Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
in fusion rollercoaster from the ground from Ian Forrester on Vimeo.
I resized the Blip.TV version down from 1280 x 720 to 640 x 360 to match the Flickr version, but otherwise I've done nothing to the quality or videos. Vimeo also won't let you embed the HD version, so your looking at the lower quality version stretched
So the last month I've been working my butt off on a load of things, but its all coming together (crosses his fingers) but enough about that for now. I'm also off to a few places in the near future.
First up I'm talking at Thinking Digital: The next generation which is this Friday in the Sage, Gateshead. Its aimed at university students, graduates and young professionals in the North East. Its already sold out I'm sorry to say, but its going to be a good day for everyone involved.
Directly afterwards is the Oreilly Maker Faire which is the first one in the UK and looks like a weekend of hacker joy. I'm working in a small team from the BBC so hopefully we're create something pretty impressive together. I'm hoping to just learn a bit of processing or solider my old bluetooth headset into something interesting.
I have never been to South by South West (SXSW) as I can never really justify it. Instead I'm going to Microsoft's Mix 2009 which is in Las Vegas. Thanks to Eileen Brown me and Rainycat to talk and discuss BBC Backstage at this great event. I'm hoping some of the other work we've been working on involving video will also be ready to announce in Las Vegas too. Good things tend to come out of Mix 09 including the RSS stuff from Microsoft so who knows whats in the pipeline for this year. I won't lie but I can't wait to get back on Speed the ride. Last time I did 8 in a row and could easily do more this time.
Coming back from Mix 09, the weekend after is BarCampLondon6 and BarCampBournemouth the weekend after that. Depending on how things go I might have to drop out of one of them. We'll see how much work I got on and whats also going in the North around those times.
Its then not long till my 30th birthday. I'm still working out the plans but it looks like the Friday night I'll go out in either Manchester/London/Bristol, then on the Saturday another city then Sunday its Alton Towers for a day of riding as many Rollercoasters as possible.
As Rain pointed out, I might be getting a little too excited as I uploaded HD versions of my last rollercoster trip to Blackpool pleasure beach to Flickr (who now support HD videos under 90s). But I can honestly say I was just testing the HD support and had nothing under 90secs except this clips. I'm actually wondering about the quality of Flickr vs BlipTV vs Vimeo. I hear Vimeo have the best compressions of all but I'm sure Flickr have worked hard on this problem too.
Its going be a hectic month but for good reasons…time to quickly update my dopplr which looks crazy.
I love the taste of Pepsi Raw and Redbull Cola. Now to be fair neither Redbull or PepsiCo have claimed there drinks are (air quotes) Healthy
so you can't really blame them if people who can not read the labels start chunking it down there throats like there going out of fashion. I actually like the taste of these drinks, they taste very watered down but in a good way. There's still caffeine included so you always get that slight pick me up too. What I don't like about these drinks however is the prices. I was traveling back from Bristol the other day and stopped in at WHSmiths in Bristol Temple meads for a drink for the journey. I kid you not the Pepsi Raw in a 250ml can was selling for 1.79. That is almost 3x the amount of a standard Pepsi 330ml can or in the same store 2.5x. Pepsi may claim Raw is a premium product but at that price its a total luxury. Redbull Cola isn't far off that price either I have to day. If your lucky you might find it in a supermarket for just over a pound but some places are add as much as 50 pence on top of the supermarket prices.
So I finally saw and was seriously impressed. This is a adult film thru and through, so don't expect your usual good vs evil comic book crap. Its certainly up there with 300, Sin City and The Spirit. i won't spoiler it for anyone, so will keep the review for another day.
I didn't watch it on the imax, I choose to watch it on Odeon's Digital projector. Don't get me wrong I like imax but I'm always disappointed when its used for feature films. The setup of imax is different and I think its like using a stereo amp for home cinema, you can do it but you don't really want to. Anyway from the moment the trailers finished and they switched to the digital projector, you could clearly see the difference. All that noise you get with film is almost totally gone. Some of you may say they like that film grain or texture but I don't like it and worst still is that spot when the film is running out and you get that jump where film has been spliced together. Watchmen was flawless through-out. The sound was clear and loud enough for a film of its genre. Actually the only thing which spoiled the film was of course people talking and nipping out for the loo.
When I watched this review of the Pacemaker, I almost had to shut down my laptop because I was so pissed off at the stupid review of the pacemaker by Techcrunch's Crunchgear. The guy, John Biggs spend at least 10secs of looking at the box rather than playing with the device. Even when playing with it, he simply uses the crossfader to go back and forth. Now to be fair John does say in the short paragraph.
I apologize in advance for this video but I’m trying my hardest to make great mixes on my Pacemaker. Sadly, the fact that I’m old and live in my attic is causing a severe reaction to cool.
But this is certainly not the way to show off a pacemaker.
I'm in the lucky position of buying in this housing market. I say lucky as in more lucky that others who have seen there expensive houses quickly de-value over the last year. But there is little I can do about that, I'm very sorry to say. So flats in Manchester are coming down in price pretty quickly, Some of the flats which were on the market for 180-200k are now down to 125k and sometimes less. Currently if your looking at a two bedroom and two bathroom place in central Manchester it will set you back anywhere between 95k – 145k depending on location and size. These are also guide prices so you can easily put in offers well below these prices.
