Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at D:Conference
A fascinating discussion, by all accounts. I'd recommend you head over to All Things Digital's site to watch the entire discussion - above is the highlights. I won't spoil it right now, but there's some brilliant, brilliant quotes from both Bill & Steve.
Zooomr needs some lovin'
Zooomr is just two people wanting to create something brilliant. But it's more than that. It's an entire community, and one that, once Mark III goes live, I'll be involving myself in. Mark III, whilst it works, is not coming back from the ether, however, until there's more funding and the all important servers to help ensure an app such as Zooomr Mk III can run just great.
Robert Scoble is calling for people to support Zooomr on his blog, and I'd urge you to spread the word. Zooomr Mark III was, and still is awesome. Let's hope it's not too long before we get to see it again.
Quite why Zooomr, unlike Photobucket, Flickr etc, has not had more funding, or been snatched up is frankly beyond me.Lots of companies claim to care about startups. Here’s a chance to help one.
(Read more on the Zooomr Blog and Technorati)
Another Sunset
In Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Read it here
HDR: The Lowry
This wasn't my creation, sadly (although 3 of my shots from last night were used for it) - Mike Franklin is the genius behind this, and generously allowed me to Flickr it. Thanks Mike.
Flickr-rs at The Quays
Last night saw the Mancunian Flickr-rs hit Salford Quays. A great evening of drinking and shooting ensued. Head over to Flickr for everyone's shots (two of mine shown here). And stay tuned for a RapidWeaver screencast later this week!
Quote of the Day
Harsh but true indeed. (Via Twitter) In the meantime, here's a shot of some Moo cards - business cards Web-2.0 style.Internet Explorer is like online aids. Harsh but true.
RapidWeaver Tip #13: Muted Tubes
Introduction
How Are You Playing It?
Your first answer is "I'll just pop in some tags somewhere on the page". The first problem here is, if you're on a frameless HTML page, perhaps like this, that the audio will cut out when they navigate to a different page. There goes the ambience you so wanted. Oh, sure, you could use frames and put the media player in its own, and ....... bleurgh. Have fun sorting that out. So, you want to have a cohesive user experience, the ambience to stay intact, and the audio on the page regardless of the content. That means Flash - something that's incredibly useful, but also so incredibly annoying as a user to have to interact with. My favourite example of all things wrong with Flash is, ironically, the Adobe store. Half Flash, half HTML and ColdFusion, it's a slow loading dinosaur that, thanks to the Flash sector, renders the 'Back' button mostly useless. And Flash also likely means loading times. With the average user wanting to wait no more than around 4 or 5 seconds for a page to load, if your Flash page loads slowly at the expense of audio (remember, not everyone's sat on top of an academic network like yours truly) people will simply not bother. Flash also removes the ability to navigate to bookmarked 'subpages' and if people have to faff around and re-navigate your (likely poorly implemented Flash UI) every time they visit, again, they just won't bother. Trust me. I don't.
What now?
Now that we've eliminated pretty much every 'in-window' option, you may think "Pop-up"! Not so fast, there. Pop-up blocking is a standard feature of web browsers nowadays, so getting a window open when someone visits your site is actually pretty tricky, and unless visitors are visiting to hear samples of your audio work, they're not likely to want to open the window anyway. Yes, that 'ambience' you so desire is going down in flames pretty quickly.
There's more than just the technical reasons for avoiding this auto-loading all singing-all-dancing idea?
Yes. It's not the numerous technical hurdles that make it futile to put auto-loading audio or video on your average site - there is one more I've not really mentioned: that Microsoft's ActiveX controls (used by Flash et. al. on Windows) no-longer auto-start as the result of the Eolas patent spat. It's the fact that by putting on auto-loading audio, you're showing a fundamental lack of respect to your visitor. That's me. I, like many, many others no doubt, surf the inter-web with iTunes open and blaring media of my choosing. When you're visiting the site for a movie, audio is expected, so I'm completely willing to pause iTunes as I want to see that content. But if I'm visiting a BBQ sales website, I won't want to interrupt my listening to put up with whatever tune you think is appropriate. If I come across a site that does auto-play audio, or for that matter, ANY audio-visual content when it's not expected, rest assured by only visit will be a swift one - and when I leave, I'll run like a bat out of hell.
I'm not anti-audio - I'm a musician for goodness sake - but when it comes to websites, please do us all a favour: leave the auto-playing media out. Please.
You Know My Name (From Casino Royale) by Chris Cornell
Don't you dare f**king interupt it!
How Times Change
With the summer coming around, and an exciting WWDC just over a month away, I thought it was time to share this video. Almost 10 years ago Apple was in a different position, the RDF was coming into operation, and Bill Gates even made an appearance at MacWorld. A fascinating video with the hindsight of the last 10 years, especially given the recent palarva at PCWorld magazine - Colin Crawford (who clashed with PCWorld editor Harry McCracken over recent articles) opens the video with a painful speech at the start of MacWorld 1997. Other gems include the fact that crowd back then hates Internet Explorer (something that's not changed ;-) ) and Steve Jobs says "the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned". He's changed his tune......
