Spanners and such
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Recent audio
The sounds I've been recording recently include:
Saturday, June 27, 2009
What's on my whiteboard?
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Spamming Twitter timeline
Twitter spam comes in waves. There's the wave of people who follow zillions, in the hope that they'll get auto-followed in return by a decent minority. And there's the wave that creates fake re-tweets from well-known users, re-tweeting things that those individuals never said in the first place.
And there's this wave, of people who don't bother to follow many others at all; they're taking advantage of Twitter search and of "trending topics". Churning out dozens of almost identical posts every minute, responding to changing trends and oft-searched terms and cramming as many of them as possible into each Tweet.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Eliss is hard
I love this game, I love the way it's completely different to everything else on the App Store. But blimey it's hard.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Bookmarking the App Store
I wish you could bookmark apps in the iPhone App Store.
This seems to happen quite frequently: I'm browsing around, either within the App Store or elsewhere on the net, and find an app that looks interesting. But it's new on the Store, and no-one else has downloaded it and written any reviews.
I put a lot of trust in the reviews. They're not infallible, but the chances are good that an app with lots of glowing reviews is probably not going to disappoint.
So when I find something interesting, but lacking reviews, I wish there was a way for me to bookmark it, or flag it, or store a note about it somewhere. So that I can come back to it in a few weeks and see what reviews it's picked up in the meantime. Right now, the only option I can see is to hit the "Tell a friend" button and email myself a note about it.
I'd much rather keep some bookmarks in situ, so that I can keep a list of these interesting apps in a place where I'm most likely going to need it, and remember to look at it.
UPDATE
I should have made clearer in that post that I meant the App Store on the iPhone, not the App Store on the desktop.
Derek Almond got in touch to remind me that on the desktop, you can drag links from the App Store and into other apps, or folders, on your computer. So it's possible (if still a little unwieldy, in my opinion) to save App Store locations you want to re-visit.
But this doesn't work inside the iPhone's App Store. I'd like Apple to add some bookmarking functionality inside the app.
"App" is one of those words that starts to sound funny if you say it over and over again.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Crafty stuff
Kate and her friend Teena have been busy getting crafty with knitting and beads. Kate's been making handbags, shrugs, aliens, and cupcakes out of wool; while Teena's been creating necklaces and bracelets and other goodies out of beads.
In a couple of weeks they will be selling at Frome's St Catherine's Artisan Market.
You can see more of their work in this set on Flickr.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
How to sync iCal, Google Calendar, and an iPhone
If you're running Mac OS X 10.5, theory has it that you can get your iCal calendar(s) synced with Google Calendar, because they both support a thing called CalDAV.
I wanted to set this up so that Kate and I could share a calendar while she's at work. I don't have a complicated calendar set-up - in fact, I've made a point of keeping it as simple as possible. I don't want to manage many different calendar files, I just want one.
(In demos, both Apple and Google show calendar apps with multiple calendars on show - one for home, one for work, one for the kids, and so on; I don't see the point of this, so I keep all dates for everything in a single calendar.)
Setting up the sync is OK, and everything seems to work as expected between iCal and Google Calendar.
The problem comes when you add an iPhone to the equation.
The iPhone won't let you add events to a Google-hosted calendar. If the calendar you sync with Google is your only calendar, when you try to add an event on the iPhone, it will create a new local calendar - which ruins everything. This new calendar will get synced to your desktop but not to Google. What a pain in the backside.
There is a solution to this, thanks to Google's support for Exchange Server.
Full instructions are here, but the short explanation is that you can set up your Google Calendar to automagically sync with iCal and the iPhone app.
Google Calendar becomes the central fulcrum around which everything else syncs, taking over that task from iCal.
I shouldn't have to remind you to make backups of your calendar files before attempting to get this working. In iCal, select a calendar, then click File - Export. Simple. Then you can always import from that file if everything goes wrong.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Welcome back, Hawkwings
Hey look, Tim Gaden is back writing Hawkwings again. His blog was always full of interesting stuff, and provided much inspiration for my own Mac blogging at sites like macdevcenter.com, TUAW and the Cult.
I'm not the only one who's pleased about this. Plenty of others have expressed their delight at Tim's return.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Thinking about pamphlets
Pamphleteers were usually wealthy people with time on their hands and opinions they wished to foist upon others. They wrote up their thoughts and paid for them to be printed. More than a leaflet, less than a book: a pamphlet.
Britannica defines a pamphlet as a periodical containing new fewer than 5, and no more than 48 pages. It is unbound and does not have any kind of protective cover. Imagine something akin to a newspaper in presentation, but smaller. And sold purely for the distribution of opinion, rather than for the generation of profit.
