- There’s a rumour going around that TV and Films will finally start being available on iTunes in the UK in the next few weeks… A lot depends on what series are for sale. Very different contractual relationships in the UK I imagine, with the weird relationship between satellite and digital terrestrial stuff…
- Fascinating Wired Magazine story on how using ambient feedback can help lower energy consumption… I’ve been desperate to play with a Wattson for a while. I suggested my parents get one and the look of terror on my mother’s face at the idea of my father continually turning off lights was too much for me to bear!
- The Google Health Advertising Blog asks people in the health industry, “Does negative press make you Sicko?” This has been around for a while, but still it’s weird and creepy. Uncomfortable with debate and criticism? Advertise your way out of it! And with no admission anywhere that you’re doing something dubious…
- The lovely Paul A. Young of ridiculously awesome chocolate fame has a range of videos on Brightcove explaining how to appreciate and use chocolate… It’s pretty ridiculously fascinating stuff. Ways to check how good chocolate is by snapping it and listening to the sound, by allowing it to melt in the mouth, by crunching it down. Makes me wish I can smell.
- SEO Blogs like Sitevisibility really freak me out… This is a big post about Jason Calacanis and how he said SEO was crap but is apparently a god anyway because he gets traffic to his sites. Wha?! Who are these bloody people?!
- The call for participation for ETech 2008 looks set to try and get the vision thing back… I hope it works. ETech is one of those most fickle and confusing of events. It’s not quite what it says on the tin and yet at times–apparently randomly–it has been mind-blowingly awesome…
- Biddulph pointed me towards Echocrome, a super freaky Escher like game that works on the principle that if you can used isometric flattened perspectives to make something look possible, then suddenly it is possible… Difficult to explain. Watch the totally astonishing video and then wonder to yourself if you’d have the patience to play it or if you’d sit there swearing and wanting to kill the creators within ten minutes of purchase.
- Lunatic toothbrush has a weird little thing at the back that redirects water from the tap into your mouth for rinsing… It’s the future, you see. This is an innovation that I suspect may make it into quirky production toothbrushes but will probably never make any sense for real actual like people or whatever.
- Top 10 UK dotcoms to watch as captured by Guardian Unlimited (not sure I understand why they hide half of their bloody articles with javascript though) Nice to see the cool people from Dopplr on the list. Nicer still to see the Moo chaps. Big fans of both. Many of the other ones are new to me.
- Awesome Faceball gallery on Wired.com includes pictures by yours truly… Even a couple of lame quotes as well. Weird thing, faceball.
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Comments are working again…
A few of you contacted me via Twitter, work e-mail, personal e-mail, instant messanging (Yahoo and AOL), SMS, phone call and in person to remind me that my comments weren’t working on plasticbag.org. Thank you all very very much for your help in bringing it to my attention! For the first time in quite a long while I’ve got my head above water for a couple of days, and I’ve managed to get a very very quick and dirty version working already this morning, and I’ll now as soon as I’ve had a shower, I’ll spend the next couple of hours making everything a little smoother and more elegant! However, if you really did have something that you needed to get off your chest, knock yourselves out!
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On buying a new camera…
While I’m on the subject of pretty things for a moment–and again in lieu of actual content and opinion–one of the main ways in which I’ve been distracting myself from work recently has been photography. A few months ago I bought myself a really nice point-and-shoot Leica and it completely transformed the way I thought about photography. As a result I’m now pretty much carrying a camera with me wherever I go–now a Flickr clichéd Canon EOS 400d–and seem to spend an inordinate amount of my time calming the storm in my head by intricate fiddlings in Aperture. Brief warnings on the latter – I’ve got a 2GB RAM’d 2.16Ghz Intel Core Duo MacBook Pro and it still runs like a wounded dog. But that’s another story.
