Category: Random

• Web 2.0 is next week in the States, and I’m not going to be there, even though I’m completely thinking about this a lot at the moment… I really need to get the stuff I’m thinking about around this area out in the open as quickly as possible before my brain melts…
• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. Some good ones here that I really ought to try and incorporate into my daily work…
• Sub-$100 laptop design unveiled “Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, has been outlining designs for a sub-$100 PC.”
• A timeline of what happens in the movie Primer Thoroughly enjoyed the movie although was a bit off my game and had absolutely no idea what the crap was going on. Need to get on DVD.
• Early Season Two **spoilers** for people fascinated by “Lost” Symbols on sharks! What the crap!?
• Salon gushes over Serenity, only pausing to lament that the only thing better than it would be to have Firefly back… “Joss Whedon’s unfairly canceled TV series “Firefly” comes to the big screen — and marvelously. But for all its wit, it’s just not the same.”
• There’s a weird article on Socialtext about how Wikipedia is eating Google and I’m pretty sure I think most of it’s rubbish. Apparently Wikipedia is linked to by lots of mediocre sites and has lots of internal links. This is why it has the world’s top pagerank. I checked. Wikipedia’s homepage has a pagerank of ‘8’. The BBC’s is ‘9’. I suspect the whole thing is rubbish.
• This is a bit random: An illustator vector mockup of the Safari toolbar for those webdesigners who build in Illustrator and may need to show off their designs in print or on a projector Basically it stops all the nasty pixellation things happening when you make things bigger. Except why do it with Safari? That’s got to be a bit random, surely?
• Mock-ups of the proposed MIT $100 laptop It’s a nice bit of design work, all things considered. I hope it’s true and achievable. At the moment it looks rather better than a lot of much more expensive machines…

Since it’s out in the States now, can I just remind all my American friends to go and see Serenity as soon as possible, and can I just add that if you don’t enjoy it, it’s your own fault for not watching Firefly first. I have no sympathy whatsoever. You’ve only brought it on yourselves. Brits, you’ve got another week left to wait, I’m afraid. And that’s just enough time to catch up on the DVD, which coincidentally I believe is on sale at HMV at the moment.

Addendum: (added October 1st 2005) I’ve just been looking at the ratings page for Serenity and it’s really surprised me. Remember, this is a science fiction action adventure – the kind of film that everyone associates with teenage boys and computer nerds like me. But in Serenity’s case, the average rating for men is only 8.2 to the massive approval rating of 9.0 for women. And in every age range (except the under 18s), women enjoyed this film more than men. Men between eighteen and twenty-nine gave it 8.2 compared to 9.2 for women. Men between thirty and forty-four gave it 8.6, compared to a mighty 9.3 for women. And even women aged over forty-five are rating the film as an 8.1, as the male approval rating drops to 7.1.

Just to give you a sense of how weird that is, I had a look at the ratings for The Empire Strikes Back, which felt like the closest analogue I could find (romance, adventure, space) and there it is pretty much men enjoying it all along the line. So if you are a woman and aren’t thinking of going to see Serenity because it’s a boy kind of movie or you just don’t like sci-fi – give it a chance. I don’t think you’ll regret it…

• Stupidity, nice people and religion: a Good Thing or not? “There’s a cause/correlation problem here – isn’t it just as possible that people turn to religion because there are these problems in a country.”
• ROLLYO – roll your own search engines where you can define groups of sites to search – and then share those groups with everyone else. It’s the last bit that makes it interesting and cool… And one other thing – while only I appear to have a clear idea of what Web 2.0 consists of, I can spot the design tropes of Web 2.0 a mile off, and they are pretty…

I’m kind of in the middle of another one of my random holidays where I feel continually oppressed by not having got anything sufficiently significant done. I really really need to learn how to take time off from all this web stuff. Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while of getting rid of the ‘recent entries’ box on the homepage and replacing it with a way of directly navigating into the rest of the site. Today I thought I’d throw up this particular rough solution and see what people thought. I haven’t always categorised my posts, and I’m still working out how to do it well, so there are lots of gaps and posts that haven’t been captured and categorised yet. But it’s a start… Any thoughts? My first one is that it gives undue and slightly troubling access to a few semi-decent posts that maybe it shouldn’t…

• Societies ‘worse off when they have God on their side’ ‚ÄúIn general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”
• At the Labour party conference, Tony Blair enters to a Sham 69 song “If the kids are united, they will never be divided” – what a strange song. You can watch the entrance via the news player as well. Shame it’s not so easy to link directly through to the clip concerned.
• Apple admits to iPod Nano faults “Electronics firm Apple has admitted there have been problems with its new iPod Nano music player, after a string of complaints about damaged screens.”
• More 4 launches October 10th in the UK, and has a really bloody odd logo The advertising for this channel has been stunning. I just wish I understood why every organisation doesn’t put their ads online. It seems like such a no brainer…

• Words ‘can change what we smell’ – A rose by any other name might not smell as sweet, UK research suggests. Yet more evidence, if you ask me, that the entire sense is made up (but more interestingly, it may explain some of the complexities of my lack of sense of smell)

