediverse ...

Summary of recent developments and plans at mastodon: https://media.ccc.de/v/848ac0cf-ab98-4904-bcb0-495aed2125a3

One of the side-effects of the AI bubble is that we stopped talking about alternative solutions to computing problems. Everything needs to be solved with "AI" - meaning an LLM - and nobody stops and asks if there is an alternative. This drives me mad because LLMs are not only unreliable, but […]

Spam used to be an argument why we can't decentralize and why email is "dead". Today we have spam on telegram, facebook, linkedin, booking etc. But this time around you can't just install a spam filter or rely on the provider to filter it for you, or have them be accountable in any form.

Half a year later and back in Europe temporarily, I can tell that definitely there is a connection issue between Japan and Europe at the moment. Certain websites hosted in Europe have extremely long load times, across devices and internet connections in Japan. Once in Europe with the same […]

@laaspher Ich weiß nicht, wo die Zahl herkommt (Quelle?). Aber so formuliert scheint die Botschaft zu sein, dass es irgendwie eine Qual sei, eine Sprachnachricht abzuhören. Ich höre meinen Freunden gerne zu. Das funktioniert mit Sprachnachrichten über Zeitzonen hinweg besser als telefonieren.

Dale Cooper: Audrey, you'll have to excuse me this morning, I'm running late. I only have time for coffee. Audrey Horne: Well maybe I could go with you. Dale Cooper: Wednesdays were traditionally a school day when I was your age

#TwinPeaks #TwinPeaksQuotes

The excel table, as viewed in MS Office. July 10 is correctly marked as Thursday.

The excel table, as viewed in LibreOffice. July 10 is falsely marked as Friday.

Fun with excel sheets!

We have an internal system to bill TA hours and it looked wrong on my computer using LibreOffice. I notified the office, but they said it was correct. So I double checked with my colleague. Today (July 10) is shown as Friday (金) on my […]

[Original post on hci.social]

Tesla's so-called "autopilot" turns off automatically a fraction of a second before a crash, so the driver can be blamed even though the driver has no time to respond […]

We have gone full circle with conferences now, where you publish work but don't present it, but still have to pay. How about... I don't know, removing the conference aspect of it and making it... just a regular journal?

Other disciplines have been doing this forever. This would also facilitate […]

Second, this odd way to pay for a publication, but not through a regular APC and instead through a conference fee (which you don't attend) is incompatible with various supplementary funding options. For example, my university has a conference support program that only covers travel costs. We […]

A quick follow-up. #MobileHCI2025 is in-person only this year. With our odd conference publication model in #HCI this creates two issues for authors.

First, instead of the reduced fee that was available before, online folks now have to pay the full fee (750$ instead of 200$ in 2023) including […]

@andresmh it is, I have a similar setup for my folding bike! But in Japan, the bag needs to fully cover the bike if you want to bring it on a train.

Arrived in Budapest and about to watch the press conference for #BudapestPride with mayor and EU commissioner Hadja Lahbib. You can follow live here. https://www.youtube.com/live/du9jqDMRCrU?si=1W9-Z0zhj0em8stl

Bei der #BudapestPride am Samstag drohen den Teilnehmenden Strafen, die Polizei darf sogar Gesichtserkennung zur Identifikation einsetzen. Etwa 50 Menschenrechtsorganisationen fordern die EU-Kommission zu sofortigen Handeln gegen den „gefährlichen Präzedenzfall“ auf […]

In some stations in Japan, the train displays stop showing incoming trains just before they arrive. This is different in Europe, where they stop showing trains only after they depart.

The idea is probably that people don't rush through the station to catch their trains. But in practice, you […]

That said, I chaired an online session at #CHI2025 and there were maybe a handful of people in the audience including myself and the 2 SVs. There was a talk by Bill Gaver which drew another 5 (?) people in who left directly afterwards.

Nobody to blame here, the way we currently do it just […]

An online form for a conference, asking about how the author would like to present their paper. The two options are: a) I will present the paper in-person or b) I will not present the paper

An excerpt of an online form with a "submitter agreement" for an accepted paper at an academic conference. There are seven points the author has to agree to. One of them is highlighted: "I confirm that at least one of the co-authors will attend the conference (in person or online)

My current prompt for this was the author form for #MobileHCI2025 that gives me the option to either present in-person or not at all. They will have their reasons to organize it that way, but for me that was when I learned that there won't be an online option. The […]

[Original post on hci.social]

It is really a bit unfortunate that we have just collectively given up on online formats for academic conferences. I think it would be important to find better solutions, especially now. Not only do the visa issues we always had persist (greetings to anyone with an Iranian passport). Even if you […]

Modern academic publishing means I don’t have access to the published version of my own paper. 🥲