UK Web Designers Go Crazy with a Camera and a Torch

Detailed description of what can be seen in the latest Cassini image of Saturn

Moz/Firefox Edit CSS Plug-in

Blah – “a place to discuss art, design, music and technology”

This week’s Mixing It is a repeat of a programme first broadcast in September in which the presenters explore the alternative music scene in Newcastle. I’ve been a bit out of the loop in terms of what’s going on gig-wise in the city centre over the last year or so, so I was expecting not to recognise many of the artists featured. So it’s to my surprise that I’ve seen all but one of the artists on the program, demonstrating how small and neatly formed the alternative music scene is in Newcastle. The programme, which is available to download (RealPlayer) for the next 7 days, features interviews and music by:

• Jazzfinger
• Guessmen
• Jumbo
• Andrew Hodson
• Mushi Mushi
• Posset
• Richard Dawson
• Astro & Prism (formerly known as Salad Butty)

“Why would Mel Gibson make a movie about people in the ancient Middle East and cast it with so many white people?” – William Rivers Pitt

Truthout > ‘The Passion’ of the Americans

Thanks to a link from Mal, I managed to watch the tail end of last night’s space walk by cosmonauts Michael Foale and Alexander Kaleri streamed live on NASA-TV. It was a mission made riskier by the fact that the space walk left the ISS crewless; usually there’s someone in the station to oversee the space walk to make sure everything’s going OK (think Bowman and Poole in 2001 . This served to give the experience of watching the event live a bit of an edge; a feeling compounded when the cooling system on Kaleri’s suit malfunctioned and he started to overheat, forcing the mission to be cut short.

While the crew weren’t in any real danger, watching the mission live made palpable the inherent risk of space travel and this is something you don’t experience when you read about such missions after the event.

Inkscape Open Source SVG Editor

If you’re reading this on Internet Explorer 6, the top of the ‘helium-3’ title may be getting chopped off for reasons that are completely unknown to me. It could be a problem with my CSS of course, in which case I’ve only got myself to blame.

Picture of the Moon taken from the ISS (via Spacetramp)

New 3-D Display from Hitatchi (Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi)

Mighty Atom: Really Similar Syndication? (didn’t think Webmonkey was still going)

The Complete Guide to Googlemania!

My cousin was the first person I knew to own a CD player. It was a Technics model, and for a 10 year old used to either a single speaker cassette-tape player which regularly chewed tapes or a cheap record player with only battered vinyl to play on it, it was the most incredible thing I had ever seen.

As a demonstration, he removed a shiny Compact Disc from its case, carefully placed it on its tray and pressed the close button. For someone who measured the quality of a tape player by how slowly the eject mechanism worked, this was mind blowing stuff.

The CD in question could have been none other; it was the CD that ushered in the Compact Disc revolution and everyone who bought a CD player at that time bought this album to go with it. Yes, it was Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms.

I marvelled as he pressed the play button and the LCD that showed the seconds that had elapsed. Where was the hiss? The slight bump and crackle that notified you that the music had started. There wasn’t any. Instead, all I heard was the crystal clear noodlings of 80s Moog-synth and Knopfler’s ridiculous guitar riff on Money for Nothing.

What amazed me the most, I think, was not the clarity of the sound, but the fact that you couldn’t see the disc playing; that the machine was in some way interacting with the disc to make music just didn’t seem possible. Almost 20 years on, and the way we consume music is taking a huge irrevocable leap once more; 10,000 tracks can fit snugly in your pocket, music can be il/legally downloaded from the Internet and the Music Industry is behaving rather like a terrified ant colony trying to cope with an indestructible invader.

Back when things seemed simple, the predominent format in which music was bought was 2 or 4 sides of vinyl contained in a cardboard sleeve. You exchanged money for a complete package; songs were written and sequenced for the format, a high level of work was put into the sleeve and album notes, and the whole thing could be enjoyed even without removing the record from the sleeve. Buoyed by DJ/club culture as well as a stable economy in second-hand/collector’s records, vinyl is still popular, and for good reason: it’s clear what you are buying and what you can do with the music once you’ve bought it. What makes the resilience of the vinyl format even more remarkable is the fact that it may out last Compact Disc.

