Darktable ●

Useable and feature-rich photographic workflow software for Linux and released under the GPL. I’ve tried most pieces of RAW workflow software for Linux, including non-free software such as Bibble and Lightzone, and this is the best.

Bike Lanes ●

A brave demonstration on why making it illegal to not use a cycle lane is a ridiculous idea.

• Iron Curtain Trail – The Iron Curtain Trail – experiencing the history of Europe's division
  A 6,800 km cycle track along the length of the former border, combining European culture, history and sustainable tourism.

• Equinox Gallery Vancouver – Works by Fred Herzog
  American colour photography from the early 60s.

• Swarmation :: The Pixel Formation Game
• Steve Jobs introduces the 'Think Different' campaign in 1997
• Death in Space – Boing Boing
  (tags: space ethics)
• Photography with Open Source / Linux | Worldlabel Blog
  (tags: photography linux)

…with apologies to Wim Wenders.

Static Caravan, Boulmer, Northumberland (CC) Matt Jones

Brunton Airfield, Northumberland.

Urbis, Manchester

Photo of Banky artwork by Dr Case (cc). Flickr.

Watching the watchers: Inside Westminster’s CCTV control centre

Gateshead Car Park Demolition Project

In Spring 2008, the Gateshead Trinity Centre, incorporating the controversial ‘Get Carter’ car park, will be demolished.

For 40 years it has dominated the town centre of Gateshead; the vision of its architect Owen Luder having never been fully realised.

The aim of this site is to host and facilitate the production of creative work based around the cultural impact of this building and its demolition.

Arthur C. Clarke reflects on 90 orbits around the Sun. I was quite moved by this.

Two months after the first sighting, I thought I saw another iPhone on my daily commute. Turned out it was the same person using the same iPhone.

According to Rudolph W. Guiliani:

Freedom is about authority.

War is peace.

Ignorance is strength.

…anarchy would result if everyone were allowed to behave exactly as he wanted and cited Oliver Wendell Holmes’s adage that freedom of expression does not include shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.

That’s just a lack of common sense.

The New York Times | Some Free Speech on Mayor’s Words

Speechification. A blog of Radio 4.

On Monday, the BBC are showing a Panorama investigation called One Click from Danger. It’s like Brasseye never happened.

A Guide to the Iowa Caucuses

It’s Runaround!

Remnants

Stop… Hammer time.

I play a real guitar right-handed, but an air guitar left-handed. The air guitar is actually a right-handed air guitar played upside-down. I string it normally though, of course.

It will be interesting to see some figures for iPhone sales in the first few months of their release in the UK. I spend two and a half hours a day commuting, and I haven’t seen one iPhone in use. iPod Touch sales will be strong in the run up to Yule, but the startling gap between the quality of the iPhone UI that of its competitors doesn’t seem enough to lure us Brits away from our free phones and and choice of reasonable contracts.

Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham may have plundered the back catalog of various folk and blues artists of the past without due credit, but boy did they do it well.

You could argue that this is an activity very much in the folk tradition; the music has freedom, songs get passed from generation to generation, and are interpreted differently. Page is criticised for stealing Bert Jansch’s Black Water Side, but really Page and Jansch were both inspired by Anne Brigg’s interpretation of a folk song which is much older than any of their versions.

From what I can gather from the reviews and bootleg footage of the gig (I wish I had been there), the band returned to their roots; just the four of them, some instruments and some Marshall stacks, like they were back doing a TV studio recording in the late sixties.

After a number of poor reunion gigs over the last twenty-seven years – especially the Live Aid reunion – they proved that they could still perform at a level similar to the their early gigs, and being a life-long Led Zeppelin fan, I’m glad about that.

Microsoft trials XP on XO laptop

From the OLPC community Wiki that’s used for documentation and sharing learning materials, to the software on the XO, everything is open, and that is the project’s strength. Microsoft are just eyeing a new market for their old proprietory software and in so doing are not helping the OLPC project one bit.

Perl on Rails – Why the BBC Fails at the Internet

… talented, underpaid, and frustrated software engineers at the BBC are forced to make a decision. Either they can produce websites using static HTML, and make a few remote calls to limited Perl functions, decorating their page with SSIs, or they can fight against a reticent and incompetent technology supplier to make use of a crippled and outdated language on servers that more than likely are unable to meet the capacity requirements of a dynamic application being used by the BBC’s audience.

