Category: Uncategorized

Morning: We visited some chickens, for filming purposes.

Lunch: poached eggs from said chickens, on toast, with young asparagus and a parmesan/parsley sauce.
Early afternoon: Visit to an astonishing robotic dairy. Wonderful, wonderful place, thinking of offering visits to schools, who would love it.
Mid afternoon: visit to Re, Corbridge. Brilliantly eclectic refound objects shop, lots of mad French bits & pieces. Lots of plain mad stuff too. Highly recommended.
Late afternoon: the extremely well-stocked North Acomb Farm Shop.

Then home for a nap. Quality.

Taken with a Panasonic GF1, 20mm ƒ/1.7. Mug by Matt Jones, tea by Clipper.

George Orwell makes tea:

“Tea–unless one is drinking it in the Russian style–should be drunk WITHOUT SUGAR. I know very well that I am in a minority here.But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.”

Thom Hogan has a brilliant editorial up about the state of the camera market – and not just the stills camera world, as one might expect from Thom, but video and connected cameras too. I think he’s absolutely right about… everything, actually.

Before heading off to the US recently (I haven’t mentioned that I’ve been on holiday, but then, I haven’t mentioned lots of things here in recent months) I agonised about buying a new camera. I still love my lowly Nikon D40, and I love the selection of lenses I have for it. It’s a modest outfit, but it has plenty left to teach me. However, Flossie is also rather taken with it all, particularly the Nikon 50mm ƒ/1.4G, which is a glorious short portrait lens on the D40. The last thing I wanted to do was go on holiday and squabble over who had the camera.

The obvious thing would have been to pick up a new Nikon body. However, none of the current range fits the bill. I’m a video guy, and while I still enjoy shooting with my big(ish) Panasonic AVCCAM I’d very much like a second camera of similar quality. Only with potential for shallow depth-of-field and all that good cinematographic stuff.

Sadly, Nikon’s DLSR video modes suck. Badly.

OK, so Canon, then? My kit of lenses isn’t so massive as to really really stop me from jumping ship, and the cheaper Canon bodies feel a whole lot more solid than they did when I bought my D40. They also do a rather tasty image-stabilised 17-55 ƒ/2.8 for which Nikon have no equivalent.

However, while the Canon EOS 550D is rather smashing, it’s not the stills camera I’m after, which takes me to the 7D… and I’m suddenly looking at a couple of grand including the lens. Then add 20% for spare batteries and CF cards. Great gear, but… not right now, thanks.

I ended up buying a Panasonic GF1. It’s mad, and I love it.

The GF1 seems to be earning a reputation as the ‘poor man’s Leica,’ which sounds about right. It’s no Leica, but it handles like a classic rangefinder that’s had a serious dose of the time machine. It’s quick, handy, and produces delightful images, particularly with Panasonic’s 20mm ƒ/1.7 lens. The 14-45 kit zoom isn’t half bad, either: slow, but sharp and still quite nifty. It’s the 20mm that’s the gem, however – anyone who buys a GF1 without it is doing it wrong.

There’s a terrific article about the GF1 as a travel camera here. I reckon that page alone must have shifted a goodly proportion of the units out there.

Now, the camera needs a little more care than my Nikon, in that I find myself toggling settings almost constantly. And there are times when the lack of viewfinder is a real bind. But mostly, it’s a fabulous little thing. Which shoots video rather nicely, too. Oh, and via an adaptor (bought from eBay, delivered from New York in three days flat), I can mount any of my Nikon lenses. Joy.

It’s far from perfect, but that’s rather the point; I bought it as a stop-gap. It’s a lovely piece of kit, and this week I used it on a paid-for shoot in preference to the Nikon.

Shooting video with it has taught me something else, though: I don’t want a 7D. For cinema-style shooting it might be wonderful, but even the GF1 is unmanageably fiddly for wide-angle handheld work. You know, the sort of thing I mostly do. What I need is Canon’s DSLR sensors in a body designed around video, or in a RED-style convertible body kit.

…which is part what Thom is talking about. Then he picks up, quite rightly, on all the stuff an iPhone can do as a connected camera that a DSLR doesn’t even approach.

What I think is interesting here is framing next-generation camera design as a software problem, not as one of sensors and optics. That, I think, is radical, astute, and absolutely correct.

Absolutely loving this new video by dancing-on-treadmills-meisters OK Go. I’m a total sucker for simple video effects/cheats, and this is everything you want from the basic effect, and more.

Only two problems: I was hoping for a more spectacular finale, and I’ve played the video enough that I’m starting to like the song.

It’s a basic rule of hosting your own blog that, following a software update, one has to publish a test post.

Thus: MT4.32 (with – ugh – the Zemanta plugin. At least for the moment). It’s been a bit of a nightmare so far, but only because I’ve also updated all my plugins and tried to roll out a new version of the template too. Lots of new things… including (but not limited to) non-working comments. Perhaps.

Or maybe they do work.

We’ll see.

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare is one of those shooting-people-in-the-head games I find more than vaguely distasteful, but for reasons that subsequently escape me some time ago I bought a copy. And I played it. And I… er… enjoyed it.

Not the shooting-people-in-the-head parts, however. No, those parts make me feel ill. As do the moving-around parts – I’m a bit of a wuss when it comes to motion sickness in these sorts of games. No, the bits I enjoyed revolved around the clear sense of video games coming of age, of establishing themselves as a solid, narrative-based entertainment medium, even an art form. Elite may have rocked in its day, but it’s amoeboid compared with Modern Warfare‘s highly-evolved and sophisticated approach. COD4 wasn’t the turning point of that particular story, but for a while there it was viewed as one of the more sophisticated, ambitious, and successful games. Yes, I bought it for research purposes. Honest.

