Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
The whole of TedXBristol will be streamed live, so you can get a idea of the richness of the talks yourself.
In the meanwhile there’s a cheeky little interview with me on the TedXBristol blog.
If your one of my lovely friends from around Bristol, I’ll be going for drinks and a meal on Saturday night. So get in touch if you want to join us…
Lytro’s light-field camera was a interesting idea and something people were very excited about including partly myself.
Engadget asks the question what would you change about the Lytro. Some of the ideas are pretty interesting to read, lets hope Lytro are reading…!
My Samsung LCD gave up the ghost recently and although its fixable with a soldering iron and new capacitor. I pretty much decided a while ago that its time for an upgrade. I bought the Samsung almost 6 years ago I think and it was one of those 720p/1080i LCDs.
I finally bought a Toshiba 40TL963B because it seemed to have most things I wanted.
Top of the list DLNA, Freeview HD, USB recording (well its useful now and then) and of course 1080p. You will notice I didn’t include 3D because frankly the idea and reality of 3D at home makes me break out in hives on the inside of my mouth. Funny thing is the Toshiba actually supports 3D but I won’t be using it ever. Worst still it has that turn 2D into 3D mode which makes me break into hives in places I’d rather not say.
I decided to stick to 40 inch because the next one up was 46 inch rather than 42 inch. It certainly looks smaller because the bezel is about 15mm deep around most of the frame.
To date I haven’t really drove the screen because my xbmc box is set to output 720p. The freeview HD tuner works well and I was pleased to be able to see the paralympics in HD. Things look great in HD and as the review says, SD content looks a bit smudgy. Its ok but noticeably bad. The review is right about that and also about the black level which looks like black ink (this is a good thing). Actually when I changed the Xbox 360 to 1080p and loaded up Geometry wars 2, it felt like I was play on a surface which was best described as the night sky.
Not even touched the Toshiba web TV crap except to get DLNA working, XBMC blows away everything Toshiba’s places item can do and will ever do.
So generally I’m happy with my purchase. I didn’t want 3D but the price difference meant I would only be paying an extra 30 pounds for 3D capability and I would also get higher refresh rates too. Yes it could be nicer about SD content but its only on Freeview SD content I notice it.
I love the idea of Amazon Glacier…
Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.
This is how I use SpiderOak right now. All backups stored there in deep storage just in-case… It will also be a great place to store photos, videos and old projects… Oh and it seems to work for UK users too.
Great work Amazon… I’m going to see if Spideroak offer anything like this before switching. As I could easily use Dropbox for daily stuff and Amazon Glacier for everything else.
I wrote a while ago about working most Fridays from coffee shops in the northern quarter of Manchester instead of working out of my home.
However someone at work pointed me to this blog post from a guy who is complaining about people treating coffee shops like there personal offices.
Dickheads with cups of coffee so dry they were probably ordered three hours ago. Dickheads reading the tea leaves in their empty glasses. Dickheads with just some free water.
Dickheads with absolutely no sign of having consumed anything except some three-week old canned tomato soup stains on their emo punk pop hip hop band t-shirts, the ones that proved they were at that concert nobody else gave a shit about.
One of them even had the pierced balls to get a banana out of this bag and proceeded to eat it as he scribed the novel he’s never going to publish, looking at his Samsung Galaxy III—iPhones are so passé—at the same time.
And here I was, (delicious) coffee in hand, waiting for my sandwich, with nowhere to eat it. And I wasn’t alone—there were two more people like me. While I waited, three more people came in, and, after looking around fruitlessly for five minutes, left without ever touching ass to chair. I didn’t need telepathic powers to read their minds. DICKHEADS.
To be honest I found the whole thing pretty funny but I do get what he sometimes means. I personally buy and spend too much money at coffee shops including FYG, North Tea Power and Vivid Lounge. So I would agree with all the points the writer makes…
- Buy at least a coffee. Don’t just go ahead and sit there with your computer. If you do the latter, I hope your genitals drop rotten into the toilet bowl one day.
- When you are done with your coffee—it’s ok, take your time, as long as you do it at some reasonable pace—you can stay around for five minutes. Perhaps ten. Then leave.
- If you want to stay longer, buy another coffee. A pastry would be fine too. Perhaps a sandwich. Anything. Whatever. But keep buying things. This is the rent you pay. It’s much less than getting your own office. Or a real apartment.