Hooray for outsourcing!

Batophobia isn’t, as one might imagine, an irrational fear of bats. Rather, it’s the fear of being near tall buildings; like inverted acrophobia. I’ve long been looking for a name for this particular phobia as I’m a mild sufferer. I’d struggle with the Burj Dubai.

Only 18 days to go before I do my Christmas shopping.

Anton Corbijn’s film Control – about Ian Curtis and Joy Division – is worth seeing.

The Register: Gatwick reduced to anarchy by ‘computer glitch’

What, so all of Gatwick’s managers walked out, leaving the rest of the staff to run the Airport themselves? Sounds like this glitch did everyone a favour.

Anil Dash on the smugness of Apple

When browsing your network in Leopard, machines running windows appear as beige monitors showing the Blue Screen of Death. Anil Dash takes issue with this:

The disdain here isn’t for the unfortunate unwashed who have to suffer through Windows because they’re so clueless — it’s a snide shot at the other computers you own, or of your family’s other machines around the house, or of the computers of the peers you work with. In short, the derision is likely aimed at people who care a hell of a lot more about you and your boundless Mac-enhanced creativity than, say, the OS X team does.

Evolution and Wisdom of Crowds

An interesting article in which the author uses Wikipedia as an example of an ‘Evolution-like’ system:

There is no question that there is something unsettling about the idea of a resource that can be edited by anonymous internet users. We would expect that many, if not most, of the edits will be of poor quality. The natural assumption might be that the quality of the end result will be the average quality of all the edits — but nothing could be further from the truth.

There has been much in the way of speculation over Radiohead’s earnings from their pay-what-you-like release of In Rainbows. What seems to be overlooked is the fact that in the coming months, Radiohead will be signing to a label for a worldwide release of the album in CD format.

It’s an interesting business model: those unfamiliar with Radiohead’s music may download the album in exchange for little or no money just to try it; most Radiohead fans will download the album for any amount of money to get the album upon its release; a smaller number of fans will buy the

For those of you experience BST via an RSS news reader, of which there are many, well about 5 – you may be interested to know its design is now rather ‘Gorey-esque’, i.e., in the style of the work of Edward Gorey, whose books I love. Dame Hex’s TrueType font based on Gorey’s hand lettering made the job very easy.

I was looking up at St Mary’s Church in the town of Nantwich, England, thinking how its sandstone structure must be difficult to maintain, when an elderly lady asked me if I was local.

Yes, I replied.

She called her husband and prompted to him to tell us his story about the Church. So, not begrudgingly, he told me, and expecting some factual information about the history of the building, I listened with interest. After some amount of back-story…

We came out of the pub, he said, and there was smoke rising at the back of the church… and it was in the shape of three angels!

I stared at him and it was obvious that he noticed my disappointment at the sheer inanity of his story.

You wanted to know that didn’t you, he said.

Yes, very interesting, I replied trying to be polite, and walked away.

Dawkins: Theology has no place in a university

From the article:

… as for theology itself, defined as “the organised body of knowledge dealing with the nature, attributes, and governance of God”, a positive case now needs to be made that it has any real content at all, and that it has any place in today’s universities.

Radiohead lets fans pick price for new album

Xeni Jardin writes:

This is major, and it’s such a slap in the record industry’s face. An unsigned superband, treating loyal fans and customers like loyal fans and customers instead of thieves — what a revolutionary concept.

Now I like Radiohead, and this is indeed great news, but why is the ordering site so hard to navigate around and understand?

I know Radiohead like to be ‘post-everything’, but they shouldn’t be applying this to their ordering system. Seems like the wrong way to go about selling albums online.

The Coen Brothers’ latest film, based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, will be released in the UK on January 18th. I’m part way through the book, which is a great read.

From what I can gather so far, if you liked Fargo, you’ll love this film.

When Apple starts peddling ring tones as something other than simply an mp3 that you can use to alert you of an incoming call, locking down iPods so that they only work with iTunes, and making horrendous UI decisions such as the new Dock, you know it’s time to look elsewhere for computing and gadgetry needs.

