Some time ago I discovered Spaces, the Virtual Desktop utility that comes with Mac OSX. It took a while to get used to the extra step of switching desktops instead of juggling with bringing windows to the top, but once I'd got the hang of it, then I wondered how I'd ever managed when I had a single over-crowded screen. As switching between desktops has become second nature, I've begun to wonder if there are any ways to extend the ease of use and immediacy any further...
One thought was to replace the keyboard key-press with a mouse click, but I used to use a three button mouse when I used Unix, and my fingers are happier with just a couple of choices. Squeezing a mouse feels wrong to me, too. The finger-gestures on the new AppleMagic Mouse might be a way forward, and I'll check that the next time I'm in an Apple Store (or find someone with a Magic Mouse - I've always found that talking with another user is a good way to shortcut the learning cycle).
But it turns out that there are a few software solutions that make virtual desktops easier to use, so here's a few things to consider.
- Dockland Soft'sSpacesuit is a free utility that allows you to have different wallpapers for each desktop, so you get immediate visual feedback as you change desktop. But Dockland are into more than just extra wallpaper - Fantastik is a neat 'window preview' switcher system that offers an alternative way to sort out multiple windows.
- The CocoaBots' Hyperspaces is an alternative wallpaper-per-space utility that also allows you to colorize/tint one background image differently for each desktop.
- Once you start looking for alternative wallpapers for desktops, then you also find utilities that extend the basic Finder functionality. One example is Conjure 3 from Conjurebunny. Another (early beta) example is here.
There seems to be an evolution in progress here. Multi-touch tables, Magic Mouse, and iPhone seem to be influencing people to increase the tactile aspects of screens, and it seems to be leading to something of which we are only seeing glimpses so far. I'm reminded of other 3D-influenced utilities like the Cooliris image browser, and I also remember previous bursts of 'user interface' innovation activity like the transition from the one-app-at-once Finder via the Switcher to the many-apps-at-once MultiFinder and alternatives like the Slave beta from (I think) Steve Capps...
What I'm certain of is that there's plenty of things to explore in this area, and that having a different wallpaper for each virtual desktop is only the beginning.
You may have seen the news about the failure of epic proportions by Eurostar last night that is continuing into today (Saturday 19th December), which is rapidly turning into a PR disaster for the train operator. But the news media are concentrating on the experience of the passengers, so I thought I would give the story from the viewpoint of a parent of a young adult on the train.
In these days of digital connectedness (something which Eurostar, their web-site, their Twitter feed, their PR company, and presumably the duty manager with the mobile phone seem to have missed out on) you feel very connected. So at 21:50 last night we knew that the 9059 Eurostar from Gare du Nord in Paris was 'waiting to enter the tunnel' after already being delayed leaving Paris. Then we heard nothing. After half an hour then the train should have been through the tunnel. Mobile phone and texts (SMS) got no reply, which suggested either the train was still inside the tunnel, or mobile telephony had failed in Kent, and given the way that even a slight bit of snow in the UK causes total chaos, this didn't seem very unlikely!
Just out of curiosity, I had a look at Twitter, and discovered the #Eurostar tag was already buzzing with people asking about what was happening? It seems that people at St. Pancras were not getting any useful information, and the train ahead of the 9059 had not arrived. As usual, Twitter was several hours ahead of any news services, and the web-sites of Eurostar (ridiculously jolly at a time of crisis, but then this was true right through to the middle of the following day - thank goodness for spin and positive PR in an emergency), National Rail, Eurotunnel (who did eventually put some information on their web-site! - a few hours into Saturday morning, hours after it had first broken on Twitter), or the BBC News web-site (the BBC were late catching up, obviously were not watching Twitter, and I left a hot-line message and an email telling them to watch Twitter for some breaking news!) were blissfully ignorant of the developing crisis until several hours had passed an we were into Saturday morning. The one shining light on Twitter was Ali Bunkall, a reporter from Sky News, who used Twitter to convey much needed information to worried and concerned relatives - full marks to Sky News, Big fails to everyone else who were obviously sleeping and unaware.
