December 2009
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Things To See And Do 2009
Being a probably incomplete list of exhibitions, days out, conferences and similar I’ve attended this year. If I did this more regularly and with reviews, it’d be nice, I expect. No promises, though.
January:
Design Cities, Alan Aldridge @ Design Museum
Late @ Science Museum
Bookcamp @ Hub, Islington
(void) are 10 / slub @ Fleapit
February:
Late @ Tate Britain
Taking Liberties...
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Crowdsourcing for the Conservatives
iamdanw:
The Wisdom of Cameron: Crowdsourcing for the Conservatives
The Conservative Party offered to pay £1m to produce something that can “harness the wisdom” of voters. 6 hours later Tom Scott launches one. He’s rather fast.
I suspect the Tories were hoping for a bit more than a yes or no voting app. Still, I applaud Tom Scott’s work: either it’ll win the money, in which case...
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“If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why would you want this? The...”
– John Gruber in Daring Fireball, on The Tablet. He devotes 2,500 words to setting up and expanding on the same point I made in about 25 earlier this month. However, it’s a good read, so that’s ok.
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Free Parking
Everyone knows - or should know - about the vast gulf in taxes on petrol/gasoline. Petrol in the UK costs about £1.10 a litre at the moment; the fuel excise duty went up by 2p at the beginning of October. That translate to well over $6.50 a gallon; currently the average US gas price is nearer $2.60. The UK isn’t even the most expensive in Europe.
However, there’s another difference...
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“I’d like it very much if somebody would make a great big international...”
– Orson Welles, in one programme of his Sketchbook series, as transcribed at Wellesnet. (If you’re in the UK, the episode is available on iPlayer.)
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The Visibility of Skill
Last week, I visited Decode at the V&A, a collection of digital art, and there’s a quote from it in the Times review (as mentioned by Chris Heathcote) that I wanted to examine:
There is no denying the technological craft behind the work in Decode. However, unlike physical craft of the kind that fills the rest of the V&A, you cannot actually see the skill behind digital art. You...
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Everything As A Vintage Paperback
fuckingbookdeal:
It was cute the first few times, but I agree with Look At This Fucking Idea For A Blog To Book Deal that maybe, just maybe, the vintage paperback concept is getting a bit… tired.
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“This happens as you focus through the view finder. It’s not merely the...”
– Edwin Land, in The Most Basic Form of Creativity, Time Magazine, Jun. 26, 1972
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iPhone, video, colour profiles
I use a lightly modified version of FlickrTouchr.py to back up my photos from Flickr, and also to push them to the iPhone (in case I get terminally bored on the Tube and fancy paging through my favourites). Unfortunately, there are two issues with it.
Firstly, until I made a patch this evening, videos were downloaded with a .jpg extension. I fixed that (note the ‘&extras=media’...
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“When it comes to providing coverage for a large city like New York or London or...”
– John Gruber in a Daring Fireball piece, “Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?”
Well, in theory, it doesn’t. In practice, the fetish for devolution¹ that the United States has doomed the US mobile telephone industry from the start. This is covered as an aside...
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“The state of youtube comments is the natural result of encouraging textual...”
– John Melesky, as seen on Twitter.
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A short list of Chrome issues (beta 1)
… most of which are actually due to me being stuck liking the way Safari does things, or a consequence of it being a beta.
You can’t invert open behind - on Safari command shift click opens in a new window behind the current one with command click opening in a new window in front/focus, whereas Chrome is hard-wired to do the opposite (and with tabs to boot)
Tab moves between all link...
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2lmc's kitchen computer
boncey:
How about this as a use-case [for a tablet].
Attach it to the wall by the front door so I can see how my trains are running and if I need my umbrella as I leave the house in the morning.
Not saying I’d pay $500 for one but it’s certainly something I’ve considered building for my own use.
2lmc had a computer, called spoon, that had a touch screen and sat in the kitchen, showing news...
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Crunchpad manufacturer renames product JooJoo,... →
nrbd:
marco:
Assuming this is necessary is a Bill Gates fallacy: assuming that the general public has the same demands and priorities as geeks like us.
I have an iPhone and a MacBook, and I recently sold my Dell Mini 9 netbook. I thought, as a geek, that there was a hole to be filled between Real Computer Tasks like coding and Photoshopping, and Tiny Mobile Tasks like checking Twitter and...
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“Until, that is, the Twitter UI gang gets off its tuckus and writes the fifteen...”
– Dean Allen, creator of the just-closed favrd, in a comment on The Stars Look Down on Jeffrey Zeldman’s site. +1. (previously.)
(On the other hand, now favourites have been “private”, or at least obscure, for so long, I’ve heard people saying that making them more visible...
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War on Photography
The Independent’s front page story today is a welcome addition to the steady stream of stories about the police stopping photographers.
This particular story hinges around Jeff Over, who was brought from backstage to the interviewee’s chair on Andrew Marr’s show to tell his story. It’s hardly isolated, though: earlier this year BBC News Magazine featured a story on the...
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“Using the new “native” retweet system gives your followers more...”
– Give Retweets a Chance at the Tweetie support site.
This post succinctly sums up the advantages to “proper” (as opposed to “folk”) “retweets”, and they rest on one thing: metadata. As with replies, doing so using Twitter’s API methods gives users the...
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TfL Interchange Guidelines
iamdanw:
Transport for London Interchange best practice guidelines
I find it a bit odd that this site includes Vauxhall as a case study. In particular, the line claiming that “Interchange is compact with short movements required between modes.” comes as a bit of a joke for anyone who has to walk down the entire length of the “striking, contemporary structure” to get...
