Category: Random

• The new BBC RadioPlayer, now with many many more hours of broadcasting each week, has now launched…
  Interestingly integrated with audio/visual stuff provided by News, Weather and Sport
• 2005 Oscar nominees
  Lots of films I’ve not been able to see yet, and more nominations for the entertaining and engaging “Aviator” than for anything else…

• An edited-down video of the Apple keynote when they introduced the Macintosh There’s a list of links that work over at kottke.org
  Wow. I was stunned by how emotionally affected I was by watching this. Please don’t laugh at me. It’s pretty moving..

• Awesomely terrible / awesomely brilliant Flickr song (mp3)
  “I love my Flickr friends, I’m addicted to their images and photostreams, I love my Flickr friends, They’ve crawled under my skin and into my dreams”
• Anatomy for beginners
  Channel 4 TV series in which a human corpse is dissected in front of a camera. Gross more because of the way it is handled – bluntly, like a butcher – than because of the subject matter itself…

• The terribly named, but incredibly elegant tadalist from 37 signals – “Simple, sharable to-do lists. It’s just what you need and nothing you don’t…”
  The thing about 37 signals is that they not only do good consulting, but they also make beautiful things for their own sake. That’s a company ethos that I can understand…
• An event on journalism and weblogging that apparently had a bit about webloggers codes of ethics
  I talked to a few people about this stuff a year or so again. I might get around to doing something around it again. I hope they define something that applies to all webloggers though, not just the minority that aspire to journalistic practice…
• Human Rights Watch takes US to task for damaging the worldwide fight for human rights
  “Governments facing human rights pressure from the United States now find it easy to turn the tables,” said Mr Roth. “Washington can’t very well uphold principles that it violates itself.”
• A discussion of the political effects of the Photoshopped “Creative Commons” responses to Bill Gates comparing Creative Commons to Communism…
  “The bad guys’ basic strategy is to portray themselves as defending the status quo while in fact effecting a revolutionary change. When you, their opponents, allow yourself to be defined as the alien, you‚Äôre doing exactly what they want you to do, and
• US military pondered love not war – more on the US Government’s attempts to find a compound to make enemy soldiers shag one another
  It occurs to me that the Ancient Greeks thought that almost romantic friendships made soldier more, not less, effective. Perhaps after the initial shock and traumatic discussions with parents, this might make an enemy army stronger!
• BBC news article on peer-to-peer networks and how they’re being adopted as an effective distribution mechanism by mainstream media companies
  “The BBC has already decided to embrace the technology. It aims to offer most of its own programmes for download this year and it will use P2P technology to distribute them.”
• Heather Champ and Derek Powazek release the first issue of JPG magazine. Awesome.
  “JPG Magazine is for people who love imagemaking without attitude. It’s about the kind of photography you get when you love the moment more than the camera. It’s for photographers who, like us, have found themselves online, sharing their work…”
• Paramount people deny that Enterprise is going to be cancelled before the end of Season Four
  “As to whether or not we’ll be back for Season 5,” Coto continued, “that’s always been up in the air. We’ll see what the future brings.”
• Matt Jones proposes using Tufte-esque sparklines to expose editing histories on Wikipedia
  The assumption being that a clued-up individual would be able to make determinations about the data based upon how controversial or active its editing history appears to have been…
• Andrew Parker’s presentation on the true shape of P2P usage on the net
  Among other things, reflects the enormous explosion of people using BitTorrent and demonstrates that the vast amount of traffic on the net is P2P (and not web) related
• New York Times editorial on how cultures avoid collapse by managing environmental pressures
  I remember being stunned driving through America and seeing landscapes being ripped apart at an enomrous rate. The consensus at the time seemed to be just that there was “plenty more where that came from”…
• Party Ben’s mash-ups download page contains some real musical gems
  I can particularly recommend Hot Hot Bowie’s “Let’s Dance With Me” and Beyoncaville’s “Crazy In Japan”. The latter is rapidly rising through my iTunes ‘most played’ playlist
• Nominate your favourite Flash movies of the year to the Flash Film Festival
  I think this is probably a bit serious to give Magical Trevor the accolades it deserves, but it could be fun nonetheless…
• @media 2005 on Web Standards and Accessibility to be held in London in June
  “It’s the web design event of the year. The @media 2005 conference brings together the biggest names from around the world to talk about the hottest topics in web design – web standards and accessibility.”
• 10 Things We Learned About Blogs in 2004
  I wonder how long it will take people to stop thinking of weblogs as publishing, and start thinking about them being people interacting to diminish the role of publishing
• Star Wars craft made out of Lego
  God I would have killed for that Millennium Falcon when I was a kid. I’d watch TV shows with cars and space-ships in them and immediately go home and make them in Lego