Over the last few years, I’ve been having an inner conflict between, on one hand, the years of happy memories of using Apple products, the quality of their product design and the ease of use of OS X, and on the other, their slipshod attidude to peoples’ freedoms, the brushed metal effect, and their amazing short-sightedness as to not open the iPhone as a platform for developers.

The iPhone is released in the UK on November 9th, and the

• August 8: Rare river dolphin ‘now extinct’
• August 29: Rare dolphin ‘sighted’ in China

Damo Suzuki’s flared trousers may have dated since the early 70s, but his music certainly hasn’t. Can are one of my all time favourite bands, and this is the video of ‘Bring me Coffee or Tea’ from their 1971 album Tago Mago.

Phil Plait reviews Google Sky

… I don’t like it yet.

Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing

A method of resizing images using connected paths of pixels or ‘seams’ to gracefully alter the aspect ratio without distortion.

If you’ve ever seen a Wallace & Gromit film, you’ll know that we British like our Cheese, and that many localities of the British Isles are proud of their cheese heritage; Cheshire, Leicester, Wenselydale and Stilton to name but a few.

I grew up on the border between Cheshire and Shropshire, so Shropshire Blue cheese was regularly on my dinner plate. The locals like to think of it as their local version of the venerable Stilton – a cheese who’s origin dates back to the early 18th century. Unfortunately for the locals, Shropshire Blue harbours a nasty secret: it was invented 1970s in Inverness and it’s origin has nothing to do with Shropshire. Yes, it’s the Marketeers who named it Shropshire Blue to make it more appealing to us English.

If you tell a Shropshire resident this piece of trivia, it’s likely that they won’t believe you, such is the power of Marketing to ingrain complete misconceptions into millions of people.

A reducibly complex mousetrap

To illustrate the concept of irreducibly complexity, Behe uses the common snap mousetrap… I wish to point out that the mousetrap that Behe uses as an analogy CAN be reduced in complexity and still function as a mousetrap.

It’s ten years to the day that Fela Kuti died of AIDS. Here’s a clip from the 1982 documentary ‘Music is the Weapon’ by Stephane Tchal-Gadjieff and Jean Jacques Flori.

Biologists Helping Bookstores

A team dedicated to surreptitiously putting the pseudoscience books on the correct shelves. (via Kottke)

BBC online video service launches

Other services such as ITV’s broadband media player and Channel 4′s on-demand offering also rely on Microsoft software but, critics argue, the BBC’s remit is to serve licence-payers, which includes Mac users and those who favour cheaper alternatives to Microsoft, such as Linux.

Of course, everyone uses Linux just because its cheaper. Hey, I could also save money by not paying a licence fee to these idiots.

Dave Winer on one month with iPhone

Remember, in the 80s Apple was the first company to build networking into every machine, and later the first company to ship a wifi router. Hopefully it’s possible for Apple to open today’s iPhone, and reward the early adopters for betting on them, and get developers busy at fulfilling the opportunities it creates as a platform, not just a device.

Project Management is Bollocks!

There’s a whole industry of consultants scamming a living out of it. They base their entire existence on the lie that they can provide the definitive solution to project management. They aren’t about to ruin a good thing by telling the truth about their fallibility.

Earlier this year, the BBC changed the way they present some news items on the news homepage. Items classed as ‘major’ started to get greater prominence, with the enlarged headline text and summary spanning the 3 columns to indicate that some serious shit is happening right now; after all, it’s hardly ever good news that gets this kind of treatment.

As an editor, it must be a tough decision over which items get this level of prominence and which don’t. Some recent ones I recall are the coverage of Tony Blair standing down as Prime Minister, and the pathetic attempts at terrorism in London and Glasgow.

It’s a strange – and somewhat stupid – method of indicating that a news item is major and significant. Why should this be indicated at all? Why not present the item normally and let the reader decide on its significance? Why do the work of the terrorists by making stories seem more ‘major’ than they really are?

Furthermore, its usage seems to have revealed the Beeb’s southern England bias – something that Humphries and the Today Programme team are accused of when they absent-mindedly give the weather forecast for London on a national radio programme.

