Category: Uncategorized

As you may have noticed, Quernstone was down for a good while over the weekend. Worse, several (but oddly, not all) of my hostees over on deletetheweb.com were and are out for the count. I’m in discussion with the delightful folks at Dreamhost support, and I should be able to sort you out in the morning. At the moment we know how to fix the problem, they’re just not sure how it happened in the first place and hence we’re not quite sure what approach is for the best.

In the medium term, I’ll probably tear down some of the older installs (which seem to be the ones affected) and rebuild them in a slightly different way. For now, thanks for bearing with me – I’ll get you back up and running as soon as I can.

And hey, it’s not like anyone was reading your random blatherings anyway. Pfff!

The folks behind Nobody’s Watching.tv (a domain name so good, I wish I’d bought it) have a new video up on – durr – YouTube. They attempt to answer the obvious question inspired by the Diet Coke/Mentos thing, vis: how come none of the 800+ videos used anything else? Funny film.

From their – durr – MySpace page, it sounds like they’re backed by NBC too, which is interesting. Though… hang on a moment. MySpace… YouTube… backed by a TV corporation? Isn’t that practically mainstream these days? [shudder]

It’s a sign of how busy I’ve been – or, perhaps, of how much I’ve been enjoying the black stuff – that I’ve not managed to blog about this all week. This, dear reader, is the wallpaper in the hotel in which I’ve been ensconced this merry week. Yes, really. The light switch is there for scale, and to provide scant evidence that, wallpaper aside, the hotel is relatively modern. Indeed, I’ve been told today that it’s a newish establishment, having opened only in the last couple of years. Which rather begs the question: who makes wallpaper like this, in the twenty-first century? More to the point: are they mad?

Inventor, installation artist, and thoroughly nice chap Tim Hunkin has an article up about his efforts to make a sign for Southwold Pier that was powered by the wind. He gave up and used photovoltaics, but the journey is fascinating, and a useful lesson in the problems and limitations of wind power.

(via Make, slightly annoyingly since I was looking at Tim’s site not so long ago. Don’t miss the Quantum Tunneling Telescope, either)

I’m in Dublin!

This is going to be something of a common theme for the next few months, since I’m working here. You’d better get used to it. For that matter, so had I – seeing dawn in from a Ryanair check-in queue isn’t exactly my natural habitat. Nor, for that matter, is paying more for a taxi than the air fair. No kidding.

Anyway, yes, Dublin. Hurray! I’m quite excited, even if it is raining.

Most of my computer hardware is getting rather old – the newest major component is my PowerBook, which will turn three early next year – and bits of it keep packing in. A particular problem I’ve been bitten by is the shift from VGA to DVI graphics connectors, especially when my desktop Mac drives ADC and VGA, only the VGA socket got nuked when my old 15″ LCD blew up back in January. But running Macs with just one screen… damn, that isn’t right, so here’s how I have things set up right now:

My PC is running RealVNC, and is headless. My PowerMac is running Chicken of the VNC to control it, displaying the result on its 17″ ADC flatscreen. My PowerBook, meanwhile, is driving the PC’s 17″ Mitsubishi CRT as a second display, then it’s using Teleport to fling keyboard and mouse control (and clipboard) over to the PowerMac (and hence, by extension, the PC). Consequently, the PowerBook has the PowerMac’s keyboard and mouse plugged into it. The PowerMac, of course, has the best part of a terabyte of drives hanging off it, and is hence acting as a file server for the PowerBook.

The result is that I have:

1. Three computers and three monitors.
2. Everything controlled from one keyboard and mouse.
3. No KVM switchy nonsense involved anywhere.
4. Absolutely no idea which files stay where when I unplug the PowerBook and carry it with me.

If this sounds confusing – damn right, it’s confusing. Entirely baffling. On the other hand, in use it’s surprisingly straightforward. You see a desktop; you point the mouse at it; and interactions happen. It’s only mind-bending when you stop to think about the layers of keyboard emulation that are being applied.

And the real question is: can I survive for six months in Dublin with the doddery old PowerBook? If I can, then a Mac Pro (or at least an iMac) is on the horizon next Spring. If not… ouchie.

A bad workman blames their tools, and a bad photographer blames their camera, right? Well, on Friday I retrieved six films from the developers (five, actually, one of the rolls of XP2 apparently hadn’t been exposed. Mind you, they naffed the other one up completely, so…), and the shots are… crock. Pretty much all of them. There are maybe three decent frames in the whole bundle, which is mildly irritating.

Some are dodgy because of vignetting, a significant issue with my wide-angle zoom that annoys me intensely. Some are badly framed, fair cop. Many exhibit horrific camera shake, which is fairly inevitable when shooting 100ASA indoors without flash, and not unexpected.

Worst, however, is that pretty much every frame is scratched, really badly. And no, I don’t believe it’s the developers’ who’ve done this – I think it’s the camera body. It’s done it before, and there have been signs that it’s getting worse (though it’s also mysteriously gone away, on occasion), but these negs are mostly wrecked.

I think it’s time to admit that I basically don’t have a camera better than my mobile phone, and to push the D50/D80/EOS 400D/whatever up the priority list. Ho hum.

Ignoring the whole just-how-green-is-this-really issue; how cool is the website? And: is this the perfect cloud-on-legs sheep graphic, or what?

Remember those lovely pictures of miniature figures on food? They’ve been let out, and are now sight-seeing around the streets of London. Ah, whimsey. There should be more whimsey in the world; it’s a Good Thing.

Every now and then a piece of software comes along that I regret not having any significant use for. The latest is MemoryMiner, which is designed to help you analyse archives of photos, and to tell stories using them. You identify people, places, and times, and MemoryMiner helps you trace the events of a person’s life. It looks like the sort of thing that would be terrific in a family history or eduction project context. It’s also the sort of thing one assumes the intelligence agencies have been using for years, but that’s by the by.

Best of all, it’s been built with care and elegance in mind. Be sure to watch the demo movie. Lovely software. If only I had a use for it…