Pamphlets began life not long after printing became widely accessible to all. They became an important means of public debate in areas of religion, war, and politics (three topics that were then, and still are, tightly interwoven). They played a part in the English and American Civil Wars, and in the French Revolution.
Many people have described today's blogs as the modern equivalent, but I don't agree. Today's blogs aren't put together with anything like the same thought and preparation that went into a pamphlet.
In the fading light of Bookcamp/Papercamp, I've been thinking about how one might resurrect the pamphlet as pamphlet: a printed thing, between 5 and 48 unbound pages. An object you could sell, or give away to friends.
Hmm. This year's Christmas pressies. Hmm.
Monday, June 22, 2009
How Barney sees me
Friday, June 19, 2009
Open letter to Save the Children New Zealand
Dear Save the Children New Zealand,
Please stop writing letters to me. Really. Please.
It's not that I don't like children, or that I don't think they should be saved. No. Both of those are good.
What bothers me is the appalling money you're wasting by posting letters to me every few weeks. I live on the other side of the world, as my address entry in your database would tell you.
I'm really not sure how I ended up in your database in the first place, but it's clear that I'm there now. Perhaps you might consider doing something about it.
I have asked you before. I emailed you. I wrote to you. But you still keep sending me letters.
Here's an idea: how about you do a search through your database, looking for all the addresses whose country is listed as "UK". Then you get those addresses, export them, and then DELETE them. Yes, delete names from your database. I know that's not something that fundraising organisations are accustomed to, but I really think it would be a good idea under the circumstances.
Anyway, you grab that data export you did, and you send it to your cousins at Save the Children UK. And perhaps they could write to me (just the once, mind you) to ask if I'd like to be on their database.
Then you wouldn't have to waste hell-knows-how-much money posting letters half way round the world.
Just a thought.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Dopplr half-year report coming soon
I've been doing a lot of work for Dopplr recently, including writing copy for things like this announcement of the forthcoming personal report.
Last year's Personal Annual reports were a huge hit. This release covers the last six months, summing up your travel in a similar fashion. One of the neat things about Dopplr is that you can add trips after you've completed them; so if you've been doing some travelling that you'd like to see included in the next report, it's not too late to add the appropriate data.
You've got until the end of June to add trips made since the beginning of the year. After that, the handle on the report-o-matic machine will be cranked, so don't delay.
There's more Dopplr-related excitement on the way in next few months. Watch this space. (And this one too.)
Friday, June 19, 2009
Nice new stuff in iPhone 3.0
A change of OS means a good opportunity to replace ancient wallpaper, and I'm very pleased with this pic of my boy greeting me every time I switch my phone on.
And look, Glyphboard is a lovely idea. It does something actually useful with the copy-paste in 3.0. Smashing.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Perspective
Perspective? You want some perspective?
You should read Michael Hanlon's Eternity. It's a popular science book about Earth's next billion years. The bulk of it is musings based on actual science. It starts with what's happening now in science and technology, and sensibly extrapolates forwards.
The final chapters are more whimsical, sometimes amusing, science-fiction stories set at various stages over the next few hundred million years. Only the first features recognisable humans; later civilisations are insectoid, or simply absent. Animals inherit the planet, and humans are assumed to have either died off, or found somewhere else to live.
What I enjoyed about the book was the way it puts humans in our place, geologically speaking. Our evolution has taken no time at all; we have made the leap from Stone Age to Nuclear Age in a tiny fraction of a sliver of time at the tail end of a single, rather minor, geological age.
We might dominate the planet now, but the chances of there being any trace of our domination 500 million years from now - even just 100 million years from now - are slim indeed. Geology acts on a far grander scale. We might kill ourselves and almost every other living thing, but plate tectonics has its own goals and its own objectives. Mass extinctions have happened before, and new life has evolved rapidly to fill the gaps.
So this isn't a hard science book, it's entertainment. It's supposed to be. But I like the thoughts it provokes. I like the way it shows not just MPs expenses, global financial catastrophe, Swine Flu, and a collapsing Labour Party, but also pretty much all of human endeavour to be what they really are: insignificant trivialities, in comparison to Earth's history to date and future to come. That's what I call perspective.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
9 years ago
Thanks to Meg, I am reminded that 9 years ago, a small bunch of nerds assembled in a pub in King's Cross, there to drink booze and discuss this newfangled "blogging" thing that we'd been doing.
You can't get much more blimey than that, can you?
The pics from the event are still here. How young we look. How carefree. Blimey.
Even more blimey: some of the people who gathered in that pub on that day have gone on to great, great things. They are internationally known experts in their fields. They are invited to speak in front of large audiences. They know their stuff when it comes to internets.
You can see, I hope, why I keep saying blimey.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
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Broadband is a commodity, so sell it
BT's management must have gone mad.
