One of my favourite actors, Paul Schofield, died yesterday. He was always good, but I remember him most fondly as Martin Chuzzlewit Sr. in the BBC production.
A great loss.
I’m not the man I once was, Pecksniff
March 20th, 2008
Putting the ‘i’ back in iPlayer
March 18th, 2008
One of the most interesting technology developments of the last couple of weeks has, it seems to me, attracted very little attention. The BBC’s iPlayer, which lets you watch most of the last week of BBC TV if you’re in the UK, and a subset of it if you’re elsewhere, received early criticism because it didn’t work on anything but Windows.
Now at least some of it works on other platforms, but the latest one is the most interesting. It now works on the iPod Touch and iPhone. I now carry around in my shirt pocket something which gives me an eminently watchable archive of the last week’s TV, as long as I’m in range of a wifi network. The iPod Touch is a great video player and now, for free, there’s a huge amount of stuff available in a rather high-quality format.
Only a very few years ago, the idea of having any access to an archive like this would have seemed amazing. But having it on a beautiful slab a few millimetres thick is almost sci-fi. I just wish I had the time to watch any of it! But we do live in most interesting times…
SmartSleep
March 16th, 2008
For Apple laptop users, Patrick Stein’s SmartSleep looks like a useful little gizmo…
The Officers’ Ward
March 16th, 2008
In general we watch almost no broadcast TV, and a very large number of movies, thanks to LoveFilm (the UK equivalent of NetFlix). When Rose told me last week that the film she had lined up was about “a guy who gets badly injured in WW1 and undergoes early reconstructive surgery”, I can’t say I was immediately enthusiastic. There seemed to be other, more fun, ways to spend a Friday evening after a long and tiring week.
But The Officers’ Ward was, in fact, absolutely superb, with some really beautiful moments. Yes, there are some slightly gruesome bits, as you would imagine, but remarkably few, and it asks some very important questions. It won several awards and nominations in France when it came out in 2001, and rightly so, but I hadn’t heard of it.
I’m glad I have now; highly recommended.
Reach Out
March 15th, 2008
A tree in Grantchester Meadows this afternoon.
Upgrade to XP
March 14th, 2008
Considering buying a low-end Dell machine this evening, I saw that it comes with a very basic version of Vista by default. But of course, even if you have to get Windows, you’d be daft to get that. For only £30 more, you can get a basic version of XP.
Amusing to see that it’s a pay-extra upgrade…
EBAW
March 10th, 2008
The UK is being swept by very strong gales today…
When my parents, many years ago, used to fly around northern Kenya in their work with the Flying Doctors, they would occasionally be able to get radio reports from people on the ground as they came into land at some of the remote desert airstrips. Usually it would just be information about wind speed and direction, how many camels were on the runway, etc.
But I remember my mother telling me about an abbreviation they used under certain wind conditions, and it came back to me today: EBAW.
“Even birds are walking!”
Aperture keyword reorganisation
March 8th, 2008
If you use Aperture and you like to organise your keywords hierarchically using the Keywords HUD, then you may find this page at Bagelturf useful, especially the section about moving keywords to the top level. I couldn’t work out how to get keywords which were in folders back to the top level – it turned out to be because I had too many keywords visible. This hint gives you a workaround, and it’s generally useful to remember that search box at the top.
My list of keywords was getting quite long, and I often had duplicates at various places in the hierarchy – ‘Seattle’ came under ‘USA > Washington State’, for example, but it also came under ‘iPhoto’ because many of my photos were originally tagged there. Typing the first few letters of ‘Seattle’ into the search box allowed me to see both and merge them easily.
This is the solution to another problem, by the way – that of getting the same keyword twice at the same level with different capitalisation.
Drag the one you want to change into a different level of the hierarchy – for example into a temporary folder. Then rename it to the right capitalisation, and drag it back to where you want it, using the search box to make life easier if necessary. Aperture will ask if you want to merge the two keywords.
You don’t even need to create a temporary folder, in fact, you can drag the one you want to change inside the correct one – if that doesn’t confuse you – rename the inner one to match, and then drag it to the level above to merge with its parent.
Hope that’s useful for someone!
Space Truckin’
March 8th, 2008
“Europe is set to launch the biggest, most sophisticated spacecraft in its history.”
Oh, and it happens tomorrow. Splendid stuff.
Golf
March 7th, 2008
Intelligent Life magazine has a light-hearted article by Will Smith… I liked this:
Football involves a lot of running around and people trying to stamp on your feet. Rugby involves a lot of running around and people trying to stamp on your scrotum. Cricket involves a maniac hurling a piece of red concrete at every part of your anatomy. But golf: I think golf could be the sport for me. There’s no body-contact, and it involves strolling round a large garden.
East Anglian Altitude
March 7th, 2008
Yesterday I visited the Møller Centre here in Cambridge.
Interesting architecture, and a great view from the tower:
There’s some other quite interesting architecture visible if we zoom in to the right:
The buildings on the right are the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, and the other tower, on the left, is the University Library, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, who created several other rather Stalinist-looking buildings but redeemed himself by designing the iconic British red telephone box.
Giles was continuing in the family business – his father was also an architect responsible for some notable buildings, and his grandfather designed the Midlands Grand Hotel which formed the front of St Pancras’ Station. Now, that is something to be proud of… take a look!
Oscar nomination
March 6th, 2008
Today’s quotation comes from Oscar Wilde…
To be really mediaeval one should have no body.
To be really modern one should have no soul.
To be really Greek one should have no clothes.
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