Well, that didn’t take long. People are already opening up the AppleTV and installing extra stuff on it, like browsers, and Perian, which gives you the ability to play rather more video formats. There’s a wiki with more info here.
Now, I have a Mac Mini under my TV so I don’t need one of these. But I can think of a few nice uses for a box that size if somebody made it run Linux… which I’m guessing might not be too hard…
Yesterday I jokingly asked Michelle, who does the company accounts, whether I had been paid this month, because my bank account seemed rather lower than I thought it should be. She laughed and said that I had. I went away mildly concerned about my profligacy.
This morning I opened my bank statement and discovered that it was substantially lower than it should be, because there were 16 fraudulent cash withdrawals in the last two and a half weeks, starting in Milan and Rome, but then moving to the US. Over £2500 gone altogether. Ouch.
The banks will fix this with relatively little incovenience on my part, I think. But since I carefully avoid having, or using, too many cards it means I now need to dig out another card which I haven’t used for some time and hope I can remember its PIN number. And perhaps such an unexpected burst of activity will look fraud on that card too!
Anyway, the moral of the story is that it pays to check your statements carefully!
Highly recommended: Malcolm Gladwell’s TED2004 talk. In just 15 mins, you’ll find out what every business needs to know about spaghetti sauce. Watch it over breakfast and you’ll have a whole new topic of dinnertime conversation…
Regular readers will know that I’m a huge fan of these TED talks; I’ve posted before about Michael Shermer’s talk, and those from Peter Donnelly and Dan Gilbert. If you’ve got a shiny new AppleTV and you’re looking for some content for it, or you have a video-capable iPod and want something to watch on the train, you owe it to yourself to subscribe to these in your iTunes. Just click here.
Scott Adams has a suggestion based on some psychological research.
The sports fields behind the Ndiyo office were floodlit as I walked home tonight.
(Click for bigger versions – another view here)
Here’s one of those hints that will be blindingly obvious to those who know about it already, but may be very useful for people like me who have just discovered it…
In Apple Mail, after you’ve replied to a message, you get a little indicator in the message list (assuming you have that column displayed):
What I’ve only just found out is that the little arrow is a button. Click on it, and it will pop up the reply you sent. Exceedingly useful. But you probably knew about that already…
Rose found this nice report in the IMDB news:
Efforts by overseas film distributors to cut costs by outsourcing subtitle translations to such countries as India and Malaysia have resulted in creating dialog that makes little sense to local audiences, according to today’s (Monday) London Times. The newspaper observed that translators with little understanding of the nuances of English are taking the place of British subtitlers, many with long careers in the business. Kenn Nakata Steffenson, who translates English films into Danish and Japanese films into English, cited one film in which the line “Jim is a Vietnam vet” became “Jim is veterinarian from Vietnam” in the farmed-out Danish subtitles. In another film, the words “flying into an asteroid field” became “flying into a steroid field.” In yet another, “She died in a freak rugby accident” became “She died in a rugby match for people with deformities.” In My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Uma Thurman’s line, “We have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment” was translated into Taiwanese as “We hold the highest standards for sexual harassment.” The Times said that Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro was so upset with the English subtitles for his 2001 film The Devil’s Backbone that he himself worked on the subtitles for last year’s award-winning Pan’s Labyrinth.
I remember watching one of the Die Hard movies in Malaysia, where the censor had been hard at work, especially on Bruce Willis’s stronger language, simply by cutting and splicing the film. I particularly recall one of the less subtle bits of editing where Willis turns to another character and says, “Yeah? Well I’ve got two words for you.
Once upon a time, those who wished to conduct vigorous debate would send letters to the Editor. Now, everything is much more sophisticated. Let me explain…
First, many thanks to CD Happel for pointing me at this great video of a juggling demonstration by Chris Bliss. It’s impressive – watch and enjoy.
Update 2012 – Google Video has now gone: You can watch it here instead.
However, another juggling enthusiast, Jason Garfield, pointed out that technically, Chris’s act is not so complicated. Simply posting this to a blog wouldn’t have had much impact, though, so he made a video of himself juggling to the same music but with five balls instead of three. You can see it here. It became known (or was christened by him) as the ‘Bliss Diss’ video. Also very impressive, but in different ways.
This apparently caused some debate in the juggling community about which was really the most difficult routine and whether Chris’s choreography was better than Jason’s. Jason got so much email – often vitriolic – that he decided to post another video explaining his position. In it he shows Chris’s video with multiple different background tracks, to show that it appears to be nicely choreographed with any of them.
Now, as someone who could barely juggle two balls to ‘Baa baa black sheep’, I am not qualified to make any assessment of the juggling technicalities. I suspect Jason is probably right, but his message has come over as rather negative so I, like many others, instinctively react against it after getting such a postitive vibe from Chris’s video above.
What interested me, however, was his his use of the media. He stated that he wouldn’t read any more of the aggressive email he was getting. If you want to send him a message, sit in front of a video camera and send him a clip explaining, or demonstrating, your position. We’ve all seen the ‘flame wars’ where people engage in heated arguments on forums or in email that would presumably never have become so vicious in a face-to-face encounter. I think Jason may have hit upon an excellent way of keeping things more civil. Have a look at his explanation.
It’s also interesting that we’ve reached a point where it’s reasonable to request anybody feeling strongly about a subject to make a video of themselves talking about it and broadcast it globally – something that would be unthinkable just a few years ago. Much of the population of the developed world now carry in their pockets the technology needed to do just that.
That’s even more amazing than the juggling.
It isn’t only Apple who are designing a new phone. According to The Register, Google have one coming too.
It makes a lot of sense – others will follow, I’m sure. There are many more phones sold each year than PCs, and you have more opportunities on that platform for branding, for promoting your services, charging for them, and locking customers into them. I’ve often found it useful to have Wikipedia and Google in my pocket, and for many people a phone which made that really easy could be attractive, especially when it might be subsidised by advertising, and tie in location-awareness, and…
Mmm. The PC is so 2006…
Yesterday I came across this picture for the first time – it’s Tom Rabon interviewing me at last year’s FiRe conference.
I quite liked it.
I showed it to Rose and she said “It looks like you’re talking to the plant! Perhaps that’s why Tom’s smiling?”
And now, of course, I can’t look at it without thinking of that.
Perhaps the main reason for Twitter’s success, beyond the ‘search for acknowledgement‘ mentioned yesterday, is the fact that it’s so controversial. Alternately derided as the biggest timewaster since Big Brother and fêted as the next big communications medium, it’s managed to get a lot of press. This posting being a case in point.
Does it demonstrate that our attention spans have now fallen so far that composing and reading even blog posts is too much like hard work? Or is it significant because the world-changing technology of SMS has finally found a way to be the channel for user-generated content?
Ewan Spence has mixed feelings about it after SXSW.
One thing I do know – their servers seem to be very heavily loaded at present. Painfully slow.
It’s now official – Samsung has announced their 940UX monitor, which has DisplayLink‘s technology inside, so can be connected to the computer by USB. News of this leaked a few weeks ago, but, contrary to the reports that spread across the web, this model does also have VGA and DVI connections. Here’s DisplayLink’s press release.
If you already have a monitor, but want to connect it using USB, you can get the technology in adaptor form from IOGear – you can find it from around $73. Sunix are about to follow suit with their VGA2625.
Disclaimer: I’m no longer a director or employee of DisplayLink, but I am still a minor shareholder. And proud of it.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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