Month: October 2004

• Little Britain is being re-edited for broadcast on BBC One to remove some of the more extreme humour
  I watched Monkey Dust on BBC2 the other day and was suddenly aware how hardcore/shocking some of it was. My expectations had changed because it was on BBC2. And my reaction changed because I had become aware of the possibility of my mother watching it.
  (categories: appropriateness bbc bbcone bbcthree bbctwo censorship davidwalliams graphicreferences littlebritain mattlucas monkeydust swearing television)
• iTunes 4.7 is a lifesaver! Now I can free up some space on my 40Gb iPod by getting rid of duplicate tracks
  On the other hand, who in hell thought that using iTunes to sync your photos was a good idea? Surely iSync is the app for that? Except of course PC users don’t have iSync – so now Mac design decisions are based on non-Mac users…
  (categories: apple application design ipod ipodphoto isync itunes music osx photo photography sync userexperience userinterface ux)
• A picture from Flickr of “Hot Dogs”
  It’s trivial. It’s ridiculous. It’s wrong in so many ways. And yet it’s also really bloody funny. I apologise for how easily pleased I have become.
  (categories: dogs dumb funny humour photo photograph photography pun)
• Apple third quarter global market share falls to 1.8%
  While Apple generally seem to be doing pretty well, it looks like most of it is fueled by the iPod. Global market share continues to fall. I genuinely don’t understand why this is the case – I wouldn’t buy a PC today if you paid me to do it.
  (categories: apple computer desktop g4 g5 imac laptop marketshare osx pc powerbook)
• There’s now more squid biomass in the world than human (and there’s 6 1/2 billion of us)
  “Dr George Jackson from the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean studies in Tasmania said squid thrived during environmental disasters such as global warming.”
  (categories: animals biology biomass creatures giant globalwarming science sea squid water)
• Mr Webb explores the possibility of iPod as a kind of wireless personal informational avatar
  “Put it in your pocket, run a radio station for the people near your desk, or the people you pass on the street. But the music sharing, because really it’s a music device, has to start with photos, that’s the big excuse. A long term plan.”
  (categories: apple datastore future ipod localareabroadcasting music network personal photography portable server sharing socialsoftware thumbdrive webserver wireless workspace)
• Jonathan Ive speaks on design at an event that I failed to get organised enough to attend
  Motivations I share: “It has become more and more important to me that I work with a company I can believe in” and “We make money to support our desire to make nice things”. These are the goals. Now, how to achieve them…
  (categories: aesthetic apple beauty creativity design designmuseum designprocess ethos imac ipod jonathanive stevejobs workethic)
• How to control a computer system by tracking the movements of the nose…
  I’ve been examining the way I move my head while reading this article to see if I could use my nose as the controller for a mouse pointer. Very impressed. Really interesting idea. Kind of want one.
  (categories: face facialmovement inputdevice mice mouse nose nouse pointer tracking userinterface)
• Metacritic reveals extraordinarily polarised reviews for Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004)
  Eight reviews evenly spaced between 60 and 100, Nine reviews evenly spaced between 0 and 40. I wonder what divided the critics so much?
  (categories: birth cinema film jonathanglazer metacritic movie nicolekidman reincarnation review reviews)
• Attack of the Clones: How Britain came to be full of millions of identical trees
  25 million English elms died from Dutch elm disease in the 1970s, and the reason? Turns out that every single tree was a clone of a single elm introduced by the Romans…
  (categories: biodiversity biology britain clone disease dutchelmdisease england nature romans rome tree uk)
• Wikipedia entry on Apple and Typography
  A fascinating entry that covers Apple corporate fonts and brand identity, the fonts used on various Macintoshs over the years as well as going into some detail about font technologies in general
  (categories: apple brand branding brands font fontmanagement fonts glyph osx postcript system7 truetype type typography)
• Want to use del.icio.us as your authoritative snippet mapping / storage medium?
  If so, then pasta might well be the answer. del.icio.us keeps everything organised for you – and incredibly elegantly – but only if it’s already on a web page. Pasta gets it onto a page quickly and then posts to del.icio.us
  (categories: brain delicious files filing folksonomies folksonomy internet mindmap pasta post posting storage tags thebrain web weird weirdtech)

