links for 2009-11-06

November 7, 2009 in Bookmarks with Leave a Comment

links for 2009-11-03

November 3, 2009 in Bookmarks with Leave a Comment

  • DVR is TV's New BFF
    How fears that the digital video recorder "threatens the very lifeblood of how television is funded" evaporated and turned out to be good for the industry, and how this isn't an isolated incident and happened with the VCR, the audio cassette, and even the turntable. Next up: music and movie file sharing: piracy or just the latest example?
    (tags: piracy copyright dvr television advertising)

links for 2009-11-02

November 2, 2009 in Bookmarks with Leave a Comment

Mouse traps

November 2, 2009 in Miscellany with Leave a Comment

So this weekend I finally managed to get my hands on one of those new-fangled Magic Mouse devices from the local Apple Store. They were announced a couple of weeks ago but have been slow appearing in the wild: but this weekend, finally, there were mice to behold and purchase.

Now I should say that I’m not usually the type of person to rush out and get the latest gadget – even the latest Apple gadget – just for the hell of it when it’s released. I was about 18 months late getting an iPhone, for example. But seeing how I also went out and got a new iPod nano the minute I could, I realise that my protestations of not being a new gadget whore appear rather weaker than they might have done previously.

So I’ll try and explain my reasoning and rationale.

Have you ever used the Mighty Mouse, the Magic’s predecessor? (The name change is the result of a copyright infringement court case that went against Apple, by the way.) One of its features is the little “nipple” scroll wheel, which – like all things Apple – is quite beautiful and aesthetically done, but tragically flawed in the pragmatism stakes.

Put simply, the “nipple” wheel gets gunged up very easily. Okay, most scroll wheels on mice do, but here you have Apple a little too in love with the beauty of its products and not wanting to ruin it with anything crass – such as a way of getting into the “nipple” wheel compartment to clean it out. instead you have to make the most of what you can do with paperclips and Sellotape to clean it out, which is a hassle, hard work – and doesn’t work for long.

The Magic Mouse does away with this problem by … doing away with the scroll wheel entirely. Instead, the upper body of the mouse is touch sensitive like a trackpad or an iPhone, and stroking a finger up and down (or left or right or in circles if you’re so inclined) will scroll the window on screen. Sounds good? Well, in practice it’s even better – it’s scrolling as it should always be done. And no more gunging up the “nipple” wheel ever again. Bliss!

The other selling point for me was that the Magic Mouse boasts an improved “laser precision” optical tracking system. For some reason, all the mice (PC as well as Apple) I’ve tried on my desk surfaces end up suddenly shooting off in same random direction, and after a while it gets seriously irritating. It’s the kind of torture they should use in interrogations if they want to drive someone psychotic. So I took a gamble and hoped that this new laser tracking system on the Magic Mouse would fix this. And you know what? It has. Perfectly.

On the flipside, the concern I had in getting the Magic Mouse was that the side profile is very, very low. It looks immediately as though it’s going to be an ergonomics disaster and cripple users within a single sitting. Apple don’t have a very good track record with making ergonomic mice for some reason, and I particularly remember the original iMac’s “hockey puck mouse” as being the worst such device I’ve ever tried, literally unusable. It drove me to buying a Microsoft mouse in replacement, it was that bad!

So it was with some trepidation that I tried thr Magic Mouse in store, decided it didn’t feel at all bad, and decided to risk it nonetheless. But how would it feel after two days of use?

Surprisingly – pretty good. No problems at all. In fact, better and more comfortable than the previous Mighty Mouse. The low profile meant that my hand isn’t held arched over the hump so much, which means that raising fingers to scroll on the surface (rather than on a scroll wheel) feels perfectly comfortable. I’m not saying it’s going to win any ergonomic awards, but I can see that it’s been shaped as it has to do its best in this area even if aesthetics still reign supreme as they always do with Apple.

The biggest different is probably the fact that you can choose how to hold the device – your positioning isn’t determined by where your finger has to fall on the scroll wheel, because you can scroll on any part of the mouse’s top surface. It’s a small distinction but one that makes a big different in comfort.