So there we were, approaching midnight, no news from the train, and wondering what was happening. So I tried enquiring by phone from info on the Internet and Teletext. I'm always struck by the way that companies are determined to stop you contacting them by phone, and even when you do get a number, then you get put in a queue that tells you they value your call, etc. etc. Eurostar's number was wierd: the number on Teletext had a recorded announcement saying that the number had changed. Phoning the new number got through to another recorded announcement that gleefully informed me that this was outside of working hours, and that I should call back when they were open. Now Eurostar may have been closed for its office staff, but it was still operating trains, and so they were not 'closed for business', they were operational. An operational company should be contactable, or should present up-to-date information on the web, or by Twitter, or by recoded announcements on a telephone line. How about an emergency telephone number? For this kind of emergency? Have they thought about crisis management with all those millions of euros in investment?
So then I tried National Rail enquiries. Seemed like a good idea. But it wasn't. The person I spoke to stone-walled me totally. They commented that they had had several enquiries about Eurostar, and suggested that I contact Eurostar. When told that the number was 'out of hours, please ring in working hours', they claimed that they had no way of contacting the operational part of Eurostar. So I asked for the supervisor, explained the situation, and was told that they had no way to contact an operating train company, plus the train was not in the UK, it was in the tunnel. So I asked for their supervisor, and got passed back to the first person. I suggested that there must be a way to contact the people at Eurostar who were operating the trains and was told that this was not possible. So I then asked how I could complain at the total and complete lack of help that they had provided, asking them if the conversation had been recorded ("yes") and was told that I could not complain because it was nothing to do with them - it was with Eurostar and a train that was not technically 'in the UK'. National Rail enquiries could not have been less helpful, and they join the growing list of casualties from above.
Next was 999, which got us to more 'no current information', presumably because they weren't watching Twitter! But they did say they would try to find out and ring us back. Which they did. Full marks to Suffolk Police who were totally brilliant. Apparently it IS possible to talk to the operational part of Eurostar, but National Rail enquiries will not let members of the public do it, you have to go via the emergency services. So finally we discovered, via an official route, that trains were stuck in the Channel Tunnel. Of course, we already suspected this via Twitter, but it was good to have it confirmed.
And so it went on. Sky News man Ali Bunkall had best info via Twitter, web-sites zero, TV news gradually catching on to a major story so that at 3 am they had a Eurostar 'spokesperson' on who blamed the cold weather, said that there had been 'no causalties' ... 'at the moment' and generally did very little to reassure worried/frantic parents/relatives. A few hours later a different and more 'spin-prepared' spokesperson was presenting a rather more carefully worded and neutral position, again blaming the weather.
Finally, just after 4 am, after about 5 hours of very little information (and most of that from Twitter and not from conventional 'News' services) we got phoned from the 9059 train, which was now out of the tunnel... but this was only the beginning...
I lived through the infamous move of 'The X-Files' from BBC2 to BBC1, where allegedly no two episodes were on at the same time or day ever again, and viewing figures plummeted (allegedly).
So I'm intrigued to see that Defying Gravity, the already-cancelled-after-the-first-season TV show (Firefly, anyone?), partly funded with the money from my TV licence by the BBC, is moving around in exactly the same way. The opening was promising: Pilot and first episode on back-to back, on a Thursday night on BBC2, and this almost seemed to be a stable location, until after only a few episodes it was moved to Saturday night, and then moved to a later slot, and next week, to an even later slot. It is an old and tired game - find the moving programme, and I'm not impressed. Worse, after a slow start, Defying Gravity is starting to get better as it goes along, and is rapidly becoming a must-watch.
Just as an experiment, I'd like EastEnders and Coronation Street to be moved around in the schedules every episode the way some other programmes are...
Update: 7th December 2009.
The usual pattern continues. This weekend there was no episode of Defying Gravity at all, but there will be next weekend. So here's the pattern:
TV Scheduling's tricks, twists and turns...
First, show the pilot and first episode back to back.
Second, show a few episodes at the same time and on the same day as the pilot.
Then, move it to another day and time.
Then, move it later on that day, and then later, and then later. Make sure that any sporting, political or other event that occurs is used as an excuse to move an episode with no warning, or better, to defer showing that episode until after the whole series has ended (if at all).
Then don't show it at all one weekend, but make sure that you repeat some previous episodes twice, again on movable times and days.
Then show two episodes back to back, so that anyone who misses them loses out big-time and has a lot of catching up to do.
Then wait a few weeks and show the last two episodes back to back when there's something major on at least two other channels.
Finally, make sure you don't repeat the last two episodes, ever...
