Month: April 2006

This Mail plugin is genius – it reads your outgoing mail, and if it looks like you’ve referred to attaching a file to the message, but have not actually done so, it… er… presents you with a smug dialog box suggesting that you might be losing your marbles.

From Rosie, reading TV industry rag C21:

The conclusion was that CBeebies needs to attract older children, particularly boys aged four-six. “In general, CBeebies is weak on the heroes and the dinosaurs and the diggers,” says [channel controller] Deverell. “It needs to feel a little less gentile and a little more noisey and boisterous and surprising.”

She notes:

I think he meant ‘genteel’. At least I hope so, or there’s going to be a whole lot of very Jewish kids television.

To which I reply:

Can I blog that? Can I? Can I?

And Rosie responds:

Oh all right. I insist that there must be many gags playing on kids tv show titles, though.

Suggestions in the comments, please. Just skip the one about changing my font for blockquotes, I know that already.

I’ve just seen an NHS advert featuring schoolkids playing a card game based around fruit and veg. A few immediate thoughts:

• It’s presumably aimed at kids. And it’s on at half midnight. Does the NHS know something I don’t?
• They don’t understand the rules to Top Trumps.
• Partly as a consequence, it’s patronising as hell.
• The linked website is surprisingly sparse.
• ‘Swap chocolate for apples’ isn’t going to win them any friends.

However:

• I really really like the logo.

[shrug]

So far as I can tell, this mp3 file is the soundtrack to the never-heard, long-lost, fabled, blah blah Channel 4 pilot based around NTK, from all the way back in the mists of time around The Second Coming of Jobs, and before the world-changing publication of… er… Starship Titanic. Hear Dave, Danny, and the crew generally rip the piss.

On the other hand, while the gags are mostly rather good, they tend towards the kernal-compilation end of obscure. It’s not hard to picture a commissioning editor watch the tape only to respond with a resounding ‘huh?’ One for the contemporary history/alternate timeline buffs, but the geekier amongst us will giggle rather a lot.

A combination of being faffed around by people I may (or may not) be working for, bank errors, and the various airlines’ ludicrous ticketing systems have conspired to keep me in Glasgow for the moment. If it’s my money, I’m not coughing up £220. It was only £60 when I clicked ‘buy,’ but by the time my bank agreed that was reasonable, tickets were mysteriously rather more expensive. Ugh.

However, some of the people I should be meeting are still faffing, so not going gives them a little more time to get their act together. Hopefully, I’ll be down Thusday-Sunday next week. And yes, at the moment, traveling on Easter Sunday is weirdly plausible.

Now all I have to do is work out whether I’m traveling on the train from Leeds (going there via Cumbria)… or from Glasgow. Ugh. Too hard.

Thanks for all the replies pointing me to the various airlines servicing Glasgow/Prestwick and London (Various). I’m tempted to be snarky, but on reflection I suppose it is possible that I was being stupid enough not to know about them. But for the record, I’m trying to avoid domestic flights when I can – without going into the sums I suspect they’re the least-sustainable thing I do, so I’m trying to cut down. I wouldn’t mind so much if the trains didn’t usually end up costing more. Joined-up this transport and environment policy is emphatically not.

A couple of posts ago, I asked if anyone knew how to do that thing where an embedded QuickTime movie shows a poster frame until you click it, then plays in place. Gia kindly pointed me towards vPip, a JavaScript thingy that rewrites your object & embed tags appropriately – neat. I’ve subsequently stumbled across a similar tool here.

So far as I can tell, however, these scripts merely simplify/automate something you can do directly anyway. All you do is set the object src to your poster, add an href param pointing to the movie, and set the target to be ‘MYSELF.’ Of course, now I know where to look, all this is explained in Apple’s QuickTime documentation anyway.

Also: somewhere in this little bit of research, I came across this article explaining how to add closed captions to QuickTime movies.