Dire Straits’ AOR epic was sold on the Compact Disc standard developed Sony and Philips in 1980. It bore the the CD standard logo, which meant it could be played on equipment also bearing that logo. This ‘red book’ standard has to be adhered to by both CD and CD playback equipment makers so that consumers know that their CD will play on any device they choose. Unfortunately, in a futile attempt to stop people copying music they’ve bought (because of course, everyone who buys music rips it and distributes online straight away!), record companies are deliberately breaking the red book standard by burning faults onto CDs which trip-up CD-ROM drives found on computers but not dedicated CD players. So, when someone buys a copy protected CD, they’re buying something that’s broken; to a CD-ROM drive, its the equivalent of a piece of vinyl that’s had a hot soldering iron struck across it.

I went into HMV the other day to try and gauge how many of the CDs it was selling were crippled with ‘copy protection’. I have to say that the percentage of broken CDs to standard CDs was pretty low, although I wonder how this will change over the next 5 years or so. I guess it’s only the Big 5 record companies that are peddling ‘copy protection’, leaving countless smaller (not so evil) companies to produce unhindered CDs. Lets hope it stays that way.

In the meantime, ‘copy protected’ CDs make good beer mats but that’s about it, so please don’t buy them. There may be software that allows you to circumvent the protection but to buy them is to validate them in the eyes of the music industry, which is bad. Anyway, I’m off to root out my old copy of Brother’s in Arms for a spot of Money for Nothin’ in glorious DDD (did I just write that?).

Nikon’s new sub-1000 D70 dSLR in production (dpreview.com has a preview)

Grey Tuesday

On Becoming a Micro DJ

Spectacular mpeg video of a high-voltage electrical arc

The Drift Table Weblog

Pictures of the surface of Venus from various Soviet missions in the 70s and early 80s

‘Field’ is an art installation using the electro-magnetic field generated by over-head power cables and 1300 flourescent tubes

Toilet Train Your Cat, with Jazz Bassist Charlie Mingus (!?)

Wanted: Graphic Design & PHP/MySQL Resumes… and a Snow Plough (I wish web development agencies advertise like this over here)

How Spirit Rover was Reprogrammed

Film Firms Struggling to Stay Afloat

MozCC – a Mozilla/Firefox extension for viewing Creative Commons License details for a site

Robosapien – “a full function fast moving robot minion suitable for all your world domination needs!”

“Close to 30 Web sites plan to kick off an act of “coordinated civil disobedience” next Tuesday by putting up downloads of a controversial album despite EMI’s demands that the album be destroyed.” – The Register > Music Fans Beg to Buy Music

Everyone wins as a result of The Grey Album download. The Beatles get the respect of a new audience of young music sharers and Danger Mouse and Jay-Z get large amounts of publicity. People will go out and buy their records as a result of this, unless they’re crippled with Copy Protection or other DRM that is.

Grey Tuesday – Free the Grey Album

Russian Missile Goes 5 Times the Speed of Light

Random Acts of Validation

Mozilla Europe (via Cloven Hoof)

The Onion A.V. Club Interviews Arthur C. Clarke

The Robots are Mobloggin’

Over at t-melt, we were discussing how Honda’s Asimo displays incredible use of technology with its ability to move like a human, but shows little sign of intelligence. Steve Grand’s Lucy, on the other hand, displays advances in artificial intelligence but is pretty far off from being able to dance around at a motor show (ok, so it’s supposed to be an Orang-Utan). Anyway, I suggested that the next step would be to marry the technologies to create an intelligent humanoid robot:

… perhaps not

Introduction to CC/PP

It seems that you can’t visit a tech news site these days without seeing the term ‘FUD’ at least once. I must be falling behind with current trends in web-speak, but I didn’t have a clue what it meant before I looked it up:

• Fear
• Uncertainty
• Doubt

Guardian Tribute to Bill Hicks

Asimo to make UK Debut at Science Museum (via t-melt)

Ted Nelson’s 1974 Computer Lib / Dream Machines (like Whizzer & Chips, for geeks) (via PLSJ)

Petition to Apple for OGG Vorbis Support on iPods

Columbia Hills Complex

NetNewsWire Atom Beta

You could fit one or two images on an 8GB Compact Flash Card

Jon Ive Voted UKs Most Influential Cultural Icon

Lycos lays off 20% of its U.S. staff, including the Webmonkey team (via t-melt)

My flat is on the second floor of a terraced house which is next to a Home of some description, the second floor resident/patient of which likes to listen to ‘Heartbeat’ by Buddy Holly and The Crickets, every day… 3 times.

