- Looks like I’m not the only one having a tricky time with Jessops for scanning negatives… I’m really quite angry about this now. The symptoms these people are describingmassively over-sharpened, insane amounts of artefacting and pixellationare exactly what I’ve experienced too. Very aggravating.
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Quick Hack Day update…
I’ve been a bit quiet on the Hack Day front for a while now. But all that’s changing. I can now let you guys know that we’ve sent out the first few hundred invitations to the event proper. If you’ve signed up for an invitation, you should go and look in your e-mail pretty much now to see if you’re coming. If you don’t have an invitation yet, don’t worrywe’re not done yet. There will be at least another couple of hundred invitations going out over the next few weeks. If you’ve not yet registered for an invitation, there’s also still time. Just remember to put in some information about yourself!
In the meantime, if you’re coming there’s a bunch of badges that you can put on your site and already the first unofficial wiki has appeared to help people find collaborators. We’ve got some thoughts around this area ourselves, but there’s no reason for you guys not to start socialising a bit before the big day.
As usual, keep spreading the word, make sure that everyone you want to come is registered, and I’ll look forward to seeing you in about a month at Alexandra Palace.
- Coming to the Hack Day? Let people know with these fashionable badges! Lots of interesting patterns here, including many that wouldn’t look out of place in 80s fashion magazines.
- Loopt’s a pretty fun looking geo service for keeping track of your friends on your mobile… I can’t help thinking that the trick here is sort of at a higher level than the application itself. More on this soon.
- Young women and men over 50 represent the largest audiences online according to the BBC… To me, at first sight, I can’t help wondering about the way they’re measuring this stuff. Still it is a good riposte to both the male execs I’ve met that view it as a kids thing and the female execs that view it as a spotty boy thing…
- Ashley Highfield has defended the idea that the BBC is Britains R&D lab for the internet… I’m afraid I have no comment on this one.
- Get Stephen Fry’s obsequious tones to wake you up every morning… It’s almost like he was in bed with you, gently kneading your lower back to bring you gradually to a consciousness. Yes, it’s that creepy!
- ‘Bobbie Johnson on where the BBC’s attempt to lead the new media revolution went wrong’ Fascinating piece of commentary and investigation by the Guardian.
- A lovely chap has just gone and made a t-shirt from the sticker I pointed to yesterday! Hopefully I’ll get my hands on one of them.
- Pitchfork Media’s review of The Field’s new album has intrigued me… I’m normally a guitar and shouting kind of guy, but since getting into Minilogue last year, I have become really interested in minimalist techno. Good notches to fit nervous and jittery brain cycles into while trying to get things done…
- I’ve been playing a bit with Growl recently too, although I have yet to find the use for it that will make it transformatively cool… Does anyone have any Growl tips and/or suggestions of good visual styles for the alerts?
- Sandie Shaw has put together a totally freaky and disturbing emo reworking of Puppet on a String.. While we’re still all recovering from Eurovision overload, I thought I may as well reference it. This link goes straight to the MP3, just in case you get freaked out by that kind of thing…
- I’m pretty desperate to go and see “28 weeks later” sometime later in the week. Zombies. I mean, really. There’s something wonderful about seeing your home town get destroyed by catastrophic disasters in movies. Americans are used to this, of course. Most disaster films allow them the weird visceral fantasy of seeing their daily lives ripped apart…
- The PopSci weblog has a really good basic tutorial on HDR images, should you be interested… I’ve got very interested in photography, even though I’m far from good at it. HDR images are already a bit of a Flickr clich√©, but they still can look pretty impressive.
- For those of you who don’t know HDR imagery, this is a picture of a sunset in Amsterdam… I can’t imagine there are many of you who are unfamiliar with this stuff by now, but just in case, you know? Explore the HDR tag on Flickr to see more examples….
- Joost has got a bunch more funding, including some from traditional broadcasters… I’m sort of conflicted about Joost. It’s a beautiful bit of work – so good in fact that I think it might actually thrive in the marketplace despite the fact I think it’s sort of slightly the wrong model for navigation and exploration of media…
- The BBC reports on fascinating work to recover information and files shredded by the Stasi after the fall of the Berlin Wall… Having seen “The Lives of Others” a few weeks ago, I’m fascinated in what it must have been like to have operated and lived in a country so full of surveillance…
- Only a couple more weeks for Apple to start selling music DRM-free… I’m really looking forward to this. I know people think that the price is too high, but for the convenience, I’m totally there…
- Could someone please turn this sticker into an American Apparel T-shirt, on black (large) and send it to me? Small typography I think, in the middle. Japanese and English, obviously. Perhaps about six-eight inches across?
- I’d really love to live in one of the tiny microhomes that Wired covered in its last issue… They’re super tiny, belonging-free residences that you could put easily in the middle of a quiet outdoors environment for a great view. Or maybe in a garden instead of a summer house. I wonder if a roof could support them…
- More about the micro compact home… I’d sort of like one of those in my parents garden for when I visited. Be a great place to get away to do some real thinking a work every now and then…
- Lost is to continue until 2010… God I don’t think I can sit through that. At least the seasons will be shorter. I suppose that’s something…