As I get older, my memory seems to be morphing/degrading/evolving(?)/improving(?) into a turbulent combination of 'fast and accurate' as I've always known it, mixed with annoyingly flaky 'near-recollections' where I can almost get to the thing I'm thinking of (sometimes so close I can almost taste it, almost have it on the tip of my tongue ready to say...), but it doesn't and won't quite resolve to the actual name.
With this in mind, here is where I'm going to collect things that flash into my head that fit into this category. You'll see what I mean when you see the examples:
Films/Movies Half-Remembered The Men Who Glare at Stoats <=> The Men Who Stare at Goats The Fifth Elephant <=> The Fifth Element Robin Hood: Prints of Thebes (Dirty postcards, anyone?) <=> Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Willow, the presumed Buffy spin-off that curiously seems to have no obvious connection with anything in the Buffy canon... The Bourne Something Else <=> Identity, Supremacy, Ultimatum Blend It With Beckham (presumably a product endorsement TV cookery show!) <=> Bend It Like Beckham
The Dixie Dregs <=> The Dixie Chicks(both exist!) Boomerang, currently wowing them on their 11th come-back tour! Dromedary, 70s prog rock band noted for long guitar solos. The Dreadful Grate <=> The Grateful Dead
Jokes That Need More Work
What colour are car-keys? A brown/green colour (Khaki!)
As always, I'll add to the list when I can, so until then, I'll apologise for its brevity, but I hope that there's a least a smile in there already!
In the Grand Theft Auto video game, one of the many modes of transport is freely available in most parts of the game space - cars (obviously, if you are swimming around in the water then there are fewer cars, but...). Getting a car is very straight forward - you stand in front of a car, or approach one stopped at traffic lights, open the door and pull the driver out, then take their place and drive off. And so car-jacking just gets added to the list of crimes that you can carry out in this game ...
What's curious is that the ease of car-jacking in GTA seems to be spreading into the real world -well, at least, the unreal world of music videos. In the recent Robbie Williams 'Bodies' single release that starts off with a brilliant dance bass-line (via Trevor Horn, no less) and then goes in a different direction (balladic, no less), there's a scene where a woman with sunglasses turns up in a beach buggy (aka a dune buggy) and slows down to a stop, seemingly to offer the strolling Robbie a lift. In a striking piece of editing, one minute the woman is smiling at Robbie from the driver's seat, the next moment Robbie has vaulted in and is driving the beach buggy with the woman with sunglasses magically transported to the passenger seat. It happens so fast and so smoothly that I had to watch it again to make sure I was seeing things correctly. Magic!
Now, I'm rather unfamiliar with the type of lift offering where the person you offer the lift to then drives the car, but it seems rather peculiar to me, especially when the woman continues to smile throughout as if giving your car to a perfect stranger was the most natural thing in the world. Of course, I'm sure that Robbie's PR people have a perfectly reasonable back-story that explains why this is totally explainable and not how it might appear, but then I'm sure that the Rockstar Games PR people have equally good explanations for the 'car-loan' scheme alternative that occurs in GTA as well.
It's a good thing that video games and music videos are not meant to accurately represent the real world, where people of both genders can drive cars without their major concern being the fear of someone arbitrarily taking over the task without warning. The truly remarkable thing is the title of the album from which the music video track is taken: Reality Killed the Video Star. In this case, the reality seems curiously lacking for one video star...
My kids continually amaze me with their internet-enabled awareness. A few recent instances of this show some interesting trends that affect how content providers should be thinking about making new content.
'It's like...'
My kids surf any available TV channels, looking for ones to watch (for about 5 seconds or less before flicking to another channel) AND ones to avoid (which are then studiously ignored forever, scorned and derided - you don't want to be on their 'tell everyone this channel is (insert current term of low esteem)' list). But their surfing is informed by their internet surfing - the internet is their source of pointers and critical thinking from their peers.
So 'How I met your Mother' is described as being 'Like 'Friends', but everyone is Ross'. Which is partly innate knowledge from years of watching repeats/reruns of Friends, and partly opinion from the internet: 'everyone says...'.
More surprising was the comment from my son about 'Being Erica', which is apparently 'like Quantum Leap'. Now this is more interesting because it is a late 80s / early 90s TV programme that hasn't been repeated/rerun in his lifetime... It turns out that my complete set of QL DVDs haven't gone unnoticed, but the internet acted as reinforcement.
