- The Men of Flickr And a studly bunch of 5′ 10″ ers they are too.
Author: Tom Coates
- The BBC reports on a think tank that reports the obvious – that you should legally be allowed to copy your CDs for personal use It’s absolutely fascinating to me that copyright law in the UK is so massively behind the day to day use of technology…
- According to the MPAA, New York is the city in the world most responsible for in-screen recordings of movies The most interesting thing about this is that it isn’t interesting in the slightest. I can’t imagine for a moment why the MPAA should be interested in where piracy occurs given that they can’t possibly hope to shut down all recordings of movies…
- Torrentfreak is my new favourite future of media distribution weblog Obviously BitTorrent is mostly used for piracy, but observing what’s going on around BitTorrent seems like a no-brainer way to learn what early-adopters are actually interested in getting from their media consumption…
- 500,000 people are downloading Lost each week Torrentfreak again – here I think missing the point a bit when they say that 5% of its audience is via Torrents. For a start, I suspect that it’s mostly downloaded by non-Americans…
- Techcrunch bigs up CastTV as the future of media search I really don’t know if I believe that search of this kind is really the future of head-content distribution. The same environment for short-form and long-form media? Head and tail? For pay and free? They’re more blurred than they used to be, but they’re not the same…
- Nine months of gestation in twenty seconds Another in my long series of favourite gawker time-lapse created YouTube videos – this time nine months of pregnancy in twenty seconds.
- Interesting Technology Review article on a new cheap Motorola phone with interesting display technology Back to basics phones that only do a couple of things effectively without any of the frills. I can see the appeal, even as I give up on voice calls and now only really use my phone to take pictures and stick em on the internet…
- The Hubble Deep Field A rather grandiose narrative and some Pink Floyd and pan pipes can’t quite obfuscate the idea that in the tiniest patch of our darkest night sky lurk tens of thousands of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars…
- djay is open source turntable-replicating DJ software for the Mac I had a play and I have conclusively determined that I have absolutely no bloody idea how this whole process is supposed to work and it pisses me off.
- Does anyone know if it’s possible to add HITs to Amazon Mechanical Turk if you’re outside the US? I’m really interested in what I could do with mturk, but it seems like you have to have a US bank account to use it at all, which is profoundly frustrating…
- Go and see The Departed if you get a chance It’s not a gentle film, it’s a bloody brutal film, but it’s also a completely fascinating and engrossing film with plot arcs that you don’t see coming that are allowed to manifest slowly and elegantly and with fascinating inevitability…
- London Underground geographic maps from the Wikimedia Commons also include significant free geo information If you’re looking to do mapping projects around open geo data, then having a significant data source like the location of all London Underground stations has got to be useful…
- Get a $5000 scholarship at an American University – if you regularly write a weblog! This is a significant opportunity for a young weblogger to get some help with their career, and while these are odd criteria for a scholarship that doesn’t make the money less real.
- PIxiesbest band everare to record a new album to be released next year There’s a party in my auditory canal and everyone’s invited!
- Pitchfork reviews the Goldfrapp remix album, “We are Glitter” Gayest thing I’ve ever said – Disco makes me feel good. I’m currently really really enjoying this album. It’s somehow more interesting than the original album and I can really see myself grinning as I walk down the street with this on my iPod…
- I got all excited about Firefox 2 but it turns out it’s just a browser and not a sequel to the Client Eastwood classic… How disappointing!
Categories
On Minilogue…
Right. Nice and simple request this. I’ve recently been exploring a territory of music that I’m not enormously familiar with. Thanks to Mr Biddulph, I’ve stumbled upon two EPs of minimalist progressive techno group Minilogue which have completely taken over my stereo. There’s a track called Certain Things Around You (Part Two) that I particularly love which you can hear a selection of over on emusic.com. It’s based on a Radiohead sample and sort of loops and builds and makes me happy. So here’s my question – where do I get more music like this?
- Matt and Clare strip all the wallpaper in their flat with the motivating factor of a timelapse video I bloody love Gawker. It’s got me to do all manner of dull jobs recently relatively quickly and efficiently. There’s a bit of Matt and Clare’s video where the sunlight’s moving across the wall that is surprisingly beautiful…
- It came up through the seat, into the ass of Timo If this doesn’t undermine my professional image, I don’t know what will. Hehehehe.
- Most fun ever: audio clips of the London Underground that you can play together to create your underground experience This is such fun. Play a few together on a big stereo to create the truly claustrophobic and brain-rattling sensations that previously only the Underground has been able to produce…
- webkuehn.de contains a CSV with the long-lat coordinates for 55,000 Wikipedia articles (along with information about the categories they belong to) Where to start!? The value of this lot is absolutely extraordinary. You can cut the data by any of the categories allowing you to easily plot the locations of all of Wikipedia’s geocoded impact craters or intercontinental ballistic missile sites…
- Jon Ronson goes behind the scenes of the UK’s Deal Or No Deal Now that’s one hell of an article, revealing some of the sad desperate lunacy of both Noel Edmonds and the people who hope and pray that they’ll be able to appear on the show, only for their dreams of riches to be completely dashed…
- The Guardian reports on Tioti Bit of a specious article. Tioti’s quite interesting though.
- The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science I will contributing money to this and I recommend any and all of you to do the same. Richard Dawkins has a style that not everyone gets along with, but that doesn’t stop him being clearly and self-evidently right.
- Jeff Bezos talks about Amazon web services to Technology Review This territorylarge corporations turning the massive services that they’ve had to develop as core competancies into commoditised servicesseems to me to be one of the major tenets of the web to come. Watch this stuff.
- Michael J. Fox campaigns on behalf of stem cell research in the US It’s fascinating how much interest this appears to have caused. Personally, given the heat around the debate in the US at the moment, I’m sort of impressed by his courage.
- Rufus Cubed Productions This is the professional Machinima outfit responsible for many short films as well as much of the WOW-work in the recent South Park episode we all loved so much…
- IDEA 2006 Peter Merholz is involved in organising this fascinating looking conference happening right now in Seattle. This is one that I really wish I’d been able to go to.
- David Cameron’s approval ratings are apparently starting to falter Specifically as a result of some of the apparently policy-lite soft-left stuff that he’s been pumping around recently. I can’t see my traditionally right-wing family taking to him particularly. They’re definitely hoping there’s some steel under all the touchy-feely stuff…