Jonathan Sanderson’s weblog, since 2001.
Having ended up keeping the aforementioned iPod touch, I’m now letting myself admit that a tiny web tablet is a remarkably useful thing. Plus, I’m sitting in the airport watching TED talks, which is like Horizon 2.0.
One niggle: I’m now so used to gesture scrolling on the thing, the trackpad scroll on my MacBook Pro feels like it goes the wrong way. Anybody else finding that?
“It takes 365 days for the Earth to orbit the sun, but 366 days in a leap year.”
Well, no. Not as such. But since you’re only, like, eight years old, I’m going to say: “Aw, bless! That’s so sweet!”
Aw, bless! If you spot a visit from Evil Mad Scientist Labs in your site referrer logs, clicking it takes you to a page wherein the text reads:
Greetings fellow blogger!
This is our (private) referrer log location. Since you are here, you must have noticed us in your referrer logs, after we saw your site in our referrer logs. (All very incestuous, isn’t it?).Anyway, there isn’t much to see here, but there is lots to see on the main site. If there is something that you want to talk to us about, that’s cool too– use the “Contact” button up above. Cheers!
Sweet!
Fascinating comments from Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian today, about Obama and Clinton:
“Fate has played a cruel trick against Barack Obama. It has made him the most exciting newcomer in US politics for a very long time – then pitted him against the man who held that title first.”
I still worry that Clinton might inspire the old guard of the Democratic party but fail to repeat that trick with the voters beyond, whereas Obama appears to have the opposite problem. Who would the Republicans rather run against?
Darn.
For years, I’ve idly wanted to name a production company ‘Media Offline.’ It’s a joke, see – when you’re editing on an Avid, and the blasted thing can’t find your clips, it flashes up a dour grey screen with block capitals reading ‘MEDIA OFFLINE.’ This can happen at any stage of the edit process, and it’s one of the reasons one watches through the final layback to the edit master. You want to know that the tape you send the broadcaster has your show on it, and not 30 minutes of ‘MEDIA OFFLINE’ card.
So I desperately wanted to use a facsimile of that Avid card as the production company’s credit caption at the end of a show. Anyone from the industry catching it out of a corner of their eye would immediately panic, wondering if it was their show which had screwed up. Fun times.
Sadly, it seems this dream will never be realised. Partly because any production company I might form is more likely to be doing web video than TV, and ‘media offline’ is a lousy name for an online media agency. But also because the domain is registered… by somebody apparently pulling the same gag.
Darn.
One of my indulgences at Christmas was to give all the adults in the family the best-packaged chocolate I’ve ever seen – from impossible-to-pronounce Kshocolat, based here in Glasgow.
It turns out the packaging was designed by Third Eye Design, also in Glasgow, and has won a ridiculous range of awards. If you stumble across it in Harvey Nicks or Liberty (or… er… Peckhams, which is where I found it), you’ll notice how dashing it is.
As for the chocolate itself: now, I’m a little snobby about chocolate. I like small amounts of the dark, smooth, and nutty stuff. For me, therefore, Kshocolat rocked. Sadly, I can’t report on the ‘white chocolate with lemon and pepper,’ since dad had that bar and he guarded it jealously. Perhaps he’ll leave some notes in the comments.
Anyway, I note all this because there’s a bit of a hoo-hah going on in the blogosphere about Tcho chocolate, currently ‘in beta’ (oh, for heaven’s sake…). They might have a Wired co-founder on their side, but I’d like to make it clear that for once, Glasgow got there first. M’kay?
It’s well worth watching Tufte’s video on the iPhone right to the end. I don’t agree with quite everything he says along the way, but his closing thoughts are gloriously subtle. Including:
“To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. … Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design.”
Lovely set of films from my chum Alom, of scientists showcasing their work: Labreporter.com.
One of my ambitions for SciCast this year is to intersperse films of this nature with ones from schools. Crossover films like this one are particularly interesting, too. My gut feeling is that the 2:30 duration is still the right way to go, but I need to refine a template format for undergrads and academics – and that means making a bunch of films myself.
One of the joys of How2 is that one started each item with a single question, and the job of the film was to answer it. Things went off the rails when films grew to include loads of other stuff – while it might have been interesting, if it didn’t contribute to answering the question, it shouldn’t have been there.
One idea per film.
That’s hard enough to hold professional film-makers to, let alone professional scientists holding a camera for the first time.
Alom’s films are delightful, but they’re also very professional. I want to find a happy medium, where the bar is set high enough that people have something to shoot for – but not so high they assume they’ll miss. Tricky.
is:
What sort of people do we want in the future?
This is how children’s media intersects with formal education. But the latter is bogged down in ‘What do we want people to know?’, while public service media has never had that constraint. So it’s been about style, and vision, and passion, and inspiration.
Right to the end, this question is what informed and guided children’s television. It was rarely vocalised, because it didn’t need to be. It was in the atmosphere, in the walls, in the blood of the departments and the people who made the programmes.
I’ve seen nothing in web media which reassures me that people are thinking on this sort of level.
That worries me.
Last week, I bought an iPod touch, with the intention of using it to test video formats for SciCast. I’m trying to produce ‘one download to rule them all’ – a file that will play on an iPod, but will also project up onto a classroom wall and still look pretty good, and can be converted to a DVD and work OK. Ambitious.
The touch is an amazing piece of kit. It’s an iPhone without the phone; you get the gorgeous touchscreen, the media player functions, and web browsing over WiFi (Mobile Safari rocks – quick enough, sharp text, works well). Unfortunately, in my testing I managed to produce files that looked great on the touch, but didn’t play on a chum’s video iPod. Apple’s specs say they’ll play the same formats, but… that’s not what we saw. Merde.
So I booked a ‘personal shopping’ hour at the local Apple Store, Buchanan Street in Glasgow, and left a note to the effect that I wanted to assemble a bunch of iPods and throw a range of files at them, because the published specs don’t seem right.
That’s what we did today. Credit where it’s due, the Glasgow store staff were terrific. Informed, interested, patient – an absolutely first-class experience that fell somewhere between ‘personal shopping,’ technical support, and web media business consultancy.
It’s hard for me to do justice to them, actually. They were great, to the point where I’ve ended up keeping the Touch and not even minding that I’ll be shelling out another £12 for the latest software for it. It was, I think, the best ‘shop’ experience I’ve had since the days of family-run bicycle shops, which of course have all gone bust now. They’ve saved me a day of farting around, basically.
Remind me – Apple kit is expensive because… ?
(For the geekily interested, the bottom line is: