Informed and critical

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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!

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Back from the Future?

On the 17th of September, my son came in from an evening appointment all flustered.




"We've just seen a DeLorean!" he exclaimed.

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...

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Format for Television

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 was Arlene Phillips replaced on the judging panel of 'Strictly Come Dancing'?

-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.

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Acceptance speech

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!

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Waveform explorations...

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.

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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!

iPhone Photos won't download 2

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.

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Publishing slowly...

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!