• Osama bin Laden has a tape broadcast on Al-Jazeera that seems designed to do nothing but mess with the US election
  I can’t tell what the effect of this is going to be – whether it will help Kerry or Bush – but it’s clearly designed to influence the election.
  (categories: afghanistan alqaeda america broadcast iraq news osamabinladen politics propaganda television tv)
• Watch the thought processes of a chess program’s AI as you play…
  I don’t have the patience for chess. I can’t be bothered to think more than two moves in advance. I keep hoping that I’ll somehow cruise a wave of successive genius to victory. But I never do.
  (categories: ai artificialintelligence chess cool design illustration nice pretty sigh thoughtprocesses visualisation)
• You too can watch Ben Hammersley’s heart pound pound pound…
  I remember the story that Ben wrote about going to have his entire body scanned and explored and probed by Americans. Never did I think I’d be able to watch his innards wiggling around…
  (categories: benhammersley body gross heart medicine scan science video)
• The Economist reluctantly endorses John Kerry for the American Presidency
  “In the end, the choice relies on a judgment about who will be better suited to meet the challenges America is likely to face during the next four years.”
  (categories: america economist election endorsement georgebush gwbush johnkerry politics president)
• plasticbag.org disagrees with The Economist – I’m endorsing Mike the Headless Chicken!
  “When a clear lack of direction is the obvious choice!”
  (categories: america election funny humour miketheheadlesschicken politics president usa)
• Ashlee Simpson Karaoke Edition iPod
  Available for just $349, it comes with enough money to use a pay phone for calling your daddy, your agent or both, when you get caught lip syncing live on national television.
  (categories: apple ashleesimpson audio funny humour ipod joke karaoke music parody satire)
• Delicious Monster’s page about Delicious Library
  So the site is beautiful of course, but I’m still slightly unsure why I’m so interested in an OSX application that does nothing but help you catalogue your books, music and DVDs…
  (categories: apple application barcode books catalogue cd deliciousmonster dvd isight library mac osx scan)

• Free Ruler – an elegant little application for helping you measure the width and height of things you are designing
  I really like this – I often find myself trying to work out what’s gone wrong with a layout I’m building in HTML and CSS – having something to show exactly how many pixels of margin and padding are around an object could be a lifesaver…
  (categories: application design elegant measurement osx pixels ruler utilities utility)
• Frank Black Francis
  Here’s a strange one – an album of Pixies tracks in their formative stages with Frank Black singing alone, and then an album reinterpreting them all recorded last year. What a strange notion. Might have to have that…
  (categories: album alternative audio cd covers coverversions frankblack music pixies rock)
• British Military Fitness gets you fit the old-fashioned way
  So if the whole thing didn’t seem a bit too much of a macho thing and if it wasn’t in any way a bit of a turn-on I might consider joining British Military Fitness to get all athletic and stuff. Some of the instructors look quite nice too…
  (categories: athletics exercise fitness hot hydepark military running sport)
• Dance label !K7 are happy to advertise on their CDs that they have “No Copy Protection – respect the music”
  It bodes well that a record company would have the nerve to do something like this. If it has any positive impact (relative or absolute) on sales of their albums, then it should encourage the rest of the industry to follow suit (if they legally can)…
  (categories: album audio cd copyprotection dance drm labelling music)