The company has started saying that it thinks the BBC should stump up cash to help it cover the cost of providing broadband to customers, because the BBC's iPlayer app is bandwidth-intensive.
The problem here is nothing to do with the BBC, and everything to do with BT's wish to pull in customers for its low-cost broadband supply business.
It pulls customers in by promising "unlimited" download allowances for Option 3 customers (full details here, but that "unlimited" allowance comes with strings: if you are deemed to be a "very heavy user", your broadband speed will be throttled during peak times (5pm-midnight). The precise nature of "very heavy use" is not specified.
What bothers me isn't what BT are doing, it's the way they're doing it. Broadband is like any other commodity: the more of it you use, the more you should pay.
This is why I decided to get my broadband from a company that is honest about the situation from the outset. Bytemark has always made it clear that it doesn't offer any kind of "unlimited" broadband contract, because it cannot get any kind of "unlimited" bulk supply of bandwidth without additional cost.
In short: if you need more gigabytes per month, you pay for them.
By saying this one moment: "We do not impose any restrictions that affect the viewing quality of services such as BBC iPlayer or Catch Up on Channel4.com or ITV.com, as these stream at up to 800Kbps;" and this the next: "the BBC and other content providers can't expect to continue to get a free ride," BT is demonstrating nothing but its own inflexibility.
Instead of whining and demanding money from the BBC, BT should just simplify its broadband offering and clearly communicate to customers what their pre-defined bandwidth limits are, and how much they'll be charged for extra gigabytes, per gigabyte.
Simple, really. But then it's surprising how often big companies just don't understand simplicity.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
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Wave to un-Wave
I watched the Google Wave introductory video just like everyone else, but a thought keeps bothering me: how will Wave be backwards-compatible with email? (Does it even need to be?)
Let's say you have a Wave account, and you want to start a new conversation with someone who doesn't. I've no doubt that Wave, just like Gmail before it, will allow you to send invites to people. But how might Wave work for people who either don't want to sign up ("Oh no, not another network and another password for me to remember"), or having signed up, don't understand how to use it.
Wave lets me add participants, but can I add participants who are not Wave users? (Hmm: Wavers?) Will there be a field into which I can enter old-school email addresses?
I imagine that this will be fixed by imaginative use of the Wave-as-platform stuff: plugins and extras that will fill these gaps, if they're not filled by Google. In the demo, we saw glimpses of how a Wave can be embedded in a web page or blog. I suspect that there will be something similar for Gmail users - a Wave widget that makes Waves look like Gmail threads.
Something similar might work for most email clients that handle HTML. They will perhaps open an HTML message that embeds the Wave and all its functionality. It will still feel clunky for some people, though, who will see the Wave-as-message but not the Wave-as-client stuff that deals with all the management of your Waves.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
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A few predictions
My six-year-old son is very fond of Enid Blyton's Famous Five stories. He's not yet able to read them himself, but will demand a chapter or so from one every night at bedtime, and knows enough about using the kitchen Mac to be able to stick an audiobook version on whenever he wants to listen to some more.
I didn't read any Famous Five as a kid, so it's been just as much of a new discovery for me as it has been for him. I've been drawn into this curious 1950s era when policemen came running, blowing their whistles. When children could go cycling, or on holiday in a caravan, with no adult supervision and just a loyal mongrel to protect them from danger. When every 12-year-old carried a torch and a compass and a penknife.
There is no welfare state in the Famous Five stories. The poor work very hard and live in discomfort, at best. The middle-class get by and are grateful for it. The wealthy have nothing at all to worry about.
Doctors must be paid for. There's no unemployment benefit. There's no pension for the elderly. Owning property is very expensive, so only the wealthy bother. Everyone else rents property. Travel and entertainment are expensive, too, so people stay local and dream up their own entertainment.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that this is the sort of society we shall be returning to in the UK during the coming decades.
John Lanchester's article for The London Review of Books, It's Finished spells out exactly how deep this nation's troubles have become. We are in more debt than most people can easily imagine, and paying it off will consume our national output for years and years to come.
The results will be devastating for so many things that my generation holds dear. The NHS, free education for all, a guaranteed state pension: all of these, I fear, and many more, will have disappeared within my lifetime.
Some remnant services may linger, but for most of us the realities of life will be similar to the simple, direct realities of the 1950s.
Consulting a doctor will cost money, so people won't do it quite as readily as they do today. Simple colds and fevers will be treated at home, the old-fashioned way.
Similarly, education will be cut back. Perhaps a basic school education will be provided by the state, but for everything else you'll have to pay.
There will be no benefits as we know them today. No regular payouts for the unemployed, and no pensions for anyone at all. Your future will be your problem: if you save enough, and live frugally enough in old age, you'll be able to get by.
