A USB Cassette Deck. Now why didn’t I think of that…
Category Archives: General
Compressed Dust
We saw The Golden Compass tonight. I’m a fan of the Philip Pullman books, and so was looking forward to this first instalment, but I knew it would have to be toned down somewhat and would be quite a challenge to bring to the screen, so I was also prepared to be disappointed.
In fact, I think they did rather a good job, and it would have been splendid but for one major problem: It should have been at least one and a half times as long. Everything, I felt, was exceedingly rushed. They had already simplified things for a younger audience — I really think the books are aimed more at adults — but an hour and three quarters was still too short for any detailed explanation of, or subtlety in, what was left. The Harry Potter films were given much more footage in which to develop infinitely inferior stories, and the second Pirates of the Caribbean was long enough for me to fall asleep at least twice.
Still, the effects here were impressive, the casting was good, and I certainly enjoyed it. Other young children will no doubt feel the same!
Perhaps the Lord of the Rings has spoiled me; Pullman is certainly no Tolkien, but New Line has shown what can be done with good stories if you have an extra hour or two to play with. In the end, I imagine, this was a more risky project, so the level of funding probably wasn’t the same, and there’s enough CGI that the costs must have been heavily dependent on the length.
But I hope they at least follow the LOTR model in producing a dramatically extended version for the DVD.
The Blackstone Key
A few days ago I posted a picture of the proofs of Rose’s upcoming book.
Those interested in seeing what the real cover will look like can see her agent’s page. This shows the UK cover; the US one, I fear, is likely to be decidedly inferior, but I think this one is good.
Proof of concept
This week we received the first bound proofs of Rose’s upcoming novel.
These are just review copies; the final cover will be rather different. But it’s the first time we’ve seen it in a proper binding, and the idea of it actually being on bookstore shelves suddenly seems a whole lot closer to reality.
Now I have to get back to proof-reading the sequel…
You can find out more about The Blackstone Key and pre-order it from Amazon on Rose’s site.
Freedom of speech and IP addresses in India
A man in Bangalore was arrested and put in prison because he posted some disrespectful pictures of an Indian national hero on Orkut. This particular hero died over three centuries ago, but I guess he could still be upset, if you believe in reincarnation.
Now, there are some worrying questions here about freedom of speech in India, but they’ve been somewhat overshadowed by the discovery that the chap in question didn’t actually do it. The authorities went to Google (Orkut’s owner) for information on the perpetrator of this heinous crime. Google duly handed over the IP address, so they then went to the ISP concerned, who told them the user of that IP address, and he was promptly arrested and put in prison.
Unfortunately, the ISP, Airtel, seems to have slipped up and given the wrong information. After three weeks, this was discovered, and Mr. Kailash was released. The police are saying it’s not their fault, and that he should sue his ISP. Many of us have been tempted to sue our ISPs for a variety of reasons, but wrongful arrest isn’t usually one of them!
Anyway, there are some interesting lessons here for people like me who are dreadfully lax when it comes to campaigning about privacy issues. I’ve always said that I could never be a good conspiracy theorist because I don’t have sufficient faith in the competence of most authorities to construct a decent conspiracy.
But perhaps it’s the incompetence, not the conspiracies, that I should actually be worried about!
Atlanta burning
My friend Brian Lemaster, whom some of my readers will know, left the world of technology a little while back to join his family’s lumber business in Atlanta, which was founded in 1946.
Last week, this happened:
Fortunately nobody was hurt. At least, not physically.
But that must be an experience he and his family won’t forget very soon…
My thoughts are with you, Brian!
How to give an excellent lecture
(As demonstrated tonight by Dr Tom Smith of Davas Ltd)
Start with a good opening slide:
This will help get the audience’s attention, if anyone turned up:
Explain clearly the theory behind your subject:
and reinforce your points, where possible, with some practical demonstrations.
Make them memorable.
Of course, if you chose the wrong career, say, accountancy, rather than firework manufacture and display, you may be at a slight disadvantage with some of these.
Understanding the numbers
A nice story from the Register – well, rather a depressing one really – about Camelot, the UK’s lottery operator, having to withdraw a recent scratchcard competition:
According to the Manchester Evening News, to qualify for a prize, punters had to “scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card”. Sadly, as the card had a decidedly wintery theme, this initially-shown figure was often below zero.
…
Among these was Levenshulme’s Tina Farrel, a 23-year-old who admitted “she had left school without a maths GCSE”. She explained: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop.”
…
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I’m not having it.”
They had to withdraw the competition because rather large numbers of people had the same complaint…
Many thanks to Michael for the link.
The King is Dead?
It had to happen eventually, but perhaps it really is beginning now… in Japan at least. PC sales are falling, according to this AP article.
I have always looked forward to living in a post-PC world.