• Kevan’s extisp.icio.us visualisation of my del.icio.us links
  I’m only really linking to this because I seem to be trying to show it to someone every couple of days and this way I’ll get to it more easily. Plus I’ve now been using del.icio.us for a while and the tag patterns are starting to emerge…
  (categories: css delicious dhtml folksonomies graphic tags typography visual visualisation)
• An interesting article on a dream cocoa client for del.icio.us
  So this is a bit of a follow-up to a post I did a while back on tag-based bookmarks in safari which has had some interesting feedback. This article has some of the most interesting ideas that I’ve seen, and I’m definitely going to be thinking around this
  (categories: bookmarking bookmarks cocoalicious delicious design heirarchy interactiondesign interface osx relatedlinks tags ui userinterface)
• Catching up on Jon Stewart stuff (swoon) – here’s his Daily Show summary of what happened to him on Crossfire
  “Tomorrow I will go back to being funny, but your show will still blow…”
  (categories: cnn crossfire dailyshow election jonstewart journalism media politics president satire tv video)
• Mobster is a companion application for iTunes that allows you to create playlists based on personalized music recommendations.
  Yeah I’m not convinced by musicmobs as a way of operating with the world. I’m sure it comes up with good recommendations, but the manual upload of your iTunes XML seems a little random to me.
  (categories: aggregation application audio collaborative itunes music musicmobs osx recommendations socialsoftware usertracking)
• Wikipedia entry on Edward Lear, nonsense poet
  My favourite Lear limerick: “There was an old person of Fife, Who was greatly disgusted with life; They sang him a ballad, And fed him on salad, Which cured that old person of Fife.” Dude – I’m right there with you…
  (categories: biography edwardlear literature nonsense poetry unfulfilledpromise wikipedia writing)
• playlistmag.com has the best introduction to using Musicmobs and Mobster
  “Once you‚Äôve uploaded the file, all your songs are added to a database. In this database reside the track names and play counts of all the songs of all of Musicmobs‚Äô users. Musicmobs then creates a home page for you that lists all the artists from you
  (categories: aggregation applications faqs introduction itunes mobster mp3 music musicmobs osx playlists tutorial)
• Microsoft and Swatch offer thinner wireless watches
  So they’re broadcasting interesting data in the air, which means that absolutely anything could use it and respond to the news or the weather or a stock price, and they put it in watches?! Where’s the teddy bear that shivers when it’s cold outside?!
  (categories: data microsoft smartdevice smartdevices swatch syndication ubicomp ubiquity watches wireless)
• DropCopy – Easily and quickly send files and folders to multiple destinations across your LAN
  Interesting little application this – I’ve been thinking around something vaguely similar for a while. This has given me some possible UI pointers…
  (categories: apple application cool design easy elegant filesharing lan networking osx rendezvous simple software ui userinterface)
• Coolfer on UK artists that don’t sell in the States
  Robbie Williams and the Manic Street Preachers – both artists I might add that I cannot stand the sight of any more – are releasing albums that will go #1 in the UK and will be completely invisible to Americans…
  (categories: america audio billboard charts manicstreetpreachers music robbiewilliams uk)
• John Peel tribute on Radio 4’s Front Row
  A particularly interesting tribute to John Peel including Andy Kershaw’s comments that just three weeks ago John Peel had said that he felt marginalised by Radio 1 and that the late nights were killing him…
  (categories: andykershaw audio damonalbarn johnpeel music musicindustry radio radio1 radio4)
• Inspired by Tufte – Weblog Continuum Sparklines
  Tufte’s sparklines are “intense, design simple, word-sized graphics that can gracefully and intensely narrate on-going results in detail” – and this site proposes a way of using them to illustrate posting activity around a specific subject…
  (categories: blog blogs diagrams edwardtufte infographics information informationdesign informationvisualisation representation sparklines visualisation web weblog webloggia weblogs)
• Even more Jon Stewart (swoon) because I bloody like him, okay? This time on CBS…
  “[Dick Cheney] has been my favorite, because he just goes out there to a room full of supporters and says, ‘You know we’re all going to die, right?’ You’re going to die unless I’m in charge.'”
  (categories: america bias cool dailyshow dude interview jonstewart media news politics show swoon television tv usa)
• The New York Times on Jon Stewart (swoon) versus Crossfire, “No Jokes or Spin. It’s Time (Gasp) to Talk”
  Of course you might not find it easy to break into the New York Times’ heavily protected web edifice, but it’s worth the effort to try: “Wait,” Mr. Carlson said querulously. “I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.”
  (categories: brilliant cool crossfire dailyshow debate funny jonstewart media politics tv)
• George W Bush’s re-election website has been made inaccessible to anyone outside the US
  “Since Monday morning (25 October) GeorgeWBush.com began rejecting web requests from outside the United States.” Of course we should not in any way think this representative of this administration’s foreign policy in microcosm. Oh no. Heaven forbid.
  (categories: american election georgebush gwbush isolationism isolationist politics republican usa wanker web world)
• Something Awful’s literal interpretations of movie posters
  “This week the Something Awful Forum Goons got overly analytical and took the idea of taking things at face value to the extreme. The very same extreme that often gets stupid people killed.”
  (categories: film funny humour literal movie poster satire somethingawful)
• iPod-related t-shirt reads, “I had an iPod before you even knew what one was”
  I may have to get one of them if only to make it clear that I’m really really hip and cool and trendsetting and stuff you guys kind of … well … it’s difficult to say it out loud, but you just kind of aren’t…
  (categories: apple clothes funny humour ipod slogan tshirt white)
• Buffy-creator Joss Whedon quits television production and shuts down Mutant Enemy
  “I have a bitter taste in my mouth with where TV has gone in the past five years,” he told Variety, labeling the reality TV craze “loathsome.” (thanks to Kerry for the heads up)
  (categories: angel buffy film firefly genre josswhedon movies mutantenemy realitytelevision television tv)

