David Emery Online

Links and schedules

As you may have noticed I’ve slowed down posting a bit recently, in most part simply due to the amount of stuff I’m doing at the moment. Obviously this is fundamentally a good thing – it’s all good stuff – but there’s no doubt that my five-days-a-week posting schedule is suffering because of it.

That’s not really a problem I don’t think – 3 posts a week, which I can do without a problem (and have been doing for a while if you exclude Friday Links posts – more on that in a minute) seems like a very reasonable amount of posts to make. I’m not trying to be some pro-blogger journalist type, posting twice a day, garnering huge page-views and adwords-bucks, so the rather ruthless schedule seems a little pointless.

Of course the real reason behind ‘The Schedule’ was not for you lot – it was purely for my benefit. I am, by my very nature, a lazy person; it takes a lot of effort for me to be bothered to actually do stuff. Ideas are no problem – I can come up with them all day long – but actually implementing them is always the tricky part (you wouldn’t believe...

End of Year Quiz 2007

1. What did you do in 2007 that you’d never done before?

I was interviewed, which was quite fun.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I don’t think I made any last year, but I might make a couple this year (check back tomorrow).

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Nope (thank god).

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Sadly yes; I lost two grandparents within the space of a month which was pretty rubbish.

5. What countries did you visit?

USA and Finland.

6. What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007?

Depressingly, money. I’m quite hopeful though.

7. What date(s) from 2007 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Quite frankly, this year had a complete absence of truly memorable dates. Hopefully 2008 will be slightly better in this regard.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Being involved with this. Or possibly having a photo printed in NME.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Letting too many things get on top of me, and hence being too busy to do anything truly amazing. Also, I wish this hadn’t got so sidelined.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Nothing worse then a...

23:59 03/12/2007

Today was my birthday.

It was very nice, thanks.

I now feel old although I’m not.

Friday Links XXXVIII

N.A.D.D.
Rings so unbelievably true it makes me slightly sad that I can so easily be summed up.

Stacks Overlays
Stack icons (or the lack of consistent ones) in the dock is pretty much the only feature in 10.5 I don’t like.

Disabling Deprecated HTML Using CSS
Cunning. Very cunning.

Design doing
The key point here is that web design is not just design nor is it just codeing – it’s both. That’s what makes it special.

Why I love Textpattern
Hear hear! I utterly agree, obviously.

O2 on iPhone: 8,000 activations on day one, 5-year contract
8000 doesn’t really strike me as being all that much, really.

Gibson gets official with the self-tuning Robot Guitar
While I rarely play anymore, that doesn’t stop me from really, really wanting one of these.

Failure Happens: An SLA is just a contract & Data Centers are single points of failure too
There is nothing you can do to prevent things going tits up, so prepare for when it does. It probably doesn’t matter as much as you think it does, though.

The official ‘In Rainbows’ cover
Reminds me of a lot of the artwork v23 do for 4AD – very nice.

Read more ➔

Friday Links XXXVI

The Superest
Superhero illustration vs Superhero illustration – totally brilliant.

Leopard, Notes, and the iPhone
Come on Apple – get this feature done, we all know it’s coming.

Googling with Coverflow
What a great idea and – with the presence of WebKit – probably fairly do-able.

Get rid of your code with Leopard
We’re going to see some seriously cool 3rd party apps running on 10.5.

The social part of blogging is broken
” I don’t expect everybody to blog or use twitter and consider it very dangerous indeed to go down that route as it does smell of inbreeding to me.” – so, so true.

Robot arm inscribes the Luther Bible around the clock
This greatly amuses me, for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on.

Mixa-it
Silly, but kind of nifty.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review
A must read due to it’s extreme attention to some of the finer technical details in 10.5. However, I firmly disagree with some of the points about the Finder interface (which I think is much better then 10.4) and the general aesthetics. Both presented as fact, but both are a matter of personal taste.

New...

Answers

Last week David Pogue, writer with the New York Times, posted a list of questions that he – even in the position of a tech writer for a huge institution like NYT – simply doesn’t know the answers to. The list can be seen here: Pogue’s Imponderables

Here are some answers:

Why is Wi-Fi free at cheap hotels, but $14 a night at expensive ones?