And in some minor, miscellaneous points about the Mighty Mouse, I’ll add that it feels far more solid and high quality that its predecessor (the added weight is thanks to the batteries – more of which in a minute), and putting the Mighty and Magic Mice side by side suddenly makes you realise that the Mighty Mouse is dumpy, frumpy and old by comparison with the sleek sportscar model that replaces it.

But there has to be at least one downside to all his, right? For me, it comes in the form of Bluetooth: the Mighty Mouse only comes in a wireless version, since obviously sticking on a cable for a USB version of the mouse would offend the beautiful lines of the product and have the Apple designers running screaming form the building, right?

I’ve never seen the problem with having a short cable from my mouse; why are people so obsessed with wireless mice and keyboards? I start obsessing over the battery life of these things and then I get all anal about turning them off when not in use to make the batteries last longer, as opposed to their nice, perfectly behaved cabled counterparts that turn off when the computer turns off. And Bluetooth devices do strange things when you try and turn them off; all of a sudden your sleeping computer wakes up, startled, wondering where its little buddy has disappeared to. “Connection lost!” it insists on waking up the screen to tell you. “Yes, I know, I pressed the ‘off’ button” I have to tell it, before putting it back to sleep, hoping it doesn’t have a second or third anxiety attack that wakes it up again. I’ve never known people with half the separation anxiety disorders of Bluetooth-enabled computers.

Seriously, I’d rather just have a cable. But the cable version of the Magic Mouse doesn’t exist; or rather, it does – it’s a renamed but otherwise identical Mighty Mouse. In the world of Apple, you can have your Magic Mouse anyway you like it, as long as it’s (a) Bluetooth and (b) solid white.

But I guess that’s a minor quibble. Slightly more important is my hope that over the longer term, the mouse doesn’t leave me crippled with RSI. While the signs are good so far, I’ll let you know if there’s any change; although such a blog post would of course be slow coming, as it would have to be typed one-handed…

del.icio.us links for 12-30 October 2009

October 30, 2009 in Bookmarks with Leave a Comment

links for 2009-10-30

links for 2009-10-29

links for 2009-10-28

links for 2009-10-27

links for 2009-10-26

links for 2009-10-25

links for 2009-10-23

  • When Bonnie Greer met Nick Griffin | News
    The awesome Bonnie Greer on THAT Question Time. Scroll down for the really powerful testimony: "I chose to come here because I saw it as a country of decent, fair people. But also because this country gave my father, Ben Greer, who was a black sharecropper from Mississippi, his first decent experience of white people he'd ever had. He came here during the war, in a blacks-only unit as part of General Patton's army and was involved in the second wave of D-Day landings, and later he always spoke about how well the white working-class Brits had treated him, the very people who today are said to be turning to the BNP. My daddy always said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. So I decided to come for him, and also for my deceased white English mother-in-law, Joan Hutchins, who had never met a black person before she met me, and who welcomed me into her heart."
    (tags: question time politics bnp)
  • Defra redesigns web pages 'too focused on agriculture' – Telegraph
    £181k spent on Defra’s website by changing it to maroon and pea green after research finds users think there is too much brown on it.
    (tags: defra website design ukgovernment)
  • Government climate change ad investigated after 350 complaints
    DECC's £6m Act on CO2 campaign, which features a father telling his daughter a scary bedtime story about climate change in which a cartoon dog drowns, is inappropriate for children because it is "upsetting and scaremongering".
    (tags: climatechange television advert ukpolitics decc)