Anyway, it occurred to me that other people might not have yet made the connection (as I hadn’t) between having a decent camera and taking pictures that you find exciting. It turns out that the quality of the photographer is pretty much irrelevant. You too can take fascinating pictures with an SLR and a few hours reading up on the subject on the internets. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve come up with recently. They’re not professional or anything, but they make me happy…
Clicking on all the pictures take you through to Flickr of course. What I didn’t mention through the rest of the piece is that for a while I was considering mortgaging my future to get a Leica M8 and a Noctilux lens as responsible for some quite beautiful pictures. But somehow I managed to resist. The ¬£6500 price tag may have had something to do with that. Not even I’m quite at the stage where I’m prepared to spend months in the office to fund one camera.
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Unkle vs. Beethoven for BMW…
I’m posting advertising, I know, but given that I’m unlikely to be buying a BMW (and most of you people are equally unlikely) perhaps it’s okay. Who knows. I’m still absolutely run off my feet right now–which is why everything’s been so quiet–but this advert is one of the few things that’s managed to break through my insanity. The video itself is reasonably interesting, but the music! Beethoven’s 9th symphony as reworked by UNKLE. There doesn’t appear to be anywhere to get your hands on it, unfortunately, which is a shame as it’s extraordinary.
- Wikipedia on Bokeh – the creation of purposeful and pleasant out of focus areas in photos using wide aperture lenses with shallow depth of fields… Got a new camera and am now reading up desperately on all kinds of stuff to try and work out how to take better photos. Examples up on Flickr for those of you who are interested.
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Quick apologies…
I’m running towards a deadline at the moment and everything’s got a bit frantic. In the middle of this whole enterprise I decided to do a completely fresh installation of Movable Type (using the new beta version) and to import everything over into it. In the process I completely forgot to fix all the templates, so quite a lot of the functionality of the site is falling over right now. I’m afraid you’ll have to bear with me a few days as I try and get everything out of the way so that I can fix it. Very sorry!
- Poor old Mr Vander Wal, a YouGov survey of the hated technology terms puts folksonomy out in front… It seems a bit unfair since it’s such a specific piece of terminology, but hey. I still prefer fauxonomy. It’s funnier. Also hated blogosphere and blog. One of the founders of Blogger once told me she felt incredibly guilty for popularising that term…
- The lovely Lane Becker has made a reasonable argument for why Pownce is competing with 37Signals rather than Twitter! (1) Yes, Twitter is going for an infrastructure play with social stuff a gateway drug while (2) Pownce is focused with sharing/socialising. But Pownce still seems to me to be–at its core–a life backchannel rather than a productivity aid.
- The trailer for new JJ Abrams movie is pretty gripping… God knows if it’s called 1-18-08 or if this is a big preview / teaser for a real name. No clue whether the trailer represents the film or if it’s just a fragment or a sideshow. Very interesting. Nice bit of marketing. Clever.
- I’m going to be doing a talk at dconstruct that at the moment I’m calling ‘Designing for a Web of Data’ It’s going to be a fairly personal view on design process when you’re no longer knocking out brochureware and editorial sites and are looking to be part of a web of data. Bit scared of it. Too much to do at the moment.
- The question everyone’s been asking about the iPhone – what happens when you put it in a blender? The answer may surprise you. Find out more at willitblend.com!
- Uk Bump Keys are–I can attest–a good place to meet your lock-picking needs… Got my set through the post the other day. Very exciting. Now I need to go and buy some locks to pick. Went to a nutso woman’s hardware store the other day. Like a hundred years old with scarlet red receding hair and grey roots. Mad jabberings.
- How to upgrade the firmware on your Nokia N800… I’ve not found myself playing with the N800 so much recently, even though I really quite like it. Main reasons – really have to transcode video to watch it and London doesn’t have great free wifi networks. Plus I tried an iPhone…
- The most important thing to watch today: Faceball promo featuring sundry Flickrinos… Dunstan Orchard scares the living crap out of me sometimes…
- MySpace–after saying for months that people building off its platform were leeches who would end up having to pay for the privelege–now wants to follow Facebook towards openness… Facebook, bluntly, has won this particular war. MySpace is clearly on the way out. Facebook has moved itself into a place where you no longer compete with it, you compete with other people on it. Stunning move. Brilliant.
- According to the Daily Express, the BBC’s iPlayer is a significant threat to the family! It couldn’t get more ridiculous if you dressed it up like a clown and covered it in custard.