• nutr.itio.us provides a more sophisticated interface with which to post to del.icio.us Appears to include a way of deducing common tags for a link as well as aiding you navigate through your own tags. The interface doesn’t quite scale to the sheer breadth of tags you might wish to use, however. I wonder how it could…
• Some notes from GameDevBlog on The Sims 2 “The Unbearable Lightness of Being, what’s-her-name was mortified by her upset bowels when she first met Tomas. Not too far from having a Fear in The Sims 2 about losing control of your bladder at a party…”
• Cal’s awesome presentation on Flickr and PHP I’ve never been more impressed, amused and missed a friend so much at the same time. Cal come home, they don’t love you enough.
• Flickr’s fruit at the bottom – on bottom-of-the-page site navigation Ah – after posting a couple of links yesterday about bottom-of-the-page sitemaps and referencing Mr Jones, I’ve just noticed that he’s posted about it too. I’ve expressed some of my concerns in the comments, if you’re interested.
• Foxy’s self-financed house of horror! A young small business owner decides to create an unorthodox Second Life installation featuring zombies and blood-sucking ghouls. So she plunked down $400 of her own money to rent the land and then converted $400 more, to hire the staff to make it happen.
• bbc.co.uk/film gets reorganised The homepage is now some form of portal to films across the BBC (which isn’t immediately clear when you get there) – with the old site’s frontpage now renamed BBC Movies and moved to a new URL but everything else still living under /films. Very strange.
• Alice Taylor thinks about Grand-Theft Auto, its use of radio and streaming real-world media into games Webb and I have been thinking about this – trying to work out if a game of the future would be interested in having a real-world radio network streamed into it. Or perhaps we’re talking about bespoke media? CNN reports on wars inside Star Wars Galaxies?
• Dan Hill on the death of John Peel Gambaccini then listed a few of the artists that Peel’s Radio 1 show ‘broke’ in the UK and beyond: The Clash, Sex Pistols, Roxy Music, Althea and Donna, Led Zeppelin, Pulp, Leonard Cohen, Joy Division, Laurie Anderson, The Undertones, Elton John…
• Apple release the iPod Photo And I have to confess that I’m slightly non-plussed by it. I mean it’s nice and everything (presumably the switch to Myriad as the font is a consequence of having a better screen that can handle anti-alliasing) but it’s just a bit, well, odd…

As of 2.00pm today, it’s just been announced that John Peel – bastion of English radio – has died suddenly in Peru. Here are a few links that I’ve found following the announcement:

• John Peel has died – “Veteran BBC broadcaster John Peel has died at the age of 65, while on holiday in Peru. Peel, whose radio career spanned 40 years, was on a working holiday in the resort of Cuzco with his wife Sheila when he suffered a heart attack.”
• More from Radio 1 – “John Peel was a unique broadcaster whose influence on Radio 1 could be felt from its very first days. He nurtured musicians and listeners alike introducing them to new sounds.” – Jenny Abramsky, Director of BBC Radio and Music
• Broadcaster John Peel dies in Peru (Reuters) – “He passed away. We don’t have any details. We received a phone call at 4 a.m. from his brother to inform us,” said Jonathan Clare, an embassy official in Lima.
• John Peel dies of a Heart Attack (NME) – Radio 1 controller Andy Parfitt said “John Peel was a broadcasting legend. I am deeply saddened by his death as are all who work at Radio 1. Johnís influence has towered over the development of popular music for nearly four decades and his contribution to modern music and music culture is immeasurable… Over a career spanning 40 years Peel consistently championed new music, and in 1994 was given the NME Godlike Genius award for his services to music.
• John Peel dies aged 65 (Guardian) – looks like a bit of a rehash from the wires, this one…

Recent news about John Peel from BBC News: Radio award for ‘unrivalled’ Peel and Veteran DJs in radio hall of fame. You can keep up with the news about his death on the Google News Search Results page. There’s a discussion on barbelith and on metafilter too. You can send in tributes to the BBC on this page and there’s a list of all the tributes on this page. Phil Gyford has also posted his personal feelings on the subject as has Mo Morgan.