Services we take for granted will disappear or be slashed to the minimum: local authority housing, public libraries, public parks, road maintenance, waste collection, public sector care of children, emergency services. Private alternatives will spring up in their place, and they will thrive. But most ordinary people will have to be much more careful with their money. It will be necessary, not just desirable to have a savings account to fall back on when things go wrong.
Public-spirited individuals might voluntarily step forward to maintain a patch of parkland, or loan out books, or cobble together a repair to a dangerous pothole in a busy road. But on the whole, Britain will be a tatty, threadbare place.
We'll manage, most of us. We'll get by. We won't have anything like the same standard of living that we have today, we won't have the luxuries and the carefree consumerism, and many people might say that's a good thing. But we'll look back on the period from 1960 to 2010 and we'll be astonished at how cheap everything was, especially food, petrol, and energy.
OK, so it might not happen exactly this way. It might not be as extreme as this. But I'm convinced that times ahead will be hard, much harder than most of us imagine. I will be amazed if there's any kind of pension for me when I reach retirement age. The whole concept of "retirement" will change, perhaps disappear. You'll work and you'll keep working, because if you stop working, there'll be nothing else for you. I will be surprised if I'm still getting free NHS healthcare by then. I don't expect there to be any sort of state benefits.
Gloomy? Yes. Pessimistic? Yes, uncharacteristically for me. But it's the future I'm expecting, and the one that I keep thinking that I really ought to start planning for.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
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Slow slow Quicktime
So what on earth would I be doing with this many audio files open at once? Some of them, I'll have you know, are even slightly interesting to listen to.
Friday, June 05, 2009
Polaroid also-rans
Friday, June 05, 2009
Mucky screen
Yuk. Mucky screen, spotted in the sunlight on the train while en route to London yesterday.
Friday, June 05, 2009
Today's also-rans
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
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Summer harvest
The salad crop in the last couple of weeks has been spectacular. Bucketloads of rocket, radishes, and other unidentifiable green leaves. We can grab a bowlful like this for every meal, and by the next day the plants seen to have sprouted a complete replacement. I know they won't last forever (some are going to seed already), but when they're so productive it feels like they will.
And my spuds are growing very fast. Getting excited about the spud harvest later in the year. Oh yes.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
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App Of The Week: WriteRoom
(About a week before I [amicably] stopped writing for Cult of Mac, I had a phone conversation with Leander Kahney in which we discussed ideas for things we could do with the site. One of the ideas on my list was "App of the week", where we Cult contributors would quickly churn out a Q&A-style post about an app we think deserves more attention. Below is a sample post I wrote to show how it might work, but that I never showed to Leander. I'm pleased that this idea has made it on to the site in my absence, as an apparently-regular feature called "Cult of Mac Favorite".)
WHAT IS IT? WriteRoom
WHERE CAN I GET IT? From Hog Bay Software.
WHAT DOES IT DO? It’s a full screen text editor and word processor. It will open standard plain text or rich text documents and let you edit them in a distraction-free environment, with all your other apps hidden from sight.
WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT IT? So many things, it’s hard to know where to start. The full screen editing is superb. It smoothly switches from full screen to window mode with a tap on the Escape key. It has a live word count (even in window mode), which pro writers go all drooly over. It can keep the line you’re currently editing centered, so you don’t have to bend your head down to look at the bottom of your screen all the time. It talks nicely to other apps (for example, MarsEdit allows you to set WriteRoom as an external editor). It’s just generally fantastic for anyone who has to do a lot of writing. Like me.
MARKS OUT OF TEN: 11
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
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Comparing music streams
What do the music streaming services say to me?
Last.fm says: "We know what songs people are listening to. If you're listening to song A, and lots of other people have listened to song A and song Z, we think you will like song Z."
Pandora says: "We know which songs are similar in musical tone, structure, key, tone and style. If you like song A, and our database suggests that song Q has a similar style or sound, we think you will like song Q."
Spotify says: "We've got this bunch of songs. You have to listen to an ad every 20 minutes or so, but if you pay us some money that won't happen."
Perhaps it's my age, but I prefer Spotify's offering because on the whole, I prefer listening to albums. If it's new music I'm after, I'll probably ask friends what they're listening to, or just switch on the radio.
(The problem with listening to the radio is that I have to be sharp-eared and near a computer to jot down, search for, and perhaps download music from artists that I hear and I like. That can be disadvantageous. Radcliffe and Maconie played something amazing last night while I was cooking, and I wasn't fast enough to write it down. Thankfully theirs is one of the programmes that has full tracklistings online within a day or so of broadcast, so I'll be able to catch up later.)
Just listening to "Leaders of the free world" by Elbow. Amazing album.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
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