Jonathan Sanderson’s weblog, since 2001.
New devs circle in Glasgow: MacMacDev. See also NSScotland, which has merged with the former, for the terrific line:
I’ve heard a rumour that John Gruber is pricing caravans in Kirkintilloch, that’s how good it’s going to be.
First meeting is tomorrow night. Sadly, I’ll be in London. Also… well, I’ve enough of a passing acquaintance with Cocoa to get the NS reference, but that’s about it. Is it possible to be a poseur at a developers’ meet? Is there any point?
Jem Stansfield, erstwhile of this parish (well, we’re on the phone monthly picking each others’ brains and he’s one of the judges on SciCast – does that count?) was featured on Treehugger earlier this week. It looks like the community there has taken his ridiculous machine a bit seriously, but I can vouch that the man himself regards it as one of his best builds.
Not ‘most useful,’ note, nor ‘most practical.’ Just ‘most pleasing.’
[tip o’ the hat to Flossie for the link]
Unless there’s a secret stash I don’t know about, I think SciCast is the third-largest producer of science video for children in the UK. We’re not far behind the big boys, either. In the last year:
So that’s why it feels like hard work. Crumbs.
Andy Baio has his mitts on what he calls ‘The Infocom Drive‘. It’s the network share of the legendary adventure game pioneers, circa 1989. It contains emails, staff lists… and lots of stuff related to the never-finished sequel to the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy adventure game. Parts of which are still playable.
Oh. My. Heavens.
Eddie Mair is ‘the main weekday presenter of PM. No-one knows why’. Rrrright. PM, for the uninitiated, is one of BBC Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs programmes, daily at 5pm.
This week, Eddie’s taken to introducing the business correspondent as ‘Nils “Bad News” Blythe.’ For reasons I can’t quite get my head around, this cracks me up every time.
BBC news have an article about photographers being (incorrectly) stopped by police while taking pictures in a public space. Surprising that it doesn’t link to this terrific resource.
The wallpaper and paint are done
Just the carpet, fitting out the wardrobes, and details to go.
Is the paisley:
…mad, or inspired?
Don’t ask me, I haven’t seen it yet.
A Vulcan flies again! My mum rang to tell me yesterday, excitedly, that she’d been watching this live on News 24. The ‘We Love Vulcans’ sticker in our Austin Maestro had, we always claimed, been hers. (There’s a much better takeoff video than the BBC’s here, which captures the authentic Vulcan howl.)
There’s always been something a bit special about the Vulcan. Concorde, the other great delta, was svelte and lean and pretty; the Vulcan was squat and dense and functional. Not to mention loud. But there was something about it, something just a little unexpected. Almost alien.
It was designed to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union, but while the Cold War was hardly a happy period of history, there’s nevertheless a hopeful aspect about the Vulcan’s design. It first flew in 1952, yet somehow epitomised Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ vision of a decade later, despite the occasionally baroque testing procedures – see link on this entry.
The Victor was hardly less inspiring – similarly compact, with its weird crescent-curved wings, Küchemann carrots, spaceship nose, and ‘are you sure they got the scale factor right?’ area ruling.
The British public had seen these sorts of designs a few years earlier. In Dan Dare comics. Somewhere deep inside I still believe they hail not from more than fifty years ago, but from the near future.
Welcome back, Vulcan. I’ve missed you.
Announced at NAB this week: the Panasonic HMC150. This might, I think, be the camera which does for AVCHD encoding and flash card recording what the legendary Sony PD150 did for DV and miniDV tape. That is: get enough things right to make it a genuinely viable workflow.
The PD150 was the first camera that was small, light, and simple enough for production muppets like myself to use, that still produced more-or-less broadcastable pictures, and that hooked up to proper microphones. Sony sold bucketloads of them; I have one, and it still rocks.
HDV, in comparison, has always felt like a bit of a kludge. DV compression was already pretty nasty, and extending it to high-def produces some fairly grim failure cases. The cameras vary and some are rather good, but while tape workflows are fine for broadcast post-production and archiving, they’re clunky and restricting for fast turn-around web video. Specifically, capturing in real time starts to feel archaic when you’re standing in a lab with a class full of teenagers.
Over in the domestic world, meanwhile, there’s a revolution going on, with more and more cameras recording to flash cards. Convenient, efficient, but… ‘consumer.’ Eu.
The HMC150 (surely the ‘150’ is no accident?) looks like a proper ‘pro’ flash media camera: proper audio inputs, likely to have decent low-light performance, wide-angle lens, zoom ring with bobble thing on it.
AVCHD is still a pain to work with, but nevertheless… this could be it, folks. This could be it.
Question is: do I buy a Canon A1 in the near future, or tough it out until the autumn and jump to the Panasonic? Tricky…
Flossie is a girl of simple tastes. She doesn’t do fluff, nor fluster, nor faff. She likes ‘simple.’ Not ‘elegant,’ nor ‘minimalist,’ nor ‘ascetic’: ‘simple.’
This should not be mistaken for lack of sophistication, however. That’s going on too, but her fondness for the straightforward is more practical: fussy stuff merely distracts her from whatever is the focus of her attention. Hence, it is not favoured.
You may, therefore, expect her house to be a pristine haven of spaciousness. Not so. Current decorating efforts notwithstanding, it’s a modestly randomised heap of stuff. Not ‘clutter’ per se, since she’s not much of a hoarder; simply that organising and sorting and stacking and filing and filtering are activities which, in Flossie’s world, border on the faffy. Why expend such efforts, when any object can be found at a moment’s notice, just so long as it’s not moved since it was placed… there?
In the kitchen, Flossie is a cook, not a chef. No florid three-line descriptions in mangled French for her. What few recipe books there may be are treated as suggestions, as starting points, as inspirations – most certainly not as methodical reference or dictate.
It is with some pleasure, therefore, that I have managed to sully and complicate this world of simplicity.
With coffee.
Coffee, in Flossie’s life, should be black, fairly strong, and sweetened just a little. To simplify: it should taste like coffee. Coffee purchases are therefore packets of grounds; fairtradey; otherwise nondescript. There’s no particular preference, nor brand loyalty. Until now.
Behold, then, Illy. It comes in cans, glistening silver things which open, initially, with a hiss of pressurised nitrogen. It demands forced filtration, in a machine of some description. The result is rich, smooth, aromatic, and … coffee.
Now, Flossie may attempt to maintain that there is no conflict here. Perhaps, she will argue, Illy coffee is the canonical coffee, the paradigm of all coffees. Ur-coffee. Hence, it is about as simple as coffee can get.
But no, we know the truth. Illy coffee is not merely simple coffee, it is indulgently simple coffee.
Such indulgence should not, perhaps, be encouraged, but with Flossie I think I may be safe. Further, it makes me happy to see her put herself first, for a change. ‘Simple’ is all well and good, but it doesn’t relax, it doesn’t comfort, it doesn’t cosset. Flossie deserves those things, and if she finds them in coffee, then so be it.
Although…
There was the mildly extravagant vintage Laurent Perrier at Christmas. She liked that, too.
Oh shit. What have I done?