- Meg Pickard has spotted a rather aggravating security hole in Twitter’s service… Messages that are supposed to be private are being exposed through the API Various people are irritated by this, particularly as apparently some of the messages are being indexed. I’m sure it’ll be sorted out soon. But still, irritating. [Addendum: This is more of a security hole in Twittervision’s use of the API rather than Twitter itself. See here for more details]
- The Open Rights Group is looking for more board members… Ideally people with a little spare time who are passionate and clueful about issues like copyright term extension, data retention policies, DRM and the like…
- Stonewall reports on a new survey on the UK’s attitudes to homosexuality… Their concern – whether the shrill voices that argue against homosexuality are representative of the wider population. Their conclusions, pretty much totally no. Awesome. Sometimes the British really cheer me up.
- “Scientists reject Panorama’s claims on Wi-Fi radiation risks” from the Guardian is a pretty interesting read… Also good are statements from scientists indicating that it was “grossly unscientific” and “a scare story”. I complained to Panorama via the BBC complaint line yesterday.
- Can I just say that this story on ‘Yahoo censoring a Flickr user and then redressing its mistake’ is absolutely ludicrously over the top… I mean, genuinely, the managers of any and all online communities delete stuff all the time. They have to. Sure it was a mistake in this case, but the only reason anyone knows about it is because Flickr are so transparent and open…
- Panorama’s programme on wifi appears to be scandalously scaremongerish… If fifty percent of studies can find no evidence for a correlation at all, and radiation is one six-hundredth of reasonable than safety limits, then realistically it’s not much of a threat is it.
- “An investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme suggests the risks posed by wi-fi computer networks may be greater than previously thought, but scientists say the health fears are unproven.” Love the use of ‘unproven’ here. It’s being used to suggest that the bulk of scientists are still keenly investigating, rather than in the rather less worrying ‘we have found no consistently observable correlations’ sense…
- I’m very excited about the Moleskine San Francisco guide/notebook that I picked up in Foyles the other day… And I’m looking forward to my next chance to use it, which will probably be around FOO Camp in about a month.
- 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…
In the background of my overly hectic life at the moment, I decided that it would be a good idea to get some old photos scanned. I’d scanned them myself a while back, but only from the prints. They looked okay, but somehow I felt that there was detail lost in the process and that there might be more quality and lasting value in getting the negatives scanned. Inspired by this brilliant scheme, I wandered into Jessops on New Oxford Street and asked them how much it would cost to get my negatives scanned and put onto a CD. At the price of around ¬£10 a film, plus an extra ¬£5 to get them done at a high quality rate, I decided to only do eight films to start off with and see how they turned out.
The finished result has been … puzzling. So this is when I’m turning to you guys in the outside world and asking you whether the scans I’ve got back are reasonable, whether they’re sort of shitty, and whether there’s any way I could get better stuff done, or the same stuff done faster or cheaper.
The main thing that’s puzzled me about the photos I’ve got back is how noisy or grainy they appear to be. Most (but not all) of the photos are black and white. They are roughly 2500 x 3500 in size. And this is what most of them look at 100% resolution, as they have come off the CD they were supplied on with no edits to brightness / contrast / levels or anything.
Now I’m not expecting these images to be looking beautiful and shiny and sharp – after all, they were taken on film and by a mostly-incompetent man in his early 20s with little experience using a camera. But I am really surprised by the grainy look and feel of it. It seems to me that a piece of photographic film shouldn’t have such enormous colour variation at this resolution. If it did by default, then you’d expect it to be impossible to get decent negatives blown up to A4 or larger, which it clearly isn’t. So I’m asking you guys out there whether this is normal, whether this is reasonable, or whether (as I’m wondering) it’s actually a function of a scanner that’s been pushed to its limit or been poorly used.
The reason I ask is because it’s actually proving surprisingly difficult for me to pull out the detail in some of these photos. The first thing I’m doing with any photo in Aperture is turning the noise reduction up to eleven. This in turn means I lose detail through the rest of the picture. It’s really aggravating.
I’m actually rather more inclined to believe that my reaction is the result of a personal failing on my part to understand the complexities of scanning from negatives than I am to believe that I’ve been given relatively expensive and poor quality service. So that’s why I need your help. If you know about this territory – if you think that even a bad photo shouldn’t end up looking so … particulate … when scanned at reasonably high resolution, then I want to know! Leave a comment below or e-mail me at the usual address, tom {at} the name of this website. Thanks.
- 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!