• Bill Gates plots a Windows future
  BBC News interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about home entertainment appliances and the digital hub
• Nokia brings ‘Visual Radio’ to mobile phones
  Weird one this. Visual supplements to radio are generally considered to be used for enhanced information provision. But often the rights owners don’t want you broadcasting song information…
• Danah on academia and wikipedia
  “Wikipedia is exceptionally valuable to read about multiple sides to a story, particularly in historical contexts, but i don’t trust alternative histories any more than i trust privileged ones.”
• A stunning and beautifully exotic story of an alien moon
  “Liquid methane rain feeds river channels, lakes, streams, and springs on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, images from the Huygens probe show…”

• Wanted – thirty Chinamen and a Zeppelin…
  And if you want to know why, you’ll have to follow the link.
• BoingBoing releases five years of posts for people to download and muck around with, and cites me as an inspiration. Aw……
  “To celebrate our first half-decade as a blog, we’ve put together a single html file containing 17,000+ posts (every post as of yesterday mid-day) in Movable Type export format.”
• Awesome graphing analysis of BoingBoing reveals a surprising obsession with the BBC…
  I love this little browsable app – it gives a real perspective on what the Boingers are interested in. Also it’s more evidence that Cory either has too much energy or not enough to do…

This evening I took some photos with my camera and sent them to Flickr. And when I went to Flickr, this is what I saw:

Vodafone, my mobile phone provider have started to turn all outgoing e-mails that go through their system into image-full HTML e-mails, dripping with highly-branded bullshit advertising crap that clearly they believe I’ve been clamouring out for. Except of course it breaks Flickr completely. Each photo I post is now complemented by spacer gifs, little logos, gif text and dumb bloody icons. Flickr treats each as a separate image. The act of posting four photos makes pages of empty marketing guff appear across my photostream – and by consequence all over my weblog. Effectively, with one flick of a switch, my camera phone has become useless and my desire to use Vodafone immediately and effectively zero.

What kind of cretinous organisation does this kind of thing? I mean I’m already paying to send multimedia messages and e-mails via their service – and they still want to cover it in advertising? I mean – I’d leave for the advertising and the HTML e-mails alone, but to make me pay for it too? Excruciating. I’m also an evangelist – promoting picture messaging via the Flickr box on my site – and a good customer. I pay more for data transfer each month than I do for making phone calls. What on earth were they thinking?

I rang up in a fury and they’re looking into it, but if I don’t get a satisfactory response I don’t think I can stay with them any longer. No doubt there is a way around this stuff, but mobile phone connectivity is excruciating to set up, and covered in proprietorial crap that seems designed to do nothing but confuse. And if it’s confusing me a lot, then I’m assuming that other people will be as or more confused by the whole thing. Therefore, at this precise moment in time, I’d say if you were thinking of using your cameraphone to post to your weblog or to Flickr, then you should seriously consider staying well away from Vodafone. And if you’re stuck with them already – ring them up, shout at them or send them e-mails telling them to stop trying to milk every last penny of value from every picture message that someone sends, because it’s sure as hell going to start hurting their bloody business if it’s not possible to use these services in the way that see fit…

In the meantime, if anyone knows how I can get photographs onto Flickr using my Nokia 6230 without getting all these vile guff, then please post in the comments below. In return, I’ll give you my first born child. Unless I actually have a child. In which case, maybe I’ll get you a coke.

• The Haddock Family Tree
  Interesting life and development of a mailing list this one. You can see me spring parthenogenically into the mix in 2001…
• Spandexman.com – Super Hero Unitards
  Contains an intensely scary number of grown men wearing super-hero style lycra body suits – some of which come with zips from from crotch to butt

• Now even Metafilter is using tags – by the time we’re talking about our work in this area I wonder if it’ll still be fashionable?
  The implementation here though is a bit odd – you can only tag stuff that you’ve written, and there doesn’t appear to be any immediate personal benefit for doing so, except maybe self-promotion…
• PLAN Pervasive and Locative Arts Network
  First Workshop of the Pervasive and Locative Arts Network – looks interesting – I shall probably be there…

• Definition of Anomie from Wikipedia
  “Anomie, in contemporary English means the absence of any kind of rule, law, principle or order.”
• “A vampire is on the loose in Birmingham. And an inept one, if reports are to be believed. Which they aren’t.”
  Despite the complete lack of evidence, no rise in bite-related injuries and the like, there is apparently a vampire stalking the streets of Birmingham
• Wikipedia’s description of Discordianism is fascinating both for its accuracy and for reading more like a Discordian text than a Wikipedia article. I wonder where the edges are?
  “Discordianism has been described as both an elaborate joke disguised as a religion and a religion disguised as an elaborate joke. Some of its followers make the claim that it is “a religion disguised as a joke disguised as a religion.”
• An article I wrote for the Guardian a little over a year ago on the future of weblog culture and technologies…
  “The real growth area in the next five years will be in these contextualising tools – the mechanisms that make weblog culture more accessible and accountable.”