- The Media Guardian has released its Top 100 people in the media industry… Nice to see Loosemore wandering into the list. Generally I’m not overly impressed by it. Not a lot of real insight gained.
- The Bishop of Carlisle is–it seems–a bloody idiot… I can’t believe I’m linking to the Telegraph, but hey. Apparently floods in Britain are all the fault of a move away from God. The gays, as ever, are one of the core candidates for global warming. Idiot.
- dafont.com has posted up a proposed serif version of Comic Sans… It’s actually surprisingly nice. Reminds me of something. Can’t quite put my finger on it.
- Ashley Highfield is apparently looking towards Web 3.0 at the moment. He seems to have skipped over 2.0 pretty cheerfully. Lots of verbiage here, little substance. He’s now looking towards ‘the world of the semantic web, the Internet that is intelligent’. A search for intelligence closer to home might serve the BBC rather better…
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The Veidt Method…
I appear to have just been spammed by a fictional character. I didn’t notice immediately. It took me a couple of seconds to twig what I was just about to junk. The text of the e-mail seemed a little too familiar…
Dear Customer,
You have received this e-mail because you have expressed interest in my course, and if you did that, it’s because you think you need a change in your life.
A better body? Increased confidence and magnetism? Advanced mental techniques that will help you at home or business? Well, yes we can offer you all these things…but in order to have and enjoy them, there’s got to be a new YOU!
More than just a bodybuilding course, the Veidt Method is designed to produce bright and capable young men and women who will be fit to inherit the challenged, promising, and often difficult world that awaits in our future. The course is designed to be easy to read and to understand, and if you follow it through, I can assure you that you and uour friends will quickly notice the results as a whole new realm of ability and experience is opened to you. Stay tuned for more updates on what you can expect to find in later updates online.
Please visit TheVeidtMethod.com!
Best wishes and encouragement – Adrian Veidt.
Adrian Veidt, of course, being Ozymandias in Alan Moore’s Watchmen comic which is apparently being made into a film as we speak.
Rumours on the web suggest that we might be seeing the beginning of the viral campaign / ARG for the movie although not everyone is convinced. If it is an official property then it appears to be related to the people at theonering.net in some way. There’s also a Rorschach’s journal out there that I’ve glanced at.
You can login to theveidtmethod with the user-name adrian and the password ramesesii.
Wondering what I think about this stuff. It’s quite a clever idea to sneak out this stuff ambiently as something disguised as a piece of spam. Still, it’s marketing, and normally I wouldn’t play their reindeer games. On the other hand, it’s Watchmen. And that’s … more interesting …
- The Open Rights Group (of which I’m an advisory board member) released its report on e-voting a couple of weeks ago which is well worth a read… The conclusion is not positive, suggesting that while there are many flaws that could be fixed, fundamentally there may be very significant collisions between verifiable and trustworthy elections and e-voting as a concept.
- Universal have decided not to continue with iTunes under the same terms and will now only use it to sell artists ‘at will’. Apparently it’s a response to Apple moving away from DRM and it’s a bad move. Strategically, even if you thought DRM was perfect, it would now be time to give up on music as a lost battle and concentrate on video.
- Ben Aldred talks about their experiences at Hack Day and the layer they made between data and Twitter services… He’s right to point out that Twitter was everywhere during Hack Day. One of the major platforms that people were building against. Absolutely fascinating.
- Paul Mison talks about the Hack Day project he did with Candace to predict and be able to observe reflections of the sun off satellites in orbit… I didn’t get to see much of the Hack Day stuff as it was actually happening, but I caught Paul and Candace presenting and I was overwhelmed with what a beautiful idea it was.
- RIP Fopp Well this is sad news. The lovely high-street chain Fopp, well-known for its cut price albums and racks of £5 CDs is closing down. Very depressing.
- Matt Jones talks about visiting Interesting 2007 and the second day of Hack Day… Among many awesome things he says about both events (very jealous I couldn’t go to Interesting) he declares himself exhausted as a result! The cheek! He got to sleep at home in an actual bed on Saturday night! Ha!