At the beginning of July, major flooding in Yorkshire lead to the loss of life, the displacement of 35,000 people in Hull, and according to Hull City Council, a “humanitarian disaster”. While the news was covered by the BBC, they didn’t give it the homepage treatment that the flooding of Middle England is now getting. As a result the British public, the Government, and The Queen didn’t seem quite so concerned.

Granted, the numbers affected by the latest floods are greater than those in Yorkshire. But when news about bottled water being distributed to those affected gets the major news alert treatment, how do you make more serious news look more serious? Expect full page breaking news items with red flashing lights soon.

Butterflies and Wheels

A site I’ve been enjoying recently. From the about page:

There are two motivations for setting up the web site. The first is the common one having to do with the thought that truth is important, and that to tell the truth about the world it is necessary to put aside whatever preconceptions (ideological, political, moral, etc.) one brings to the endeavour.

Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider never gives interviews, or at least, interviews he takes seriously. For Brazillian TV in 1998, he gave the interviewer one-word answers as she desperately tried to make them sound more interesting translated into Portuguese.

Here’s another, way more bizarre, interview he gave in 2001 under the pseudonym ‘Don Schneider’. Being a monoglot, I haven’t got a clue what they’re saying, but then I suspect a Spanish speaking person wouldn’t either.

Spaghettification

Proof – surely – that the Universe was crafted by the touch of His Noodly Appendage

Evolution is not just a theory

The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is our best explanation for the fact of evolution.

Primates on the pill

Roman Catholic doctrine doesn’t have much to say about monkey morality, but there could be trouble if it did. Olive baboons in Nigeria sometimes consume natural contraceptives that may make the females less attractive to the males and almost certainly lower their chances of becoming pregnant.

Update: fixed the link

Chris Lintott reflects on a week inside the Galaxy Zoo

I’ve been inspired by just what it’s possible to do with this internet thing

Florentijn Hofman’s Rubber Duck

A yellow spot on the horizon slowly approaches the coast. People have gathered and watch in amazement as a giant yellow Rubber Duck approaches.

Last week I linked to a piece on wired.com about how Prince is pointing the way to a “brighter future for music”. The deal to distribute his latest album ‘Planet Earth’ free with the Mail on Sunday had music industry executives foaming at the mouth; they consider this “nuts” move to be setting a dangerous precedent for other artists to publish their music without the big companies seeing a penny.

No doubt that getting the Music Industry in a tizzy is a good thing, but we shouldn’t consider Prince as the artist leading us to a new era of music publishing. He just wants to get his music out to more than the 80,000 people in the UK that bought his previous album, and do a deal with the Mail on Sunday in the process.

Admittedly, the marketing worked on me, and I paid a visit to my local newsagent on Sunday. I felt a bit dirty buying the Mail on Sunday, but luckily there was a newspaper recycling bin nearby.

Speechification

A blog of Radio 4. Not about Radio 4 but of it. We point to the bits we like, the bits you might have missed, the bits that someone might have sneakily recorded. And other bits of speech radio might find their way here too.

(via Submit Response)

Recently, I’ve found myself using Google search queries as a kind of passive messaging system. For example, I make regular use of Dave’s BBC radio stream pages, whereby the stream URLS are scraped from the BBC site and presented in a more useable format. By way of a Google search for Dave’s site, I showed my appreciation thusly:

dave bbc streams -”thanks dave!”

If Dave checks his server logs he’ll know that his service is appreciated.

PZ Myers is surrounded

[the map] shows the concentration of ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies in the United States, with the lighter colors being the most enlightened and the dark reds being the most repressed and misinformed.

Dirk Maggs is adapting Dirk Gently’s Detective Agency for Radio 4

This would surely work better on TV. I wasn’t particularly impressed with Maggs’ radio adaption of Adams’ later Hitchhiker novels.

Scientists say they have seen one of the fastest evolutionary changes ever observed in a species of butterfly.

… the example in this study happened in the blink of the eye, in terms of evolutionary time, and is a remarkable thing to get to observe.

BBC apologises over Queen clips

So the BBC runs with a story in many of the morning’s papers about the Queen storming out of a photo shoot by Annie Leibovitz. Then they issue an apology to both the Queen and Leibovitz for misrepresenting the incident. But hang on… isn’t this a BBC commissioned documentary?