Because people staying at cheap hotels are much more price sensitive then ones staying at expensive hotels. People staying at the pricer establishments are probably not paying themselves anyway.

What happens to software programs when their publishers go out of business?

They stop being sold. Obviously.

Would the record companies sell more music online if it weren’t copy-protected?

Yes.

Do cellphones cause brain cancer?

No.

What’s the real reason you have to turn off your laptop for takeoff?

Because airlines a really scared of lawsuits. And: they can.

Why can’t a digital S.L.R. camera record video?

A Digital SLR uses a mirror that normally deflects the viewpoint up into the viewfinder so you can frame the shot using the same view the sensor is going to get. When you take a shot the mirror flips up, revealing the sensor. Hence, while you’re composing a shot the sensor...

Advertising as content

I’m of the opinion that as a general rule, TV advertising doesn’t really work. In fact, I think most advertising doesn’t work – or at least isn’t worth the amount it costs – but lets stick with TV for the time being.

Most TV adverts are pretty uninspired; I would love to give examples of the average TV ad, but I can’t remember any and that’s exactly the problem: we’ve become completely overexposed to the medium to the point that – in the vast majority of cases – we completely filter it out. It’s completely understandable, as it’s not content that anyone really wants to see. The viewer is there for the program and its content, and the advertising just gets in the way of it. From the get-go you’ve irritated the person you’re trying to sell things to, which is hardly an ideal starting point.

There is though an entire – highly profitable – industry around making TV adverts, which attracts some very talented people which then means we do – on very rare occasions – end up with something that is really quite special. Look at the success of the Cadbury’s Phil Collins gorilla advert, for example: it’s a very...

Colin

You have almost certainly heard about the tragic death of Colin McRae in a helicopter crash this weekend. That itself would be bad enough but the news that his 5 year old son, along with another boy and a family friend, were in the crash as well makes it even worse.

It is a huge loss of motorsport – Colin McRae was quite probably one of the most gifted drivers, no matter what the car; Formula 1, Touring Cars, Motorbikes all – in my opinion – pale in comparison with the skills needed in rallying, and in rallying he was undoubtedly the best. The ability to thread a car down a road you’ve never driven down before – relying solely on your pace drivers shouted directions – at immensely high speed (not that much slower then an F1 car) and across all sorts of varying terrain, including ice, mud and sand, is surely a much greater challenge then any other motorsport can provide.

He was the first British driver to win the World Rally Championship back in 1995, and not only that but he clinched it at the final rally which was held in the UK. Now, I’ll be honest...

Antisocial

This evening I went to see the delightful Emma Pollock who put on an album launch for her new album “Watch The Fireworks” at The Social in central London. She was as good as ever, but I’m not really a fan of The Social which put a dampener on things somewhat.

I like the idea of The Social, with it’s relaxed demeanour and cosy interior, but when it gets full it turns into somewhere pretty appalling to actually see an artist perform. It’s just too small, really, and the shape around the stage is all wrong so there’s very few places you can stand and guarantee being able to see anything.

Of course, as ever I was trying to take photos which hit upon exactly this problem – getting close wasn’t an option as it was so packed, so I had to zoom in and duck and weave between the (rather tall) people standing in front of me. This was confounded by the utterly rubbish lighting they’ve got in there – I guess they’re trying to create a “mood”, but they essentially don’t have any powerful lights, meaning I had to either switch to ISO 800 (which is to noisy to...

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Hello again! I’m back and now pretty much caught up – only a mere 8000 odd unread items to get though when I came back. I don’t seem to have missed too much; lots of little things but nothing too exiting seems to be the theme of things.

As seems entirely fitting for the concept of a personal blog, I’ve got some holiday snaps to share with you – think of it as the digital, Web 2.0 equivalent of being forced to sit though a slide-show by your grandparents after they’ve got back from a caravanning holiday to Skegness. I’d like to think that my photos – which are of assorted pictures from central Finland, although some could probably be from anywhere – are slightly more interesting, but I’m not going to kid myself.

On a vaguely interesting personal note almost all these shots were shot using the manual mode on my Canon – it’s nice to feel like I’ve finally fully grasped what things like aperture, shutter speed, histograms etc actually mean and the effect these all have on the final photo.