So it may be no longer possible to recycle old media ideas and formats, secure in the knowledge that people will have forgotten the old version. My kids are very aware, and very scathing about re-use of ideas, unless, as with 'Being Erica' there is sufficient effort visibly expended in building on the old idea. So 'Heroes' was abandoned by my kids when they realised that once you have people who can do anything, anything can happen, and there's no consistency of storyline, explanations can be overturned, etc. Superhero stories work because of the limitations of the characters, not their powers, and with infinite possibilities comes infinite boredom and lack of motiviation to stay interested.
Finally, there's big categorisations - like 'Jennifer Aniston Movies', which I didn't think of as a genre, but which is increasingly mentioned in the same breath as 'What have they done since Friends?'. A youth that is connected and informed, and critical - maybe there is hope for humankind!
Apparently he had been in a car with some mates on the way home, and going around a roundabout a car had pulled onto the roundabout ahead of them from the left. One of them noticed that it looked unusual, and my son got his iPhone out. They didn't get very close, and had to turn off at the next roundabout, but my son did get some shaky pictures of what seems to be a DeLorean DMC-12 sports car...
Trying to take photos in a car which is attempting to catch up with an albeit legendarily allegedly slow sports car is never easy, and the photos go some way to proving this!
Of course, if this was CSI-world, then we would be able to digitally 'enhance' the photos, get the numberplate, see the driver's face, extract a 3D model, notice that the front left tyre was slightly deflated, etc. Unfortunately...
I have had an idea for a new television programme format: 'Have Your Say'. It is based on something which has intrigued me for some time, and I've now realised that it would make a great format for television, so I'm giving it away for free.
The thing that has always intrigued me are the sometimes curious, sometimes inexplicable, and sometimes intriguing decisions that are made by people who have ultimate control over what happens in television programmes. Recent examples could include:
-Why did season 3 of Primeval start out with its main character, but lose him and his love interest by half-way through the season, and then introduce a replacement who behaved in much the same way?
-Why did the Doctor Who publicity machine set up Martha Jones as the next Companion, only to lose her rapidly, and then quickly introduce a different new Companion?
-Why didn't Derren Brown actually explain how he did the Lottery prediction, on the subsequent 'How it was Done' programme?
(I'm sure you have your own questions!)
As you can imagine, there are lots of these types of questions, and whilst TV is full of investigative programmes about customer service, politics, crime, and the paranormal, TV itself is rarely held up to account for itself.
The format goes like this: Program researchers locate and investigate anomalous activity in TV decision making. Reporter presents results and identifies those responsible, who are invited to explain. Public then votes on which explanation they believe.
There's a lot to recommend this format. It uses skills that already exist (investigative reporting), there is no travelling required because the stories are all from the same place that the programmes themselves are made, the public voting will bring in much-needed cash, and the public gets to hear some interesting, amusing and maybe even plausible explanations - plus the public gets a chance to 'have their say' on how acceptable the explanations are!
Finally, some people might be already thinking of another format that already has broad television coverage, plus a voting scheme, but it only happens every few years: Politics.
Every so often, someone says something that indicates that a revolution has happened. Often, the person who says it does not realise the true significance of their words. It happened recently in the Radio Times, a venerable television (and radio!) listings magazine in the UK, and probably one of the oldest such magazines in the world.
In a interview, Julia McKenzie, the latest actress to fill the role of Agatha' Cristie's 'Miss Marple' on the small screen in the UK, said that people would have to get used to her replacing any previous holders of the role. Now I have no problems with the quote, nor Julia McKenzie, and there are people who have called this arrogance, but I'm not one of them.
Instead, I think that it is a remarkable statement that completely misses the point, and in doing so, it reveals some fascinating things about what is happening to television. Why do I think this? Here's why:
Julia's statement says that people have to accept that she is going to be the Miss Marple that they will see on their televisions, but neither is actually true. There is now nothing to stop people watching any of the previous Miss Marples, and so the Miss Marple that appears on televisions could be any one of them - via repeats on terrestrial channels, DVDs, satellite/cable channels that re-run programmes, internet players like the BBC's runaway success: iPlayer, etc. So Julia may not be the Miss Marple that people see, nor do people have to accept her in that role. People now have a choice, and her statement clearly indicates that she thinks they do not. Now this did indeed used to be the case: before video recording became a commodity, and before digital hard disk recording of TV (PVRs, TiVo, Sky Plus, etc), and before the internet, then you watched broadcast television, or you didn't - just two choices.