Nick Harper performs Zappa’s epic ‘Titties & Beer’ at the Greenbelt Festival…

The Psychology of Social Computing: What Best Explains the Success of Facebook?

“Curiosity” – and its cousin “nosiness” – are basic cognitive attributes. Anyone who says they are never nosey or never curious as to what their neighbours or work colleagues are up to is probably fibbing. Having lived in several small communities, where gossip is an alternative currency, the general rule seems to be “most residents discuss most other residents”.

Where are the Joneses? is a new sitcom produced by Steve Coogan, Henry Normal, and anyone else who wants to contribute. That’s because it is written collaboratively using a Wiki, and the a new episode is performed and released online every day. All the content is published under a Creative Commons licence.

I’m sure that just as Wikipedia has its detractors – mainly academics who dislike its lack of authority – this will draw criticism from established comedy writers who will say it can’t be compared to the genius of comedy writers such as Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, Galton and Simpson, or John Sullivan.

Last.fm strikes Sony music deal

…and moves deeper into the dark heart of the Music Industry.

Prince Points the Way to a Brighter Future for Music

As with blogging and so many other things digital, music distribution could become a competition to see who posts things first. In a sense, music distribution would no longer be about space — it would be about time.

In 1973, standing on a pavement in Manhattan, Marty Cooper made the first mobile phone call. Inspired by the communications devices used in Star Trek, Cooper developed a device that allowed phone calls to be made to anywhere in the world without being connected to the recipient by wires.

Today, OpenMoko and FIC have launched the first phone to run on a Free and Open Source Software platform, and as a tribute to that first mobile call, they’ve named it the Neo 1973.

Apple’s iPhone may be the slickest piece of consumer tech ever released, but what you can do with your iPhone – and the price you pay for it – is strictly determined by Apple and AT&T.

Conversely, the OpenMoko platform gives the user complete control of the phone’s software as well as giving anyone the opportunity to contribute to its ongoing development.

I’ll wait for the dust to settle on both the iPhone and OpenMoko launches, but come 2008, I think I know which phone I’ll be buying.

The BBC coverage managed to skip the highlight of yesterday’s Live Earth concert in London. ‘Tap’ were joined by an army of Bass players to perform Big Bottom…

Another day, another bomb kills and injures 350 people in Iraq

Tomorrow we’ll probably forget.

The UK’s National Health Service is a very good thing and, after watching Michael Moore’s latest film SiCKO, I realise it’s something I take for granted.

That said, in order to put the America’s health care system in as negative light as possible, Moore presents us with a very rosy view of the NHS as well similar universal health care systems in France and Cuba.

The NHS is not quite as perfect as he suggests; among other problems it’s becoming impossible to get NHS dental treatment, waiting lists are very long for some surgical procedures, there are ongoing serious problems with NHS IT systems, and people are getting infected by the MRSA superbug which seems make its home in UK hospitals.

Moore seems to be exploiting the fact that a large percentage of the film’s intended audience is unfamiliar with our health care system, giving him a blank slate to draw any picture he wants.

SiCKO is a powerful and moving film, and people should see it, but I would have liked to see a slightly more realistic presentation of the NHS, and I suspect the French and Cuban systems aren’t the perfect models of a welfare state either.

Moore wants his fellow Americans to think that the grass is much greener on the other side. It probably is, just not quite as green as Moore wants them to believe.

Phil Plait reviews Tranformers

Every time a new Michael Bay movie comes out, I swear I’d rather do something better, like stick a red hot screwdriver in my eye or visit the Creation Museum. Or both.

Full review. He actually quite likes it.

For Muslim Extremists, Religion Matters

In short, it’s not what the material world fails to deliver that drives suicide bombers. It’s something else. And, time and again, the very people committing these acts have articulated what that something else is: their religion.

BBC News: Good vibes power tiny generator

While Steorn wait for their stage lights to cool down, scientists at Southampton University announce details of a tiny device that uses natural vibrations to generate power.

Today is the day Steorn were supposed to be demonstrating their Perpetual Motion Machine via a live Webcast. Perhaps unsurprisingly, if you visit their website, you will see this announcement:

“We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting. We have commenced a technical assessment and will provide an update later today. As a consequence, Kinetica will not be open to the public today (5th July). We apologise for this delay and appreciate your patience.”

