Category: Uncategorized

A couple of posts ago, I asked if anyone knew how to do that thing where an embedded QuickTime movie shows a poster frame until you click it, then plays in place. Gia kindly pointed me towards vPip, a JavaScript thingy that rewrites your object & embed tags appropriately – neat. I’ve subsequently stumbled across a similar tool here.

So far as I can tell, however, these scripts merely simplify/automate something you can do directly anyway. All you do is set the object src to your poster, add an href param pointing to the movie, and set the target to be ‘MYSELF.’ Of course, now I know where to look, all this is explained in Apple’s QuickTime documentation anyway.

Also: somewhere in this little bit of research, I came across this article explaining how to add closed captions to QuickTime movies.

Ah, all fun stuff to play with…

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Apple have software for dual-booting Windows on a Mac! Arrrrghhhh!

One can’t help wondering if this was intended to arrive earlier, and was delayed to avoid putting a real dampener on the Windows XP-on-Macs competition. After all, it’d have been a tad awkward if they’d claimed the $12,000 prize – though they’re still eligible for the graphics driver prize, I’d assume. Heh.

While nothing’s ever entirely certain in this world, it’s increasingly likely that I’ll be in London on Monday and Tuesday next week. Anyone want to claim dibs on hanging out and/or putting me up on Monday night?

Don’t all shout at once, now.

[update] Hmm. Looks like they’re tearing up the West Coast mainline this weekend – thetrainline.com is quoting between eight and nine hours for the journey on Sunday. Ouch. I asked it to look at Saturday, and the only thing it’s offering so far departs Glasgow at 16:30, changes at Edinburgh, York, Leeds, Sheffield and Nottingham, and arrives at St. Pancras at 09:45. There’s a six hour change in Nottingham. Umm…

Quite why I bought a Griffin PowerMate has always been something of a mystery. It’s a lovely piece of milled aluminium with a glowing blue LED in the base, that plugs into a spare USB port and is used as a rotary controller. It’s been jacked into my desktop for a couple of years, but while I’ve admired it, I’ve never really used it. It’s quite pleasant for scrolling web pages, but that’s about it.

On the face of it, it’d be a fine controller for Final Cut, allowing one to zip through clips at a rate of knots. However, I never found it terribly satisfactory for this, as a result of a driver quirk. Having it emulate the left and right arrow keys worked fine, and allowed frame-accurate control – but when you stopped winding through the frames the software overshot massively, playing back all the queued-up keystrokes. Useless.

Today I finally noticed something that’s (most likely) been in the software since day one, which is having the thing emulate a mouse scroll wheel instead. Setting it to scroll left/right has two wonderful effects. Firstly, it no longer overshoots. But secondly, it winds through the media when the mouse pointer is over the viewer or canvas windows… and it winds through the timeline when the pointer is there.

Oh happy, happy day. I have an analogue controller with focus-follows-mouse, in Final Cut.

Lesson to self: RTFM.

Linked from the front page of BBC News this afternoon: ICA: The Show, a new bi-monthly video magazine on contemporary arts, released by the ICA. Since I’m sort-of up to my neck in web video at the moment, I aimed my browser in the general direction, and hit the ‘thataway’ button.

First up – ooh, round-cornered gradient-filled delicately-shadowed design. Straight from the Web 2.0 stylebook, I see. Quite nice, actually. A quick poke around reveals flattering comments from the Arts Council and the DMCS, but enough of that – let’s have a look at the video, eh?

Er… ah. No. See, the download link takes you to Sony’s YourPSP site, only there’s so much Flash slopping around that it seems they can’t deep-link you, so you have to stumble around and find ‘The Show’ all over again. Classy, really joined-up thinking that. Then once you’ve found it and clicked the ‘download’ thing (and navigated the popups), you find your way to a registration form which at one point threw a Java error at me. Not JavaScript, but Java – what?

The registration procedure requires your name, address, date of birth, gender, marketing preferences… and the model number and serial code of your PSP. Without those, you can’t register, and hence you can’t download The Show. Even though it’s most likely some variation on the MPEG4 theme and hence playable on any PC. Back at The ICA site, there’s precisely no visible feedback address: the only useful note I could find reads simply ‘all rights reserved,’ which is hardly 2.0 of them.

So let’s be clear about this: the ICA have hooked up with the marketing department of Sony, and between them they’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to complicate the download process and make the video available only to existing PSP owners. I can only assume that they’re doing this to prevent those pesky iPod Video owners from seeing The Show.

There are many ways of approaching video on the web, and many potential models for its use. This one is, I predict and hope, dead in the water. Idiots.

Drat. Oxford won. Harrumph. Not enough Hall men in the boat, obviously. Or, perhaps, not enough pumps – there was a bizarre snippet en passant in the ITV commentary, about the Oxford boat having a water pump but the Cambridge one lacking such a device, on account of ‘the design of the boat.’

I’ll be the first to confess how little I know about shell eights, but… what? How does that work, then?

Time to clear out some browser tabs. I don’t vouch that any of this will be remotely interesting.