What’s interesting about the sequel, the imaginatively-titled Modern Warfare 2, is that a year or so on this progression of the whole sector seems to be regarded as much more credible. True, many stories about MW2 have focussed on its sales records, or the furore surrounding an early scene in which the player shoots civilians (sort-of. Turns out it’s more complex than that, obviously).

However, reviews like that at Eurogamer are fascinating for their rhetoric as much as what they have to say about the game directly. This is erudite, thoughtful, insightful journalism, of the sort one might expect to be reserved for arts or film reviews.

Which is, of course, entirely fitting. MW2 appears to be one of those big dumb action movies that, curiously, isn’t as dumb as you’d expected when you walked in the cinema. It’s having to appeal to the lowest common denominator to make back its production costs, but that doesn’t prevent it from striving towards a higher ideal. And if that isn’t a sign of an established, mature, and creatively fulfilling sector, then I don’t know what is.

I still don’t think I’d like it, but I’d probably run out and buy a copy if I wasn’t already immersed in Dragon Age: Origins.

I had cause to check my site referral stats recently, and noticed that the most common search term leading people here is no longer ‘ugly wedding dress’, as it was for many years (don’t ask). It’s now ‘Mathematica iPhone.’ No, really, The Daily Grind is the top hit for a Google search for those words. The post I wrote, more than a year ago, is here. It’s a rather lame joke.

Lame enough that I’d forgotten all about it, even when Wolfram last week published an Alpha app in the App Store: stories here and here.

Now, Wolfram Alpha quite likely offers us a glimpse into the future of Google Wave: huge anticipation; lots of geek excitement; soon revealed as being a pointless distraction that doesn’t really work right; check back in a year or so and see what it’s up to then, just in case.

Extrapolating from that parallel, let’s try again:

I hear on the grapevine that Google are working on a dedicated iPhone Wave client. Expect it in the App Store in about three months’ time, for an outrageous asking price north of £30.

[source: entirely made up.]

I’ve somehow been sucked back into web design and development of late, most of which isn’t making me happy (IE6, just die already!), but a few neat bits of tech have delighted my inner geek, and it’s also given me cause to read a few interesting articles. This, at Beta Blog, is worth a skim: Kill Your Signup Form with Rails.

Ignore the Rails part if you’re not that way inclined, the lesson here is about gradual engagement. This is something we do in education or informal engagement – wearing one of my other hats as a science communicator it’s entirely familiar – but making the connection to web development surprised me more than it should.

The idea is simple: don’t make people commit, or sign up to your site, until you absolutely have to. Amazon is a familiar example of this sort of design pattern, in that you can browse away merrily, the site identifies you via a cookie and personalises to some extent, but you don’t actually sign in until you request an action that changes state – adding an item to your wishlist, or checking out your basket, for example.

By that time you’ve already expressed an intent to provide information to Amazon, so the cost/benefit of typing your password is clear.

It’s a sound principle.

It’s a couple of years since I was last in Ireland, and that a fleeting visit for the Scope wrap party, driving down from the North where I’d been giving SciCast workshops. This weekend, I flew into Dublin, was whisked to Waterford in the South-East, gave a couple of talks/workshops for the Institute of Physics, and was returned to Dublin.

Odd, the things one notices.

• I’ve completely lost my muscle memory for Euro coins and notes. I have to peer at the loose change, reading each coin to decipher its value. Ridiculous.
• Dublin Airport’s new terminal is impressive, though the walk from it to arrivals seems to be deliberately three times as long as necessary. I’ve never understood how it came to be that when one flies, one spends more time walking than flying.
• On the drive back from Waterford, we passed two beautifully-preserved ruined abbeys, and a traction engine rally. The latter all steam and smoke and clanking metal, about to head off up the main road. I’d have liked to see them move, but getting stuck behind them as traffic would have delighted me less at the time.
• Tourist offices should provide a service thus: you pay a modest fee to be followed by one of their staff, who poses as a more amateur tourist than you are. At some juncture they contrive to approach you and ask for directions to somewhere they’re absolutely certain you’ve been. Being able to give directions in a foreign city is a real buzz. Perhaps that’s just me?
• Gruel on Dame street is still fabulous. Not as good value as it was, thanks to the now-crippling exchange rate (£:€ is basically parity, ±10%). I had a salad of feta, fine beans and roasted squash that was outrageously good, followed by terrific grilled mackerel with a new potato and broad bean salad. Simple, perfectly prepared, jaunty service – superb.
• Lisbon vote, round two: from every lamp-post has sprouted an inelegant spray of billboards. ‘NO to European militarisation’ / ‘ YES to jobs’ / ‘Irish Democracy, 1945-2009? Vote NO’ / ‘I’ve decided: We belong: vote YES’. The impression I get is that (a.) it’s been a nasty, nasty campaign, but (b.) it’ll go through comfortably. We’ll see.
• Ireland is still deliriously, happily, indulgently shabby chic. Nobody shows up on time, nothing quite works correctly, hotels are a little flabby around the edges, and nobody would have it any other way. Me included.

I love this place. To me, it’s like somebody made an independent state out of Yorkshire. In an odd way, I feel at home here.