So the unveiling of the most important invention in the history of humanity was ruined by some hot lights. Remember, next time you plan on demonstrating an impossible machine, make sure the environmental conditions are right!

European vs. American mobile phone use

Some interesting comparisons between mobile phone culture in the US and Europe.

The Times is reporting that O2 has won the rights to offer the iPhone in the UK

While I’m sure the iPhone will sell well in the UK, O2 will have to offer some extremely attractive price plans in order to lure people away from their existing contracts.

Zeldman: Let there be web divisions

Right on.

In the UK, Scientology isn’t recognised as a religion. I see no reason why it shouldn’t be recognised as a religion, as it certainly has many things in common with other faiths: it has a theology, its followers believe that humanity needs salvation, people get indoctrinated at an early age, believers get spiritual counselling, and its organisation is a complex hierarchy in which its members progress through various ‘levels’.

Scientology regularly gets a deserved drubbing by the media, the BBC Panorama programme “Scientology and Me” being a recent example. But why should it be singled out from other religions to get this amount of criticism? Why is the story of Xenu any more ridiculous than the story of Noah’s genocide, God creating the earth and everything on it in six days, Mary’s virgin birth, or Jesus’ resurrection? To refer to the theme of Dan Dennett’s presentation at TED, they are all dangerous ideas and should be treated with absolutely no respect.

So to those about to write another piece claiming the Scientology is 100% Bullshit, remember there are plenty of other religions equally deserving of such criticism.

A short presentation from TED 2002

Floods are judgment on society, say bishops

How’s that for some truly enlightened thinking by the C of E.

Today’s iPhone isn’t a reading device

It’s behaving like no web browser I’ve ever seen, and it’s behaving badly. It’s breaking an implicit agreement between all platforms that co-exist on the web. We create sites that assume nothing about the device they’re being rendered on, and browsers should take care to make our text readable for users of their device. The iPhone web browser doesn’t keep that promise.

UK terror threat now ‘critical’

This is a deeply pathetic situation, and via sensationalist, dim-witted news coverage of yesterday’s and today’s events – particularly by the BBC – we know just how easy it is for a couple of idiots with a poorly conceived terror plot and a few cans of petrol to grind parts of our nation to a halt and have the government notch up the threat level.

From the rumour mill: On Monday, Apple will announce a European 3G iPhone for Vodafone, T-Mobile and Carphone Warehouse

A faster network and choice over carriers; this would be a much better deal than the US version.

Tell Steve Jobs: Unlock the iPhone!

The iPhone is revolutionary in terms of its user interface, but no amount UI innovation can make up for the fact you’re chained to a particular carrier. If the UK version offers me the freedom to choose which carrier to go with, only then would I consider buying one.

What follows is a revised comment I recently made on Reddit:

It’s strange that
when Jeff Han
demonstrated his Multi-touch technology in 2006, everyone said how
pioneering it was, and now that Microsoft are releasing similar
technology, called Surface, people seem to be ridiculing it as a
‘big-ass table’.

To me this satirical ad smacks of hypocrisy by someone who – I suspect
- would be first in the queue if Apple released something similar.

Of course there are applications for this type of interface, as Jeff
Han demonstrated in 2006. In fact, I’m puzzled by the connection
between Han’s product and Surface, and after digging around the Web I
haven’t come up with a conclusive link between the technologies.

I do know that Microsoft have a really bad image problem and they are
desperate to be seen as innovators like Apple. Could it be that MS
have licensed this technology from Jeff Han, with a deal that allows
MS to state that they are the innovators?

Here’s a Flickr photoset of astronomical objects by Dan Goodin.

I’ve started geotagging some of my photos in Flickr, so you can see where some my images were taken using my Map page.

It’s a pretty interesting feature, although the quality of the street-level mapping on Yahoo isn’t particularly good, making it difficult to accurately pinpoint the exact location of each image.

Here’s a film, shot by none other than Thomas Edison, of a chap pulling off some tricks on a bicycle in 1899.

You might think that this is a clever fake, but the existence of this page on the American Library of Congress site suggests that it’s authentic.

Thomas Edison – popularised the electric lightbulb and the BMX Fakie trick.