Save Net Radio - Boycott the RIAA
Now, there are some badges available here. But those badges are not exactly, er, stylish. So I decided to tap Florian at ADHDGraphics / CocoaGrove for a new, slick, badge that everyone would want to use on their blogs to spread the word. Florian has agreed to let these be used freely, so show your gratitude by visiting either of his two sites! Without further ado, here we go:On July 15th, internet radio as we know it will end. That’s the new date (it was May 15th) that the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has set for internet radio broadcasters like Pandora Media to pay up on retro active royalty payments (increased from 0.0008 to 0.0019), which will see many web casters owing in the millions.
If you want something to Twitter about it, then this fits the 140 character limit just nicely:
If you're thinking "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" then read the FAQs here. HTML codes are as follows:May 15, the music will die. Hit the music industry back, don't buy music on May 15 and show support for internet radio. Everyone tweet this.
For the Black Button
For the White Button
For The Aqua Button
For the Dark Aqua
Manchester Flickr Meetup VI
After, like, a while of missing them, I finally made it to a Manchester Flickr Meetup.
And they're really good.
Yes, it was quite an occasion. The images below are copyright their respective owners and used with permission. Lunch at the great Night & Day Café, followed by us swamping the Thomas Chop House (we need to find a bigger venue for city-centre drinks!!).Then we wandered (the image above providing me some dubious segue to this, and yes they're my feet in the shot above!). Eventually, we hit Albert Square for the duel. Yes, a duel. Mark and Jon's grudgematch was settled by a photo-shoot-out. Now you may be asking 'How the HELL do you do one of those?'. Here's how:Especially when police officers, kicking, shootouts, alcohol, weird looks and surreptitious stalking of C-list TV stars are involved!
- Find a wide open public space - Manchester's Albert Square was ideal for this.
- Ideally, you need plenty of Flickr peers to psych you up - and a small crowd of normal, non-Flickring people to think WTF. The small crowd is optional, but highly recommended - the Flickr peers essential to a) judge the shootout and b) capture it all on camera.
- The two combatants stand back to back, with cameras ready to shoot. The crowd, or rather someone in it, then counts one to ten, and the combatants step forward on each count.
- Upon reaching their tenth step, the combatants turn around as fast as possible and photograph their opponent. The best shot wins. Especially if the opposition are photographed still bringing their camera up ;-) but the idea is, on the spur of the moment, to get as good a shot as possible.
It must be noted that this is the largest ever recorded turnout and all Saturday's turnout are in this shot (unlike the last one I attended), not through the joys of remotes, self-timers, or other technological marvels, but infact, the local polizei (crowd of onlookers for the shoot-out in the background below!)Juvenile behaviour broke out, with camera fighting ensuing.When one member of the fighters (Tom) was sent to the ground by a rogue cobble, we all laughed hard. But then a random person who walked nearby gave Tom a kick as he walked past. The shot below was from the immediate aftermath, and with a police van still in the square, not to mention cries, laughs and 'No Fairs!' from a 26-strong mob, the police thankfully caught up with the thug.After much deliberation, we headed off to Font Bar - possible location of an exhibition of our work sometime soon, for some drinks. During the planning for the meet, Flickr decided to christen the day itself '24 Hours of Flickr'. Everyone looking for a shot that summed up the day. After much deliberation, I dropped this one into the pool.We then proceeded to take about 4 hours to walk the mile to Castlefields, where the Flickr-azzi fired up their cameras for the Coronation Street stars drinking at the bar we ended up at. 8 hours after having set off on foot from the flat, I finally returned, rather shattered. Unsuprisingly, there's masses of photos for the meet - if you want to see the entire 359-photo combined pool for the event, check it out here on Flickr! (My Set) All-in, a top day.Thanks to all those who've allowed their photos to be blogged via Flickr.
Machine Tag Me
So what tag should be all agree on? I'm suggesting of:user=(username) - so of:user=nikf for the one above. It'd be great if Flickr built this in, and then linked up photos automagically. Of course, it'd be better for the Flickr system to use your Flickr ID (so, for example 80573242@N00 for me - find out yours here) but I'm sure that, if something such as this were implemented, there'd be some kind of automation to make this a really consumer friendly idea.
Like the idea? Then post on Flickr in the Ideas thread for it!
The Bigger Picture
For the price, you really can't complain. You surrender all control over the images to the software, once you've ordered them, but it doesn't do all that bad a job. (See the end of the post for comparison images).
DoubleTake, on the other hand, is a pretty comprehensive app - it supports RAW files unlike the HP software (which I guess is to be expected) however I'd recommend working with 16-bit TIFFs as whilst it's certainly not unforgivably slow with the NEFs I dragged into it, it's obviously far faster to work with TIFFs (not to mention you'll have white balance etc sorted too!).