But things are not like that anymore. There are many ways to watch television, and all of them give people choice where they used to have none. And rather like giving people access to personal transportation devices like cars/automobiles, taking them away isn't going to be easy. The freedom that people now have to watch what they want, when they want to, is going to be very difficult to take away. But there's more to it than that.
People are now used to flexibility in watching television in some ways, but there are other flexibilities that are yet to come. The next digital revolution involves what happens inside a television programme, instead of what happens around it. The coming generation of television will enable us to change what happens inside a programme, what we want to happen, when we want it to happen. Miss Marple will never be the same again!
Waveforms are often used as visual metaphors for sound. In actuality, the shape of the waveform is a poor representation because you can only see the top 30 dB of the harmonic content - the rest is hidden in the thickness of the line that is used to draw the waveform and other difficulties of trying to represent a large dynamic range in a medium that has only a tiny dynamic range (a waveform diagram). But the metaphor is useful, and as long as the sound is the important thing, then crude waveform diagrams are acceptable as symbols.
Possibly the most interesting use of sounds that were presented as waveforms was in the early 1980s, when German synthesizer pioneer Wolfgang Palm and his company, PPG (Palm Products GmbH) produced a series of leading-edge 'wavetable' synthesizers that used digital techniques at a time when analogue was king and Yamaha's DX series of FM synthesizers were being developed in Japan. Digital synthesis in a popular and affordable form is often credited as appearing with the DX7, but PPG's 'Wave' series of wavetable synthesizers used (for the time) sophisticated digital sound generation with analogue filtering and enveloping. By changing rapidly from one waveform to another - called sweeping' through a table of waveforms (a wavetable) - the sound generation produced much more complex and evolving sounds than more conventional synthesizers of the time with sine, square, sawtooth and triangle waveforms. I was hooked, and I've been a champion of wavetables ever since, although I also have weaknesses for FM and additive synthesis too, and I'm very confortable with subtractive synthesis.
So when I heard that a new Live Pack was available for Ableton Live, that provided lots of waveform samples and used Live's Instrument Racks and Simpler sample replay engine to produce wavetable-like sounds, then I downloaded the demo, auditioned the sounds, and liked what I heard. Very soon afterwards, I bought the complete set: Waveforming, from MESA+ (and not to be confused with the Dutch Nanotechnology research institute). Waveforming provides 66 multi-sampled wave-samples, 270 Instrument Racks (plus Simpler Presets) as well as a few drum kits, sound effects, and sample songs (provided as Live Sets, so you caan delve into them and see exactly how the sounds are used in context!).
The sounds cover a wide range, and fall into very few of the classic wavetable cliche traps. I was very impressed with the breadth of sounds, and their usability - I was able to find timbres to fill all the niches I wanted, and overall the sounds seemed fresh and very usable (as well as offering lots of customisation options through macro controls, and lots of room for making new sounds by using the supplied samples). Of course, sound is very much a personal thing, and so these are my own subjective opinions, but I think I'm going to use the Waveforming sounds a lot!
Thoroughly recommended - try out the demo and see if your ears like it too!
I've covered this problem before in a previous post, but it has resurfaced in a new variant, so it is time to mention it yet again.
Here are the symptoms: For the second time, my iPhone won't download photos to my Mac. This time, Image Capture refuses to acknowledge that my iPhone is even connected to my Mac, even though iTunes knows it is connected and is quite happy to sync it.
In fact, my newly updated to 8.2.1 version of iTunes was very happy to download and install the 3.0.1 firmware update to my iPhone recently, and I began to put two and two together...
My iPhone dock has been repeatedly reporting that it is not an Apple accessory (it is!) for some time, but it connects to my Mac via a USB hub, and I have been reading up on the Palm Pre debacle recently, where Palm and Apple are seem by some to be fighting an escalating war of attrition.
Many people seem to think that iTunes should be forced to connect to non-Apple USB devices because iTunes is popular (not sure I understand this, but...). It seems that each time Apple try to re-assert their right to make their software talk to their devices (standard practice for proprietary device software - my HP printer drivers do not work with printers from any other manufacturer, and I would not expect them to, nor would I expect any other printer manufacturer to try to make their printers talk to the HP software drivers), then Palm alter their device's software so that it will talk to iTunes.