Ah, all fun stuff to play with…

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Apple have software for dual-booting Windows on a Mac! Arrrrghhhh!

One can’t help wondering if this was intended to arrive earlier, and was delayed to avoid putting a real dampener on the Windows XP-on-Macs competition. After all, it’d have been a tad awkward if they’d claimed the $12,000 prize – though they’re still eligible for the graphics driver prize, I’d assume. Heh.

While nothing’s ever entirely certain in this world, it’s increasingly likely that I’ll be in London on Monday and Tuesday next week. Anyone want to claim dibs on hanging out and/or putting me up on Monday night?

Don’t all shout at once, now.

[update] Hmm. Looks like they’re tearing up the West Coast mainline this weekend – thetrainline.com is quoting between eight and nine hours for the journey on Sunday. Ouch. I asked it to look at Saturday, and the only thing it’s offering so far departs Glasgow at 16:30, changes at Edinburgh, York, Leeds, Sheffield and Nottingham, and arrives at St. Pancras at 09:45. There’s a six hour change in Nottingham. Umm…

Quite why I bought a Griffin PowerMate has always been something of a mystery. It’s a lovely piece of milled aluminium with a glowing blue LED in the base, that plugs into a spare USB port and is used as a rotary controller. It’s been jacked into my desktop for a couple of years, but while I’ve admired it, I’ve never really used it. It’s quite pleasant for scrolling web pages, but that’s about it.

On the face of it, it’d be a fine controller for Final Cut, allowing one to zip through clips at a rate of knots. However, I never found it terribly satisfactory for this, as a result of a driver quirk. Having it emulate the left and right arrow keys worked fine, and allowed frame-accurate control – but when you stopped winding through the frames the software overshot massively, playing back all the queued-up keystrokes. Useless.

Today I finally noticed something that’s (most likely) been in the software since day one, which is having the thing emulate a mouse scroll wheel instead. Setting it to scroll left/right has two wonderful effects. Firstly, it no longer overshoots. But secondly, it winds through the media when the mouse pointer is over the viewer or canvas windows… and it winds through the timeline when the pointer is there.

Oh happy, happy day. I have an analogue controller with focus-follows-mouse, in Final Cut.

Lesson to self: RTFM.

Linked from the front page of BBC News this afternoon: ICA: The Show, a new bi-monthly video magazine on contemporary arts, released by the ICA. Since I’m sort-of up to my neck in web video at the moment, I aimed my browser in the general direction, and hit the ‘thataway’ button.

First up – ooh, round-cornered gradient-filled delicately-shadowed design. Straight from the Web 2.0 stylebook, I see. Quite nice, actually. A quick poke around reveals flattering comments from the Arts Council and the DMCS, but enough of that – let’s have a look at the video, eh?

Er… ah. No. See, the download link takes you to Sony’s YourPSP site, only there’s so much Flash slopping around that it seems they can’t deep-link you, so you have to stumble around and find ‘The Show’ all over again. Classy, really joined-up thinking that. Then once you’ve found it and clicked the ‘download’ thing (and navigated the popups), you find your way to a registration form which at one point threw a Java error at me. Not JavaScript, but Java – what?

The registration procedure requires your name, address, date of birth, gender, marketing preferences… and the model number and serial code of your PSP. Without those, you can’t register, and hence you can’t download The Show. Even though it’s most likely some variation on the MPEG4 theme and hence playable on any PC. Back at The ICA site, there’s precisely no visible feedback address: the only useful note I could find reads simply ‘all rights reserved,’ which is hardly 2.0 of them.

So let’s be clear about this: the ICA have hooked up with the marketing department of Sony, and between them they’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to complicate the download process and make the video available only to existing PSP owners. I can only assume that they’re doing this to prevent those pesky iPod Video owners from seeing The Show.

There are many ways of approaching video on the web, and many potential models for its use. This one is, I predict and hope, dead in the water. Idiots.