However I still don’t like places which go out of there way to restrict laptop users.
In Manchester when I first arrived, Teacup and Drip Coffee was a great place to enjoy a chat, read and catch up with some work. Now they both seemed to turn hostile on computer users by taping up plug sockets, messing with the wifi and general snobbery of laptop users. In Teacup you need to be shown a place which makes it too formal for my own liking. But fear not others have stepped in to fill the void.
Interestingly North Tea Power not only fills the void but takes customer service to another level, really encouraging laptop users… Love those guys!
Not written about TOS DR or Terms of Service Didn’t read.
“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that.
ToS;DR aims at creating a transparent and peer-reviewed process to rate and analyse Terms of Service and Privacy Policies in order to create a rating from Class A to Class E.
A long time ago while the Data Portability group was in full swing, we talked about doing something very much like TOS DR but the issues of trying to get a unified system across all End User Licence Agreements (EULA’s) seemed like a total nightmare. The suggestion was to use a traffic light system to alert people of the bogus stuff ahead of time. This also meant it wouldn’t replace the EULA, it would just highlight some of the questionable stuff.
In the end it was far enough off the main focus of the group to make it a that would be nice rather than essential. Its a shame but it was the right decision for the time.
Hope the TOSDR guys get as popular as Creative Commons and team up with the likes of the plain english campaign.
To be honest if I had more time and wasn’t already doing lots of other stuff, I might be tempted to join in and help where I can.
UKNova is being forced to change. We have been issued with a “cease and desist” order by FACT (The Federation Against Copyright Theft).
Despite our efforts to cooperate with the UK media companies, FACT have stated: “ALL links or access to content provided by UKNova are infringing, unless it can be proven that explicit permission from the copyright holder for that content has been obtained”.
Whilst we believe that they are wrong both legally and morally on account of the strong ‘no commercial content’ stance that we have always taken, we are not in a position to be able to risk lengthy and costly court battles to prove this. Therefore we have no other option but to close down the trackers. It has not been an easy decision to take, but it is apparently our only option.
The argument by FACT sounds wrong too from what I know about UK copyright law but would I state my flat on it? Not a chance… I expect moving to Magnet links won’t help their dilemma either? Such a shame and a great loss, people will just seek their TV from elsewhere now, somewhere with less rules.
I remember UKnova was once asked to come into the BBC to meet content producers and defend their position as part of a BBC Backstage outreach (one of many engagement with the darknet/undernet, etc). The guys behind UKnova at the time were scared of arrest but they did come in and that discussion was one of the best discussions I’d seen. Thanks to Jem Stone and Ben Metcalfe for setting that up by the way…
Remember what I said about chilling effects?
Torrrentfreak just published about it before I did as I wasnt’ sure if I should, so I left it in the drafts for 12hours… thanks Mark Boas.
Apple have won their case against Samsung…
A US court has ordered Samsung to pay Apple $1.05bn (£665m) in damages after upholding allegations that several Samsung devices had infringed Apple’s intellectual property, including design patents and some functionality.
Samsung has promised to appeal against the decision describing it as “a loss for the American consumer”.
I can only say, the consumer will lose out in Steve Jobs legacy to take down Google…
The chilling effect will be felt…
This camera by Nikon is a win for openness, google and of course android
The first mainstream digital camera to be powered by Google’s Android system has been released by Nikon. The Japanese company’s point-and-shoot Coolpix S800c model is being marketed as a “social imaging device”. Demand for compact cameras has suffered because of the rise of smartphones.
Is it ugly? Maybe a little…
Is it fascinating and a wonderful combination? Yes…
Google always wanted Android everywhere and it started happening a while ago. Now this is just a logical extension of where digital cameras may go. Instead of some crazy proprietary embedded operating system, why not Android?
I’m wondering if I should bite the bullet and install these alpha and beta plugins under Cubicgarden.com? In my mind it seems what you need for a federated/distributed blogging system is just a few plugins away?
OStatus for WordPress turns your blog into a federated social network. This means you can share and talk to everyone using the OStatus protocol, including users of Status.net/Identi.ca and WordPress.com
WhisperFollow turns your wordpress blog into a federated social web client.
In it’s current form it aggregates RSS feeds in a page on your blog called “following” which it creates.
The links it aggregates are the ones from your blogroll with rss feed data.
And many more…
These would be a good time to have a duplicate setup of cubicgarden.com to test these and many more plug-ins out on..