Allegedly some part of the recent updates increase the tests that iTunes makes to determine if a USB device connected to it is actually made by Apple. One of the side effects of this seems to be that my iPhone is no longer recognized by Image Capture, and so I can no longer download photos from my iPhone to my Mac.
This was confirmed when I removed the USB hub, and connected my iPhone dock directly to my Mac. Suddenly Image Capture was able to see my iPhone, and I could download photos again. Prior to the updates the hub had not prevented this from happening. Putting the hub back in between the Mac and the iPhone dock made Image Capture unable to detect the iPhone again. Hmmm...
So it appears that collateral damage is happening as a result of Apple and Palm's activities. If you can't download photos from your iPhone, then try removing your USB hub and connecting your dock straight into your Mac... It worked for me, although if the current activities continue to escalate, then this topic may well surface yet again.
(Later) Actually, this was only a partial solution. The next time I tried to download photos, even with no hub present, and my dock connected directly into the Mac, Image Capture still refused to acknowledge that the iPhone was connected, even though iTunes disagreed and happily did a sync.
I'm also less than happy that my iPhone dock gives false (I'm not an Apple product) reports - apparently due to wear and tear on the connector, which seems weird given that the connector is bound to see lots of use... I do wonder if all of these are connected?
Conflict creates casualties, and this time it was me, an innocent bystander, who was hurt, if only metaphorically and sometimes recoverably. Let's hope that this can be solved amicably and we can return to a world where things don't suddenly stop working.
Back in 2004, my main synthesizer, a wonderful Yamaha SY99, suffered from floppy drive failure. I got a replacement drive from the UK Yamaha Service Department, and because installing it was an interesting challenge, I wrote it up and made it available via my web-site. You can find it here, if you are interested.
Since then, others who have had similar floppy drive failures have come to me, and I've been meaning to update the pages with all the information that I've learned since 2004. It turns out that the floppy drives seem to fail after just over ten years because they use a belt drive system instead of the direct drive that you would find in more recent floppy drives. Of course, floppy drives have been largely replaced by those tiny sticks that have many names: Flash drives, USB drives...
So I've just spent a day writing up my latest discoveries about the SY99s floppy drive... And it seemed like it was happening very slowly. My major problem was the tables that I had made in a spreadsheet, showing the pins on the connectors and their function. Converting this to HTML so that I could put it onto a web-page didn't seem to be possible, so I did it by hand - slowly and painstakingly. If you look at the site referenced above, then you will find my hand-crafted tables there, in all their glory.
It then struck me that whilst there may be a clever way of converting from a spreadsheet table to HTML, if I don't know how to do it, then my ONLY recourse is to do it by hand. Perhaps I'm finding it difficult because I know how to code HTML by hand, and have never used any of the higher-level, more-abstracted ways of producing web-sites. The world is increasingly filled with people who know how to do things, and other people who do not know how to do those things, and I'm not sure that the polarisation, or the figures, are moving in the right direction. I think that increasingly fewer people know how, and that increasingly fewer people would even know how to find out.
I find this very worrying.
Even worse, I started out trying to reduce the entropy of the universe by documenting something useful to shar with others, and ended up at this gloomy place!
I've always been fascinated by the way that water 'sticks' to surfaces, causing nuisance phenomena like teapots that always dribble from the spout. But sometimes you can use the stickiness to your advantage...
I regularly fill the water container for our two cats. The design is quite smart in that it provides a constantly replenished supply, at least whilst there is water left. It is little more than an inverted plastic container in a dish, and atmospheric pressure (countering the partial vacuum in the container) stops the water overflowing. Filling the container, clipping on the dish and inverting it over a sink gives a result which is less than perfect - the water from the container fills the dish (and some of it also tends to spill into the sink during the inverting process) and so the water container is about half empty. I've tried filling the sink and trying to fill the container under water, but the sink isn't big enough to do it properly, and this wastes lots of water. Instead, I turn the assembled container and dish through 90 degrees, and dribbles the water into the container by letting the water stick to the dish. The container quickly fills up, and gradually bringing it back to the normal position fills the dish. The end result is a container that is very nearly completely filled with water, and a very neat use for the stickiness of water!
Whilst I buy a lot of CDs, I've also gradually been seduced by the instant gratification of online purchase of individual tracks, even to the extent of buying MP3 format tracks instead of linear WAVs or AIFFs.