I have seen a few places I like and a couple I love but only recently have considered putting in offers on one. But if you were in my position what would you do so? I do have a time limit of a year for reasons best not discussed here. A lot of people have said, wait it out it will go down even more. Some have even been brave enough to attempt to put a date when things will get so low. I've recently been doing some research into this and found Home.co.uk quite useful if a little behind on its real time stats.
Flat Sale Prices in Manchester in December 2008: 150 flats, with a average price of £124,021 and a median price of £106,500. Current asking prices is also quite interesting. But going by this information Manchester will keep a reasonable price for its property no matter what happens?
Thousand Portraits from Carlo Nicora on Vimeo.
Our project is a true portrait of Britain created by photographing 1,000 people.
We stopped everyone who crossed our path on the streets of London, excluding nobody, asking the same question more than fifteen hundred times.
In a moment where recession is the main subject of every discussion, it was striking to come across such positive attitude.
I love the idea but one thing pain's me about this project. All the shots were taken in London but this is meant to be the portrait of Britain? Thats simply not right and a real let down for such a nice project.
XBMC Media Center, the free, open source, cross-platform media-player and entertainment hub.
Guests: Scott Davilla and Jonathan Marshall for XBMC
XBMC is a free, open source (GPLv2+) media center application available for Linux, Mac OS X, AppleTV, Windows and the original XBox. It allows users to view, organize, and play back media from an attractive user interface. It utilizes many other FLOSS projects in order to play back almost any media available, and can obtain additional metadata information for albums, artists, TV shows and movies from online sources. And all of this can be achieved from the the couch via a remote control.
There are many skins that allow users to theme the look and feel of XBMC to fit into a user's current system, and many plugins and addons that extend functionality, offering access to online content such as Hulu or Apple Movie Trailers from within XBMC.
The project originated in 2001-2002, with XBox Media Player being developed for the original Microsoft XBox. XBox Media Center was a rewrite of this in 2003, and in 2007 it was ported to Linux and later to Mac OS X, Windows, and the Apple TV, becoming known simply as XBMC. The first, official stable release of XBMC in its current incarnation was XBMC 8.10 (Atlantis), released at the end of October 2008.
Boxee was also discussed. Boxee is a freeware cross-platform media center software with social networking features that is a fork of the open source XBMC media center software with some custom and proprietary additions. Marketed as the first ever “social media center,” Boxee enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social networking features. Boxee is still under development and is currently only available as Alpha releases for Mac OS X (Leopard and Tiger), Apple TV, and Linux for computers with Intel processors, with the first Alpha made available on the 16th of June 2008. A Microsoft Windows alpha version of Boxee was released in January 2009, but is currently available only by private invitation.
When I first saw the Beetham Tower or the Deansgate tower I quickly liked Manchester. It says a lot about where Manchester is and where its going. It was great to see Vertical City cover it, a shock because I never really thought of it as anything special compared to the rest of the worlds skyscrapers. Lovely looking and almost affordable to live in but nothing like 1 Canada Square or 375 Park Avenue. I think you can catch up with the whole thing on 4OD if you missed it.
As the tallest residential skyscraper in the UK, Manchester's distinctive Beetham Tower is turning heads and dividing opinion.
Heading up a new generation of skyscrapers that are regenerating Britain's post-industrial cities, Beetham is at the heart of a battle between traditionalists and modernists.
Despite producing some of the world's leading architects such as Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, Britain isn't exactly enamoured with skyscrapers.
And this reluctance to embrace the high-rise even extends to the country's future king, Prince Charles.
This is so insane. Boxee is doing nothing wrong and even the Hulu team have no real problem with whats going on. But oh no the content providers can't understand the whole situation and have demanded Hulu be removed from Boxee. The users are going to lose out big time in this. We really need to educate the content providers about this new world of digital distribution. This is from the Boxee blog…
we love Hulu. they have built a great product and brand (including one the best Superbowl ads this year). since our early days in private alpha, Hulu was the most requested site by our users. so we built support for browsing Hulu on boxee, reached out to Hulu, and on Oct 20th, 2008 shared it with our alpha testers. the response has been amazing. people love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. last week we generated more than 100,000 streams for them…
two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing.
our goal has always been to drive users to legal sources of content that are publicly available on the Internet. we have many content partners who are generating revenue from boxee users and we will work with Hulu and their partners to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.
we will tell them how users love Hulu on boxee, why it represents a great opportunity for them to better engage with fans of their shows, how boxee can help in exposing their content to new people, and why they should be excited about future opportunities of working with us.
In the i'm a pirate and what you going to do about it session at Beebcamp, it was identified that streaming could be the answer to bit torrent downloads for most users. But with decisions like this one, there's almost no choice but to look to the darkside for the same content. I'm really hoping the BBC is stronger that Hulu and won't remove the unofficial iplayer plugin from Boxee. I actually just helped a friend get boxee setup because he would like to watch BBC content on his TV instead of his laptop. There a family which don't really watch live TV and own a Apple TV, Boxee with iplayer makes tons of sense for them and I'm sure many others…
Fear not the users of Boxee, the Boxee team are collaboratively working out a pitch for the content producers. If its any good, it could be very useful for other content producers large and small. I highly suggest everyone get in there and add to there pitch.