Category: Uncategorized

Dopplr knows about many places, all over the world. So many, in fact, that it’s a little hazy about some of the details. And it’s very rough indeed when it comes to local customs, it seems:

Close enough. Ahem.

[update: I’ve been informed by Dopplr that there’s a town near Sheffield called Wales, which is what it found. So it knows more than I do. Oh, the shame.]

Mondrianum: a Mac OS colour picker pane that talks to Adobe Kuler. Joy.

Chris Hoy wearing three gold medals and a suit, riding a Brompton folding bike, accompanying the double-decker bus into the Bird’s Nest stadium.

Brilliant.

[update: Annie Mole has a screen grab at Flickr]

They’ve actually done it: shut the M1 and duffed in the twin cooling towers near Sheffield.

It’s maybe ten years since I found myself talking to the guy who had the contract to bring them down. They had a workable plan, but it involved closing the M1. Blowing them up without closing the motorway would have been nuts, since the towers were right next to the flyover near Meadowhall and Rotherham; closing the road wasn’t on the cards; stalemate.

Apparently, a decade on the towers were in poor enough condition that leaving them up was no longer an option, so the road was duly closed in the small hours of this morning, and down they came.

They were a fine landmark. Now we’ll only have the merrily-decorated cranes in the yard on the other side of the road to look at.

Genius. Utter genius. Via Team Gupta, who ponders re-enacting this at a real party… after the drink has been flowing. Evil man.

[edit: changed the embed to the earliest posting I could find on YouTube. The original source is the Marie Curie Actions ‘Teens’ site, which appears to follow standard EU practice of there being an inverse releationship between the funding level of a project and the quality of the web design.]

Here’s a lovely little text experiment. Via Big Contrarian.

Lousy way of making tea, though.

After the use-video-for-geometry-and-stills-for-high-res-texture-maps tech demo, here’s another gob-smacking bit of video frighteningness:

Blimey. Using multi-point motion-tracking to unwrap a texture map, which you can then modify before re-applying to the source image.

Back in the mists of 2006, I blogged about how one outcome of increasing use of high-definition video might be greater demand for post-production rotoscoping techniques to smooth out actors’ wrinkles. Looks like I might have been right.

I’m following the BBC’s excellent Olympic live-update page, which combines a video stream with irreverent text updates from a relay team of BBC staffers. One of the things that keeps cropping up is viewers complaining about the use of the word ‘medal’ as a verb.

Look, folks: if you’re going to get all nit-picky about grammar, make sure you check your facts. The OED isn’t free, of course, and the edition I have to hand is one of the crappy one. But pick any other online dictionary and you’ll find that ‘medal’ can be a verb. Here’s the American Heritage Dictionary on my Mac, for example:

medal | ˈmedl |
noun
a metal disk with an inscription or design, made to commemorate an event or awarded as a distinction to someone such as a soldier, athlete, or scholar.

verb ( medaled | ˈmɛdld |, medaling | ˈmɛdlɪŋ |; also chiefly Brit. medalled, medalling) [ intrans. ]
earn a medal, esp. in an athletic contest : Norwegian athletes medaled in 12 of the 14 events

Yes, I was surprised too. But it’s not bad English just because we haven’t had the chance to use it very often.

Lovely shots at 120 frames/sec, shot on a Red One.

These aren’t the broad beans I’m eating tonight. These are broad beans from two years ago. They wouldn’t be as nice as the ones I’m about to scoff. Not by now. Though they were nice at the time.

I’m sorry. I may have become monosyllabic. I’m salivating at the thought of broad beans. They have a strange effect on me.

Broad. Beans.

Broad beans.

Yum.