• Wow. Pretty bloody astonishing episode of Battlestar Galactica. Reboot of an old classic. Lloyd Bridges has changed a bit… Don’t look if you don’t want to be spoiled for episode ten of season two. Is all I’m saying.
• Is the GPX 2 more interesting than the PSP? Well it’s running Linux, can show photos, play music and has a MAME emulator onboard so you can play all MAME’d games. No denying an open platform portable is interesting…
• “Most of the cast of the upcoming SF movie Serenity told SCI FI Wire that they have signed on for two more movies if the film version of Joss Whedon’s canceled Fox TV series Firefly is a hit” Can I please, please, please remind people to go and see Serenity when it comes out. I really really want a bloody sequel here. The film deserves one…
• World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures This will be in London at the beginning of October. Looks pretty awesome, actually. Kind of fascinated by it.
• Wild Things Are on the Beach “A self-styled god, Jansen is evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind”
• Turning the Pages‚Ñ¢, the British Library “Leaf through 14 great books and magnify the details” – lovely, beautiful, and a great use of rich media to do something that couldn’t be done easily with web pages alone. Not totally sure about the interface though…

• BBC News presents a multiple choice maths quiz so you can see if you’ve got any brains left Turns out there are some things I don’t remember from school maths, but not that much…
• Insight into the Google master-plan (sort of) My suspicion… No master plan. That’s all I’m saying. Lots of people doing stuff instead. Probably not a bad thing.
• Artists erect giant pink bunny on mountain “An enormous pink bunny has been erected on an Italian mountainside where it will stay for the next 20 years.”
• A nice entertaining little story about how the iPod Mini looks a bit like old transistor radios Quite how these things make BBC News I don’t know, but the pictures are nice, I work with John Ousby and it mentions Flickr which is good
• Ethical Search Engine Optimization – not bad little article this, chiming nicely with my own views about SEO (mostly bunk, build better sites) “The time, effort, and money spent on search engine optimization (particularly of the exaggerating or deceptive kind) can often be put to better use by working on improving the quality, content, and structure of the website itself.”
• Typetester ‚Äì Compare fonts for the screen Beautiful piece of work that allows to compare and explore fonts for screen use and then even get the CSS so you can use them on the web
• Liquid Sculpture – High-speed and Fine Art Photography of Drops and Splashes Stunning. Beautiful. Really worth exploring in substantial detail. And if you work in ceramics or glass or plastics, there are some forms here you should be exploring. Awesome.
• Apple may build video cams into future Macs “A recently published Apple patent application reveals that the company last year toyed with the idea of integrating a tiny video camera into the latch of a future laptop design, presumably with intentions of leveraging its iChat audio-video conferencing
• Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) A stunning video for a Grandaddy song that uses an Apple II to create ‘expressive’ typography. Wonderful.
• Hm. Bit of a clumsy set of comments about user-generated content from my colleagues, there… Still, never mind… ‘”User-edited” versions of the talkboards will be created, said Mr Mermelstein, because he said many of the messages posted were “crap”, repetitive or boring.’
• TiVo 7.2 OS adds content protection, blocks transfers, and auto-deletes some shows Lots of discussion about this one. Basically it’s a PVR with rights controls imposed from the studios and broadcasters – designed for pay-per-view stuff…

• Sony’s new MP3 player actually has some elements that bear comparison to the iPod One element in particular appeals to me – various forms of shuffle including ‘Time Machine Shuffle’ and ‘Favourites Shuffle’
• The well-known and well-respected English Cut weblog, featuring stories and thoughts from a Saville Row tailor Much talked about, but never on plasticbag.org – stunningly written and fascinating site with a certain embarrassment / bluntness about the very idea that it’s marketing. Great stuff…
• Beautiful Victoriana-inspired poster for the Third Annual Creativity Now poster Mm. Design is good. I’m feeling the wellsprings welling up again. Maybe there will be something other than white again…

• Frequently Asked Questions about the ISAN version identifier for audiovisual works “The first 16 hexadecimal digits of the ISAN relate to the audiovisual work. This work segment is further sub-divided into two parts: a 12-digit root segment followed by a 4-digit segment for the identification of episodes or parts when applicable.” Huge.
• Sky are to launch a freeview channel in the UK showing programming that hasn’t been on terrestrial yet, but which is a year or so behind Sky One’s shows It’s pretty clearly a marketing move – there are loads of people using Freeview that haven’t upgraded to Sky and with E4’s defection to free, Sky really need to have a platform from which to encourage people to ‘upgrade’ to satellite.
• It’s kind of terrible, but it’s kind of great – a new t-shirt slogan is appearing around London’s tourist shops… I mean it’s funny if you don’t get all weirded out about bombs and stuff. Um.
• BBC News: “A US psychologist says there are not that many differences between the genders.” The complexities of the politics of same vs different, superior vs inferior, made vs born (etc) remain a perpetual focus for debate, argument and rhetoric…