Today’s unveiling of OS X v10.5 included a demonstration of Apple’s new implementation of virtual desktops, known as ‘Spaces’.

About bloomin’ time Apple!

The more we subscribe to the ‘digital lifestyle’, the more we multitask – it’s common practice to have our email, a web browser, instant chat, photos, and music open at once – and I’ve always felt OS X provided a very cramped environment to do all this. Moreover, I never found Expose a particularly good method of navigating these windows, and I consider it another bit of not-very-useful eye-candy akin the Dock.

It’s much more useful to logically group tasks together on the expanded area that virtual desktops provide, and this is something that been part of Linux window managers for years.

So Spaces is, for me, a welcome addition to OS X.

On the subject of eye-candy, have a look at the H.G. Wells-esque ‘Time Machine’ feature, which allows you to ‘go back in time’ and restore accidentally deleted files. I wonder if it allows you to go forward in time and show you files you haven’t created yet. That would be neat.

What do you get if you cross the 1980s classic Acornsoft game Elite with Grand Theft Auto? A game called ‘The Outsider’, by David Braben.

At first it seems impossible to liken these two games; one a relatively slow-paced first-person space trading game with primitive (by today’s technology anyway) graphics, and the other a violent third-person thuggery simulator.

But then you remember that just as you can wreak havoc and then suffer the consequences by having a load of police on your tail in Grand Theft Auto, you could do exactly the same thing in Elite; and the more you think about it, the more similarities these two games have.

So, The Outsider is a game that seems graphically similar to GTA, but will be bring gameplay elements of Elite into the fold. The character you play is even called ‘Jameson’.

There’s a fascinating Wikipedia entry showing a timeline of the use of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) in film and TV.

For me, there are a few notable things about this list:

• I would not have considered Westworld as being the first film to contain CGI. As I recall, ‘Yul Brynner-vision’ doesn’t look particularly CGI-like (which is probably a good thing)
• I never knew Westworld had a sequel
• The use of vector graphics in Star Wars is certainly believable, seeing as the classic vector generated Atari game was released only a few years later
• I always thought that, like The Guide sequences in the TV version of HHGTG, all the effects in Tron were traditionally animated. It seems that this not the case as the Lightcycle sequences were CGI.
• I never knew John Lasseter made a short computer animated film while he worked at Lucasfilm (before Pixar). I always thought Luxo was the first fully CGI animated short film.
• The ‘stained glass knight’ (created by John Lasseter) in Young Sherlock Holmes scared the hell out of me.
• Now you may be tempted to think that Labyrinth is a 80s fantasy film of the cheesiest order. Well it is, but directed by Jim Henson, this film ripples with a level of inventiveness you just don’t see in today’s Hollywood films.

I wonder if George W. Bush has Neil Young’s latest album on his iPod.

test

Walk into a Post Office these days and you may find yourself walking out having not only posted a parcel, but also signed up to a credit card, switched to a new telephone provider or insured your home.

As I was queueing in the Post Office last week, I overheard a conversation between a Post Office employee and an elderly customer:

“You’ve been a Post Office user all your life, so you can trust if us you switch your home insurance to us.”

So the Post Office are on the hard sell, the reason being the Department for Work and Pension’s decision to pay state benefits directly in people’s bank accounts instead of using the Post Office’s services, thus denting their yearly revenue significantly.

Their Chief Executive put a positive spin on the move towards providing financial services like this:

“Extensive research carried out among 20,000 customers clearly indicated a huge demand for financial services from a brand like the Post Office.”

If there’s such a demand, why do I always get told about the competitive interest rate on their Credit Card just as I’ve paid for a parcel to be delivered? One could argue it’s either that or a significant rise in the cost of posting items; I think I’d rather pay a bit more than be hassled by their insistent sales patter.

In 1990, New Order made a record with the England football team to raise morale and generally support the team in their bid to win the World Cup tournament of that year. It was a pretty good record, and made memorable by John Barnes attempt at rapping halfway through.

This song, however, pales into insignificance compared to the video you’re about to see, in which Swedish metal band ‘Hammerfall’ got together with the national women’s Curling team to make a record ahead of the Winter Olympics: Hammerfall – Hearts On Fire

Well it worked, they won Gold.