Buying CDs online is easy and fast, but has one major downside - the hub in the centre of the CD case. Most CD cases weren't designed to be exposed to the trials of being posted, and so many of my CD purchases arrive with damaged hubs. Two examples from today's batch of deliveries illustrate this very well.
The first is from a black plastic 'Digipak', where the CD hub and finger access areas are moulded as part of a single piece of plastic that is stuck onto a cardboard cover that bends round to surround the CD. This hub had lost all of the top teeth, and only had half remaining. Opening a shrink-wrapped CD to find a shower of teeth falling out is a depressing feeling.
The second is from a conventional clear plastic 'jewel case'. Severe forces during transit have reduced this hub to just two teeth, plus lots of casualties rattling around inside.
Exhibit three is different - a survivor from earlier... The temptation to type: 'and here's one I received earlier' is enormous. Some jewel cases have the teeth connected across the top, and this seems to provide more or less total protection against tooth loss. Or at least, from my own personal experience, I've never encountered any teething problems with these. Now I would love to be able to credit the manufacturer here, but I couldn't find any identification marks at all. But well done, wherever you are!
My son reliably informs me that 'The Orange Box' is a bargain, containing, as it does, several first person-based games for the PS3 at a low price. The connection with oranges or orange boxes escaped me... (other than orange being the main colour on the box!)
I was more intrigued by the concept of it including 'Half-Life 2', which should surely be called just 'Life'? (Although there would be the possibility then of confusion with 'Conway's Game of Life'...)
There again, is the next in the series called 'One Third Life 3'?
Sometimes you have the right tool at the right time, in the right place. But this is a rare event.
So I was rather gratified when I was travelling by train recently, and I tried to listen to a podcast on my iPhone. Headphones in, I turned it on and listened... and strained to hear...and turned it up to max, and still couldn't hear it unless I cupped my hands over my ears.
The problem? Not my hearing, but the train I was travelling in. It was a single carriage train - the 11:16 from Ipswich to Cambridge. And it was loud inside. Very loud. So loud that listening to an iPhone turned up to max volume was not really audible on headphones against the din coming from the diesel motor.
For once, I had the right tool - well, almost the right tool. I had downloaded 'Decibel' from the App Store some days earlier, and had casually seen how noisy it was at work and at home, but nothing more than casual use, and I hadn't calibrated it. But now I had a noise to measure, and the highest average reading I got was 89, although it was consistently above 86 for most of the journey. The conductor was very good at SHOUTING to the travelling customers, or is that victims of ear assault?
Now I'm not an expert in environmental noise, but it was very noisy in that train, and it made the 88 minute journey all the longer to have to put up with a loud companion... Not a pleasant experience.
Just a quick word about one of the latest projects that I've been working on recently at work - the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour Hero Powercards game is now live and available for people to play. Produced for the Women's Tennis Association, 'Hero Powercards' is a video-rich interactive game that uses real-world player statistics and rankings. It has been developed as part of the "Looking For A Hero" campaign for digital agency Analog Folk, with game programming by Bloc, and Real Time Content as the video partner.
There I was, enjoying a decaf mocha grande at the Starbucks Lakeside Suite at the Elveden Forest Center Parcs resort in Suffolk, UK (possibly one of my favourite locations in the world to have a coffee, with perhaps the Starbucks just around the corner from the Jim Henson Company in Hollywood as a close second), when up strolls a peacock.
Now Elveden Forest is in that large assembly of trees known as Thetford Forest, and so wildlife isn't that unusual, but peacocks have that stately 'look at me' attitude rather more than your run-of-the-mill moorhen, mallard or grey squirrel.
Center Parcs has long been one of my favourite holiday destinations - an amazing way to get away from it all without getting too far away.
As you might expect, people put down their coffees and got out their cameras, and the peacock was suitably fawned over, admired, and talked about in hushed whispers. No sign of his peahen, though - perhaps her preference is for another brand of coffee?
Once all the fuss was over, a squirrel ran around the patio, weaving in and out between the chairs and tables, looking remarkably similar to the one that I'd snapped earlier in the morning from the villa. But this one was moving rather swiftly, and I only managed to catch a shot from behind my mug, and another of a twitching tail zipping away to the left behind a chair...
The squirrel that morning had turned on 'uber-cute' mode as it looked around the patio table...
Digital cameras and blog do enable the most remarkable uses of technology, don't they?
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