2010-08-27
Can You Change Some Change?
There’s been a bit of buzz about the Dollar ReDe$ign project, especially the Dowling Duncan and Raffael Hannemann entries. There’s one thing that’s bothering me, though.
If this is truly an attempt to consider radical change for US banknotes, the spec should eliminate the one dollar bill. Sure, redesign the $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100, but if you’re thinking big, cut the little one.
I can’t think of another Western currency that has paper money worth so little. The UK eliminated the old 10 shilling note in 1969, replacing it with the decimal 50p piece; the pound note hasn’t been produced in England and Wales since the pound coin was introduced in the mid-’80s, and it was formally withdrawn in 1988. The smallest UK banknote is the fiver. The dollar is currently worth 64p.
Similarly, the smallest Euro note is €5, with €1 and €2 coins. Denmark and Norway both start at 50 krone, which is also roughly worth £5. The Czech Republic recently phased out their 20 Kč note, which was worth 66p, in favour of coins and the 50 Kč note.
Meanwhile, the US Mint is complaining nobody uses dollar coins, while no doubt dollar bills wear out terrifying quickly (just like the old UK ten bob note did). Maybe the shift from cash to electronic transactions will save the dollar from itself, but that seems like wishful thinking. Perhaps some Americans reading this can understand: why is the dollar bill so entrenched?
Watching For Attribution
bojo:
So, apparently this picture got picked up by the world we live in and is now doing the rounds. Great!
Only trouble is that Tumblr makes it really hard to know this stuff is being shared. It’s only because I saw an unusual amount of activity that I went into my Flickr stats and discovered that it had more than 500 notes from other Tumblrs! Surely there’s a better way for me to know what’s happening to my stuff? Can’t somebody join the dots?
Hm. Once you know something is on Tumblr, tracking it is easy: likes and reblogs tend to show up in templates, and if they don’t, there’s the API (or the Dashboard) to see. From that point of view it’s better than Twitter, where you get no visibility on favourites, although it’s probably only on a par with Flickr, which has the aforementioned stats for pro users, and Recent Activity (including showing who faved things) for everyone.
For the larger point, though, I suppose there might be a programmatic way of doing that. Google’s profile (based, I believe, on link rel=me data) knows that I have husk.org, flickr.com/photos/blech and notes.husk.org, and so Tumblr could (if they were so inclined) notify me on my dashboard if something from any of them were linked to.
I can imagine it taking quite a lot of niggly (and hard-to-scale) code, and things would probably still fall through the gaps, but it might be a nice thing for Tumblr to do to counter the perception that it’s just about the mindless reblogging.
2010-08-26
Amazing. Fantastic. Wonderful.
There’s a word I’m desperately trying not to use. That word is “Awesome”.
I don’t know how much of it is the reflexive use it seems to have on the internet, and how much is English snobbery, but I really don’t like using the word. I’m pedantic enough to think that something described with it should inspire a sense of awe, rather than just being momentarily amusing or impressive.
Also, it’s not as if (British?) English is lacking in synonyms. The title of this post contains three I thought of without trouble, and I’m sure with a bit more effort I could come up with a few more.
I suppose this is a plea to help with my self-policing. If you catch me saying That Word, and I don’t notice myself (usually I do, and mumble a very short version of this post) then feel free to give me a stern look. Thanks.
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Keld Helmer-Peterson, at an old BBC News In pictures gallery: Everyday colour.
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2010-08-25
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I’ve been using Autostitch iPhone a lot this summer. It makes it easy to combine shots and so makes wide-angle panoramic photos a possibility, despite the fixed field of view of the phone’s camera. (You can see an cropped example, of Tromsø from the Hurtigruten coastal steamer, on Flickr. Above is the raw image that the phone produced.)
However, not all of my photos are with the iPhone, and so I need a desktop equivalent too. So I downloaded four Mac panorama stitchers and ran some photos I had previously stitched on the phone together.
Annoyingly, despite all costing at least ten times as much, they (with one exception) all performed far worse. Calico Panorama at least managed to get everything in the right place, and smoothed out the variations in exposure (which are unavoidable without manual controls). AutoPano Pro was also competent, but that UI is eyebleedingly awful. PTgui also did fairly well, but DoubleTake was clearly completely confused.
I also tried PhotoStitch, which was bundled with the Canon PowerShot S90 I recently bought. It needed to be told what the alignment was, and crashed after producing a version that was worse even than DoubleTake’s attempt. Poor show.
I suspect I’ll try a few more sets of images in Calico before deciding whether or not to stump up the cash, but there seems to be a wider lesson here. A piece of $2 software with barely any UI feels more able to do its job than a variety of desktop applications costing anywhere from $20 to $80, and it’s making me consider rethinking my workflow just to take advantage of it.