The personal computer as we normally picture it has been such a successful model over the last quarter of a century that it has stifled quite a lot of innovation because many ideas, which might otherwise have exciting new tangible forms, are easier just to do on a PC. But as PCs become less of a focus, we should see new types of interaction becoming more common.
Mark Weiser’s famous article, “The Computer for the 21st Century“, talks about when core technologies become really powerful: when you don’t notice them any more.
The most frequently-cited example of this – highlighted by Don Norman – is the electric motor. There was a time when you could buy a ‘household electric motor’ and a range of accessories which would allow you to use it as a blender one minute, and a vacuum cleaner the next. But you know electric motors have become really significant as a technology when you start thinking of a washing machine as a washing machine, and a drill as a drill, rather than as incarnations of an electric motor.
Perhaps that’s what we’re starting to see in Japan.
Millions download music directly to their mobiles, and many more use their handsets for online shopping and to play games. Digital cameras connect directly to printers and high-definition TVs for viewing photos, bypassing PCs altogether. Movies now download straight to TVs.
More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely.
Now, to be fair, it’s not clear that people are actually doing without traditional PCs, they just aren’t upgrading their old ones very fast.
But this is a start. One thing that characterises appliances like washing machines, at least for most of us, is that you replace them when you have to. You don’t buy a new one so you can boast to your friends that this years’ model has a higher-wattage motor.
This is not the end of personal computing. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
What fun!
Thanks to Rex Hughes for the link.
The Best Way to upgrade Mac OS X
John Gruber has exactly the right prescription:
- Do a complete backup clone to an external FireWire drive.
- Test that the backup is indeed bootable and up to date.
- Unplug the backup drive.
- Boot from the installer DVD and perform a default upgrade.
This is how I’ve done the last few upgrades, but when my copy of Leopard arrives next week I think I may do a clean install. I haven’t done one for many years, and there’s probably lots of accumulated sediment… I could do with a spring clean.
I’m only really doing this because I’d like to stop running my machine with its disk 98% full! I regularly use OmniDiskSweeper to find and remove major space-hogs – video podcasts that I watched long ago and forgot to delete, for example. And I long ago moved most of my photos and videos to external drives. But now I suspect it’s the thousands of smaller files – logs from utilities I tried under 10.3 and such – that make a significant contribution… We’ll see… 100GB ain’t what it used to be…
The Persistent Image
Here’s a story about miracles. Lots of them. Technological ones.
BBC4 last week aired the first episode of a series called The Genius of Photography. It was excellent and I would have missed it completely, but just as it was beginning, John, knowing that I have an EyeTV setup, sent me a text asking if I could record it.
I was working on my laptop downstairs when my phone chirped the message’s incoming arrival. I glanced at the time and saw that the show was just beginning so, with a couple of keystrokes, made a VNC connection to the Mac Mini on the top floor – all wireless, of course – and saw that the opening credits were just beginning. I clicked record on EyeTV, then went back to work.
It occurred to me that it might be fun to watch it on my new iPod Touch, so later that night I clicked on EyeTV’s convenient ‘export for iPod’ button before going to bed.
This afternoon, I slipped into my most comfortable pair of headphones and curled up on the sofa in front of the fire to watch the first episode, which was titled ‘Fixing the Shadows’, about the earliest days of photography.
It was most engaging, beautifully produced, and the gorgeous iPod screen was a joy to watch.
And as if this wasn’t compelling enough, it began to dawn on me just what I was doing…
Here I was, looking at a horse going around a track in Palo Alto. Except I wasn’t really, I was looking at some of Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1878 photos of such a horse (taken, incidentally, to satisfy the curiosity of the horse’s owner – a chap named Stanford. His racecourse is used for something else now!)
Mind you, I was really being shown these photos by somebody pointing a TV camera at them somewhere. Of course, I wasn’t seeing what came out of the TV camera. Oh no. That had been recorded, and edited, and stored, and encoded, and transmitted, and received, and stored, and decoded, and re-encoded, and transmitted and stored again, and synced to my iPod, and decoded again, with the net result that I could see it glowing on a little LCD screen I had just taken out of my shirt pocket.
Of course, that’s an abbreviated summary of what happened, and it’s just the start. Think about how many further processes the images went through so that you could see them on your screen now!
I boggled at all of this for a moment.
Then I tapped the screen and went back to learning just how hard it had been for Daguerre, Fox Talbot et al to capture any kind of images which would persist rather than fading after a few seconds. And how they had changed the world when they eventually did so.
Ancient history? No.
That was about one and a half lifetimes ago.
Transatlantic timeshift
A reminder, in case it happens to be relevant to you, that summer daylight-savings time ends in the UK this coming weekend… and in the US the following weekend.
So next week the time difference between us will be one hour less than usual.
More info here.
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