• Creative Commons and Wired create the Wired CD
  With a whole variety of random artists including the Beastie Boys and Thievery Corporation
• Paula LeDieu will be attending a session to talk about the BBC’s Creative Archive Project later this week
  The Creative Archive is a fascinating concept – and hopefully one that the projects I’ve been working on for the last few months will help to realise
• Help promote Firefox by getting your name in the New York Times
  $30 a shot gets you a name in the New York Times advert as well as helping the open source community and encouraging real human beings to use the best browser on the PC (although not necessarily on the Mac)
• Unjustified – why justified text so often doesn’t work on the web
  Some really nice insights here about text formatting and page layout in general
• Wikipedia’s article on MI5
  Within the government community, MI5 is colloquially known as “The Box” (after its official address – PO Box 3255, London SW1P 1AE) or simply “Five.”
• Business 2.0 on Firefox – “Microsoft’s Worst Nightmare”
  I think the most interesting thing about the article is that they’d open-sourced the browser to try and make it survive and take off. And for years it didn’t look like that was going to happen. And then, you know what… It did…

• Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief
  A stunning BBC documentary tracing the history and key figures of atheism – and one I doubt you’ll find accessible with BitTorrent
• Stunning pictures of ‘the Gherkin’ skyscraper in London
• The Donut Hole
  “It’s the Quality!”
• International Standard Recording Code is the international identification system for sound recordings and music videorecordings
  Each ISRC is a unique and permanent identifier for a specific recording which can be permanently encoded into a product as its digital fingerprint. Encoded ISRC provide the means to automatically identify recordings for royalty payments.
• Wikipedia’s entry on Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
  When Springfield became over-patriotic and took the name “Liberty-Ville”, Apu quickly caught on. He renamed his kids Lincoln, Freedom, Condoleezza, Coke, Pepsi, Manifest Destiny, Apple Pie, and Superman.
• New Future Needed: Apply Within
  If you ask me, we didn’t look past 2000 as it approached and now it looks like it’s going to be ten or fifteen years until we’ve regained enough perspective to provide interesting views of the future
• Fiona Romeo talks about the upcoming web creative generation
  Another piece that gestures towards the upcoming mass amateurisation of nearly everything
• Usability thoughts on a sitemap on every page
  This work was behind some of the thinking on the new Flickr bottom bar and I think probably influenced some of the design work on iCan and other Matt Jones projects
• The original PoorButHappy Columbia site demonstrating the large but apparently useful bottom navigational sitemap
  This link courtesy of the Wayback machine, since the original page is now offline
• Colloquy IRC 2.0 beta is available to play with
  I can very much recommend Colloquy for the Mac – it’s for the most part a really nicely polished and elegant to use little application

• The Baghdad Blogger goes to Washington And the immigration people have the nerve to ask the stupid question, “Sir, are you religious?”
• Big Brother builds ‘Truman Show’ village People expected to “spend decades” in the built-for-tv town
• Jeff Veen talks about Adaptive Path’s reworking of the Creative Commons site I love the process and applaud the clarity of the final product – but slightly disappointed that it looks quite bland
• The Morning News hosts a roundtable for MP3 Bloggers So this is a little old, I’ll accept, but I never post something until I’ve read it.
• Bat Boy: The Musical A Rocky Horror meets Little Shop of Horrors meets Edward Scissorhands musical that I attended last night. Difficult to put into words what I thought of it…
• This is the way that I’m currently posting my linklog via delicious to plasticbag.org It’s clearly provisional functionality and I have my thoughts on how it could be improved, but at least it works
• AudioSlicer chops up MP3s at the quiet bits Didn’t work so desperately well for me, but the concept is exactly what I’m after…