- Blog
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An Open Source BBC?
Azeem has kicked off a provocative to-and-fro from some of the big brains about the BBC’s role in the post-crash Internet. I’m a busy man – I’m nearly forty and I’ve never lit a firework in my life (can that be true?) and this evening I have to light lots of them. So, here are…
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Digital divide – approx. 3000 miles wide
One look at this map (From the Public Internet Project via Werblog) showing Manhattan’s wi-fi nodes should be enough to prove that the biggest digital divide of all is the one that runs roughly North-South down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. What would a similar map of London, Paris or Berlin look like? Sparse,…
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This is fun…
iTunes playlists are becoming an obsession. Here’s my “sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers” list – every track that features one of those words in its ID3 tags. For some reason, these lists make for a much more provocative listen that just randomising the whole library. A Mother’s Love, The Meters All Your Sisters, Mazzy…
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Today’s Guardian article
I persuaded The Guardian to print my blog address so maybe I’ll get some traffic today! I posted the full text of today’s article about Super Audio here a few days ago. If you’d like to comment on that article, click here to load the entry.
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Another unicorn!
Yoz has done the donkey work on legendary software engineer Mitch Kapor’s latest product, a ‘Personal Information Manager’ (PIM) called Chandler. A useful analysis, lots of links and even some retro executables. The man should get a medal. I’ve tried a lot of PIMs, brainstormers, outliners, contact managers – structured and freeform, integrated and standalone.…
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Distressed geeks
Some scratched and mangled black & white photos I took at Dave & Danny’s ‘Village Fete for the Twenty First Century’ back in the Summer showed up in the post months late. Some frames were lost all together – including all the ones of Dave & Danny themselves. The rest, including this one of Matt…
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Powerpoint in pedagogy
We’ve pressed the Powerbook and MS Powerpoint into half term service for our four year-old’s revision. In kiosk mode it’s easy to create a constrained sequence of words, letters, numbers that will only advance when he clicks in the right place and that provides an entertaining sound as a reward for getting the task right.…
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New ways of listening
As I said, it took me a long time to adjust to the new ways of listening implied by clever tools like iTunes. A concrete example: what I used to do was exactly analogous to listening to a CD: flick through the long list of playlists until one catches my eye, double click to play.…
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Fireworks
Today we bought fireworks. I mean we really bought fireworks. They’re having a toofer at Tesco’s so we wound up with a shopping trolley-full of fireworks for half price. Driving them home was like The Wages of Fear – I maintained a steady 5 mph as the sweat beaded on my forehead. We’re going to…
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Sublime Audio
The recording industry did noble work in giving us routine connection with the sublime. Now they’re risking everything by misdirecting their energy into spoiler technologies like Super Audio CD. Meanwhile, in my kitchen, an alternative becomes apparent…