The couple living in flat directly below me like Westlife, they play Westlife almost every day. At the moment they are playing ‘Uptown Girl’ by Billy Joel.

I think I need to go and have a lie down.

World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else (pass it on)

abebooks.co.uk (50 million second-hand, rare and out-of-print books for sale… wow) (via Submit Response)

Soople splits Google’s various advanced search functions into separate form elements (demonstrates how powerful Google really is under that simple interface)

Why I’m Turning a Deaf Ear to the Pod Botherers (I’m sure Bryony wouldn’t say no if a friend bought her one for Christmas)

I don’t think this guy’s too happy about being a cyborg astrobiologist

Opportunity peeps over its crater and spots its parachute and backshell (more here)

Mozilla Firebird gets renamed to ‘Firefox’ with .8 release (Isn’t that the name of a bad early 80s Cold War thriller starring Clint Eastwood?)

CND / Peace Symbol on Mars (via Spacetramp)

Top Businesses Ignore Accessibility

The Duckspool Darkroom Meltdown (says it all about the rapid demise of analog photography and traditional darkroom processes) (via t-melt)

BBC Four do programmes for geeks – Tetris: From Russia with Love

Email spam is starting to read like Beefheart lyrics

37Signals’ new product Basecamp seems to be a very useful project management tool for web developers and such like. With a similar hosting and payment model as Typepad, it gives creative companies the means to create a secure online environment between them and client; notifying – in a weblog format – the client about the project’s progress, keeping track of key dates along the project timeline and managing to-do lists of tasks to be completed.

As a freelance developer, I can envisage how something like this could be really useful for both myself and the client and I’ve been thinking about implementing something similar – a kind of secure client weblog – for a new site I have in the pipeline. Basecamp, with all its excellent features, has made me reconsider whether coding something myself – which would be nowhere near as feature rich – is really worth it.

I never believed it for a second

10 Technologies that Refuse to Die

Blair ‘unaware’ that WMD threat only applied to battlefield weapons (I have real trouble believing that)

O’Reilly : LaTeX: It’s Not Just for Academia, Part 1

Go on Jimmy! (that is all)

(PDF Download 64KB) The Independence of the BBC: last week’s advert in The Telegraph

Moleskinerie: A Weblog for Moleskine Fans (mine’s a squared, pocket sized) (via Submit Response)

BBC Denies Axing Political Satire

iCapture is (partly) being served from an iMac DV called Buzz (hmm.. I haven’t got a name for mine)

Wikipedia Reaches 200,000 Articles (if the ideal of the Web is to represent the sum of all human knowledge, Wikipedia alone is on its way to realising this)

Next Generation Xbox to have G5 Processors

Custom link text-decoration with CSS

The Drift Table (Jack’s having one these coffee tables with a difference installed)

’… why give 40 when you’re only asking for 10?’

The BBC has launched Parent’s Music Room, a site giving guidance on motivating your child to appreciate and play music. I think the ability to a play an instrument, like being fluent in a foreign language, offers incalculable benefits in life.

Call it peer pressure, but playing music just wasn’t a cool thing to do at my school. Music was reserved for the lunchtime-club fraternity; when I was ripping holes in the knees of my trousers wreaking havoc on the school-yard and trying to avoid getting my already superglued glasses smashed up by hurtling footballs, they were indoors with their clarinets, bassoons and classical guitars, slowly and patiently learning a new and universal language.

My mum did hire out a clarinet for me to learn to play once; I removed it from its case, assembled it and blew down it a few times, but always made sure no-one was watching. Now I go and see the Cinematic Orchestra play and watch Tom Chant solo on alto-sax, and I think back to when I closed the case of that uncool clarinet for the last time. What a fool.

Orlowski thinks Apple & Pepsi are perpetrators of corporate child abuse with their new iTunes promotion

IBM enlist Kurt Vonnegut to promote the Open Source ideal

Mars Rover Photos RSS Feed

40MB of Free Loops for Garageband