![[Blog Photo] Monolake](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/207/483688552_b0286ec384.jpg)
The ability to set a fish-eye setting to the image to get them to align is handy, as is the ability to set the focal length. The 'Align' does exactly what is says on the tin, 360º panoramas are possible, and whilst you can save as JPG, JPEG 2000, TIFF, PNG, PDF, you can also save the panorama as a QuickTime VR and a DoubleTake 'document' which allows you to save the panorama without losing the ability to come back and re-edit it at a future date. One feature I didn't get a a chance to test (as inkjet ink is still too pricey) is one added in the recent 2.1 update: Poster Printing - DoubleTake now can split your images into several pages for printing on A4, allowing you to re-construct the picture after using up copious amounts of ink (read more about the feature on the DoubleTake site)
All in all, DoubleTake is a neat app. Sure, for some people the free software will work for their needs. But if you're interested in having more manual control, and more export options, you really should head over to the developer's site and download a demo - I give it a definite thumbs-up. DoubleTake is €16.95 excluding VAT and requires Mac OS X 10.4. Download details for the Hewlett Packard software can be found here (under Step 3).
Samples:
- Comparison of panoramas created by DoubleTake and HP Photosmart Stitch (1.3MB PDF)
- QuickTime VR created by DoubleTake (2.20MB MOV)
- HP-created version on Flickr
- DoubleTake-created version on Flickr
The Fate of my Nokia [Contains Rude Words]
- It refused to charge at random periods for a period of 4 months. Replacement charger has only delayed this happening again.
- It crashes. Like Windows Mobile. For no reason
- If you're lucky to get it charging, it'll crash when a phonecall comes in. But only after you've answered the god-damn call.
- It's a cheap, nasty handset. Feels horrible, the springs inside the slider are making funny sounds. For the first time ever, I'm glad I agreed to buy specific insurance for the handset from Vodafone. Never before has a phone felt to likely to break.
- I have yet to make a successful 3G video call. Not that I really need to, but it'd be nice if my 3G handset were to, y'know say actually work?
- Syncing. Sucks. The phone doesn't offer the ability to specify what each number is - Mobile, Office etc - until after you've saved them to the phone. And then you have to access it through way to many menus. Problem is, when it syncs, iSync simply puts numbers into a 'Other' category.
- The music player is all right, I guess. But so utterly primitive, that I can't believe they used it as a marketing point.
- I've been utterly disappointed that I've had to send it in for Firmware updates. Vodafone didn't do enough testing.
Someone else got kinda frustrated with their 6280 (Ondra) - and threw it against a wall. I salute you. My 6280 is already cowering with the fear of the iPhone's arrival already.
1It must be noted that I'm holding judgement on iPhone purely for contractual reasons - if the deal isn't right when the carrier's packages are announced, I'm honestly not sure what I'll do. Probably head back to Symbian. Symbian rocks.
Mah Mediah
![[Blog Photo] Mah Mediah](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/209/481670006_4e5aead317.jpg)
Over the past few weeks, I've been trying to get hold of some additional media for my D80 - with the D80 filling a 2Gb SD card in 160-odd shots compared to the Sony's 590-ish (that's at maximum resolution and file type) I'm stocking up a few extra cards. Along the way, I've had two faulty (albeit admittedly cheap) cards that weren't worth the hassle. So, where to look? There's Amazon, sure, but I've got another suggestion - Play.com. I chose to look for some SanDisk Extreme II cards - I know there's Extreme III out, but to be honest, the Extreme II I'm using at the moment is plenty fast. OK, the III's are only 3 or four quid more, but I set myself £30 for memory, and I intended to stick to it!! The short of it is this: £30 got me 2 x 2Gb Extreme II SD cards. Delivered free, and now awaiting use. If you're looking at CompactFlash for a Canon (you have my sympathies.. ;-) ) then I'd recommend you start here (SD cards can be found here) - there's some massive savings to be had!
Sunset over Manchester
After much trial, and plenty of error - a sunset to be proud of! This weekend sees a couple of things going on in Manchester - firstly the City vs United derby ("Am I bovvered?") and shortly after that, Flickr Meet VI is hitting a pub near you. We're gonna be chatting about plans to get an exhibition going of Mancunian Flickr-rs work, and it all kicks off shortly after the footy's final whistle (i.e. 3pm-ish). RSVP or otherwise at Upcoming.org is not essential, but it will give you the details and the opportunity to make sure we don't move on without you! The meet is also signalling the end of the submissions phase for the exhibition - the group pool closes on Monday, so if you've not submitted photos yet, you'd best get to it!
Finally, if there's any other Mancunian bloggers out there who would perhaps be able to help us get exhibition space that perhaps we've not thought of, or otherwise help us get this exhibition rolling, then either post on Flickr, or contact me directly via the contact form found here!