• Pre-pixellated ‘logo’ T-shirts. This is both a great idea and tragically dim at the same time. They look great… but the emblem could still become a distinct brand and featuring it on TV could be considered ‘undue prominence.’ Or perhaps that’s the Americans doing irony again.
• Is it just me, or are the toolbar controls in Interarchy 8 waaaay too close to the window edge? Anarchie/Interarchy used to be one of my favourite pieces of software. I forget why I moved over to Transmit, but I’ve no reason to go back. Heigh-ho.
• PayPal Mobile. Oh happy happy day… though one does have to wonder if PayPal’s vendor fees are still rather large?
• Windows Vista in 2007. Ish. ‘Business-oriented’ versions are still due this year, but it’s not clear to which of the six (or was it eight?) editions that refers. Regardless, the consumer version is now due in January 2007. Given how far away that is (again), one has to wonder what the confidence level is in that prediction. After all, every previous Longhorn schedule has been wide of the mark, and I see no reason to believe this one more than the others. But what’s really interesting is that we’re all expecting Mac OS X 10.5 to be out by the end of the year. It’ll be an interesting comparison.
• Onlife feels like the sort of thing Martin and I used to talk about under the heading ‘Serendipity.’ It’s an application that watches what you do and keeps a rolling history of it, viewable and searchable in timelines and calendars. I’m surprised it’s taken this long post-Spotlight to arrive – my guess is that the user interface for this sort of thing isn’t easy. Onlife looks good so far, and I admire the developers for making it free while they’re trying stuff out with it. I’ll have a play and see how I get on.
• Oooh! Oooh! Plus, Onlife’s dev invokes Vannevar Bush’s memex, and started playing with this stuff at the Media Lab. Cool! 🙂
• (free) Fonts that look like scribbled and illegible print and handwriting. Genius!
• I actually rather liked the EuroMedley hoax on Today this morning. Makes more sense than sea shanties, anyway, and good on Kinnock for playing up to it.
• ZipLight – add filenames within .zip archives to your Spotlight catalogue. Handy.
• All-squid, all the time: Squid.us. You want squid info? They have it.
• Gia’s gone all video on us. Next week, I have to find out how to do that thing where an embedded QuickTime movie shows a poster frame, then reloads itself in situ. Then I have to make that work with this whole ActiveX debacle. This looks useful.
• Heh. Giles linked to my little post about apple.com/macintosh being broken – I’ve been linked from O’Reilly.com! The book deal must be close… or at least, getting back into the top 100,000 blogs on Technorati.

Enough!

Is March always this busy? Having read the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and then jumped feet-first into Creative Commons licensing, last week (crumbs, was it only last week?) I ended up at a school in Dingwall doing a day-and-a-half video workshop. The students (a.) were terrific, (b.) were patient with my patently inept workshop planning, and (c.) worked like stink to get their films presentable. They slaved over hot iBooks right up until the deadline, bless ’em. Huge fun, very silly, and four inches of snow overnight merely added to the entirely surreal quality of the trip.

This week I did not-really-the-same stuff with a group of staff at the Glasgow Science Centre – who were, frankly, embarrassingly good at filming things and probably didn’t need me in the first place. But like all rookie teachers, I’ll claim their success was down to my instructional talent. Obviously. Then today I finally held a running camera again, shooting a couple of pieces with the award-winning Ben.

So now I have nine films hot for the editing, and it’s going to be another busy week. Meanwhile, it looks like I might be going to Bangalore in the next month or so, in a this-must-be-a-wind-up-surely? sort of way. For work, I’ll have you know. All very strange.

So: busy, happy, all a bit weird and unsettling but (mostly) in a good way. And I haven’t even mentioned the wolves in the walls yet. Nor my attempts to convince James to have business cards printed reading ‘James Gordon, Vaudeville Producer and Shark-Hunter.’ It would actually be true, you see.

Anyway, I’ll try to catch up with posts soon. I know you’ve missed me. Even if you didn’t send me cards and flowers for my birthday. Ingrates, tsk.

This is a year old, but I was reminded of it recently: cute Flikr group of people who’ve set the desktop picture of their Macs to replicate the physical background behind them. You… well, you pretty much have to see it for yourself.

Now if somebody could do this in real-time with a TrackIR headset…

One morning a couple of years ago, I awoke to find a small snake curled up beside my bed. Since I did not then, and do not now, own a snake, this was something of a surprise.

As of today, however, I’d be ready for it. How so? Because now, I’m insured. Today (well… yesterday) I took out performing artist’s public liability and employer’s liability insurance. Activities covered are principally video and film production, workshop/training, science experiments and demonstrations, and so on. But a range of other activities are also included… including ‘snake charming.’

I don’t think I realised previously how important it would be to me to be insured for injuries incurred by members of the public as a result of my snake charming act going badly wrong. But now that I am covered, I find myself inescapably drawn to the ‘reptiles’ section of eBay.

Tragically, there are specific exclusions for knife throwing acts and high trapeze. Drat.