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Handly list of tools, many of which I hadn't seen before, and will have to try out.
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Just an aide memoire so I don't forget the name or era.
Author: Alasdair
Amanda Palmer 10
OK, that’s not a clever title. Tough. Nor is it exactly a normal portrait. Don’t care. I really like this one – there’s just enough light in the shadow to give definitition and shape, rather than just being a silhouette, which is what I was going for.
There’s a dozen or so shots from ths gig on my flickrstream. I may post a few more of the better ones over the next couple of days.
Life Through A Lens
I know I’m guilty of this. I spent fully half the gig last night with the camera in front of me. But y’know what: the LCD on my DSLR screen is not active unless I have just taken a shot, and which point it is obscured because it is in front of my fucking head. I don’t like shooting with point and shoots as gig, because I am aware that they have these distractingly glow-y screens.
And also, they’re rubbish for it.
Links For Thursday 5th February 2009
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Anyone interested in this? Herzog + weird German Electro sounds like a moral victory to me.
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According to one set of maths, it might actually work out cheaper for the paper to give away Kindles for a while, and then switch to digital only. The logic is flawed in a number of places (the move would cripple their ability to pick up new readers in the short term for example), but it's still fascinating to see that even with e-paper equivalent as expensive as the Kindle, the maths looks to be becoming favourable.
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Jamais Cascio explaining quite clearly why the academic program offered by the recently opened "Singularity University" is a load of old trousers, and offering a rather more sensible sounding educational program for teaching people to think about the coming years/decades.
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"Broken gets fixed. Shoddy lasts forever." Having recognised that as true, I don't particularly need to refer to the actual this link myself, but I thought I'd mark anyway it just as an action to ensure I commit it to memory.
The Internet Of Trees
I have been kicking around this idea of a papernet (in brief: internet content in an auto-printed form) with a few folks. I’m currently building a OS X app that will do the early stages of what I want in a papernet endpoint in my ever diminishing free time, and generally thinking about how the beast might work and basically sorting through ideas raised by other clever bastards involved in the discussion so that I’ve got a scope document to hold myself to. (Yes, I write scope documents for my spare time development projects. How else am I supposed to know when they’re done?)
And I’m sure a lot of you are thinking “why in fuck are you thinking about paper, Al? Isn’t it doomed, and ecologically unsound to boot?” Well, maybe paper’s doomed. And, in theory, I can probably lash something together so that my iphone does this already. But electronic paper will be with us soon, and the idea is not locked into the literal dead tree artefact. The point is that I have something to read, on the bus, every morning. Something I can hold in my hand, that, crucially, does not require either power or a net connection. The idea’s transferable with technology. But for right now, we’re still working from the dead tree standard because most of the planet does not have an iphone, despite Steve Jobs’ best efforts.
But anyway, I had this all percolating at the back of my mind, and then my on-line grocery shop from Ocado turned up. (I am painfully middle class, I know. You’ll all know I’m afflicted by the recession when I start talking about shopping at Lidl.) And, well, take a look at the receipt that came with it. (Yes, I have cropped it to remove costs, because that’s between me and anyone that can be arsed with replicating this shopping list on the website.)
There’s a bit of papernet, right fucking there. It’s tacked to the front of my fridge, and for the last couple of days I have glanced at it in order to know I needed to use up before it went off when cooking of an evening. Electronic shopping giving rise to the physical thing I use as part of a task I cannot accomplish at a computer (until they invent a USB hob, anyway). Wonder how long it’ll take before your average supermarket shop does this with their till recipts?
(Oh, and they threw in a free copy of Saturday’s Times with my delivery, so I got my on the bus reading, too.)
Links For Tuesday 3rd February 2009
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Hadn't run across this one before. Anyone interested in a game?
The Frozen South
Fell out into the world this morning, and as everyone and their dog will have already informed you, it snowed in London last night. And by god, have we made a big deal out of this. But let’s be sensible about this: it was a snow day. We might need used to them, because if the gulf stream gets fucked in the ear by climate change, as I understand looks reasonable likely, then Britain’s going the get the climate its latitude deserves. Still, as days go, it was kinda nice. Worked from home, found time to nip out and get a few pics, and to have lunch at the pub with Sarah to generally conspire and set the world to rights, as is our usual MO.
But photos and lunch with friends are part of my usual lifestyle. What was lovely, though, was the little slices of magic I kept stumbling over as I walked down the back streets. An Asian family, with 4 kids between the ages of about 5 and 15, spilling out of their house, playing in the snow, more or less just diving into the stuff as they horsed about. Dad leant on the gatepost with a video camera in his had, watching the kids horse about. And all of them, the youngest to the eldest had the same sort of expression on their face, of sheer bloody rapt delight. “We only moved here 18 months ago. This is the first time we’ve seen snow like this.”
I watched them play for a minute or two, and ambled on down the street, only to get clipped on the shoulder by a snowball. I turn my head, and two girls of about ten ducked their heads back inside from the upper window they were giggling at, scraping the snow of the ledge to ambush the unwary.
A bit further down the street, I stopped to help push a young woman’s car up the camber of the road when she couldn’t get traction, so she could get on her way – me and another guy trying to get out backs into it without the feet going out from under us, both of us straining and laughing at the absurdity of having to shove a car just these few feet away from the kerb.
The cemetery entrance drive, full of kids throwing snowballs and building snowmen, but never going further than the drive – the rest of the graveyard pristine and white and solemn and silent like something out of a postcard.
Just for once, the weather in this country being a thing people took a bit of time to enjoy, rather than complain about.
Snow Day
A Snowball In Hell
Bit of a longshot: I have misplaced my copy of Brookmyre’s book of this title. Did I lend it to anyone reading this?
Some Required Assembly
I’m doing a meme on one of my blogs. People ask for pcitures of some part of my daily life, I take the pictures and I post ’em. My friend Ara asked for “Some part of the cooking process”. So here is the first part of what eventually became the sauce I put on my past this evening. Mushrooms, onions, garlic and some sweet peppers sweating a bit before I added chicken, chorizo, and a red pepper sauce to them. Tasty!