links for 2009-10-22

links for 2009-10-20

links for 2009-10-19

links for 2009-10-17

  • The myth of easy engagement. Who should participate and how…
    Tim Davies responds on the online engagement approach, saying that always focusing on the small number of active, enthusiastic people first is not necessarily the right way, and talking through the reasoning behind engagement strategiies
    (tags: onine engagment)
  • The myth of engaging with everyone
    Why asking about digital access/Twitter take-up/internet refuseniks are the wrong questions about online engagement strategies.
    (tags: engagement online)
  • 'Sorry you were out': the post that never was
    There are widespread reports across the country that postmen are leaving ‘Sorry You Were Out’ cards unnecessarily: either the postmen are simply too lazy to carry parcels on their rounds, and, instead, come armed with a sheaf of ‘Sorry You Were Out’ cards; or there is an unofficial policy that if any delivery consists of more than three parcels per street or shift, a van has to be used instead of a postman with his trolley — presumably for reasons of health and safety; or trainee postmen are not allowed to deliver parcels, maybe because of problems with theft? The Daily Mail (I know …) investigates, and an interesting premise is littered with a lot of "presumably"s and "theoretically"s because that's easier than in-depth investigative journalism.
    (tags: post parcels royalmail postofice)

links for 2009-10-16

links for 2009-10-14

links for 2009-10-13

links for 2009-10-12

Back-up away slowly

October 11, 2009 in Technology with 2 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

For the last of this loose trilogy of tech-themed blog postings, I’m going to talk about having bought a backup hard disc. Yep, this is a post about backing up your hard drive: those of you with a non-geek disposition should look away now.

Yes, my final purchase this week has been a backup hard disc, and I have a confession to make that is surely shameful to all geeks: it’s the first backup drive I’ve ever owned.

Now in mitigation, this isn’t the first time I’ve held backups of key files, of course. I’ve always kept copies of my key files on an array of backup media, starting with the old SyQuest cartridges back in the 90s, then seguing to the Iomega ZIp drives that succeeded them, and then we got into burning first to CDs and then to DVDs.

And when even 4.3Gb of backup started to feel a bit restrictive, along came the rise of USB key sticks. The first one of those I bought was 2Gb for about thirty pounds, and that was impressive in its day; a few months ago, however, I got a 16Gb stick for sixteens pounds – Houston, we have pound-gigabyte parity!

These storage amounts are utterly staggering when you stop to think about it. I remember loading programs into a BBC Mirco by cassette tape, and being amazed by these new-fangled floppy discs for my Amstrad CPC that held unimaginable amounts of 180K per side. A little later and I was trying out Pagemaker on an Apple Macintosh Plus: since it didn’t have an internal hard disc, running the program meant juggling two different floppy discs in and out of the single drive. It made it quite fun as a computer game of speed and dexterity, but a complete non-starter as an efficient business machine for achieving anything.

When I was working at a magazine publisher’s in the early 90s, in the repro department that scanned in all the pictures at high resolution, we had the problem of how to store the photos and completed layouts. A typical page would need up to 256Mb of storage, and back then there were no High Street solutions offering that kind of capacity. We ended up with a technology called ‘OptiDisc’, a forerunner of DVDs, but at a cost of something like fifty pounds per disk. When you’re storing literally hundreds of pages on these things at any given time, that’s a huge outlay on media alone.

Arund this time, the first Mac I ever owned myself had a 105Mb hard drive when most models had a 80Mb drive – how could I ever fill up such a vast space I wondered? – and the next Mac, my first laptop, had a 1Gb drive. Four years on and my next computer, a Powerbook G4, had ten times that capacity. It still sits on my desk, the hard disc crammed full, its once mighty storage capacity humbled by the tiny nano sitting on top of it – let alone the desktop iMac with a 320Gb drive.

But even so, I’m still feeling the cold dead hand of file bloat creeping up on me. I have 20Gb in downloaded podcasts alone, and now that I have a TV tuner and can store TV programs at a size of 3.8Gb per hour-long program. All of a sudden my ad hoc storage routine of saving “key files” down to portable media – even when it’s cheap at 16Gb at a time – is increasingly under strain, unable to keep up.

Hence the decision to finally get a proper back-up disc to do a proper job of it. No more “saving key files when I feel like it” and “hope I haven’t missed anything” – I want to now that everything’s back-up. And if the Mac crashes, that I haven’t lost a week or a month’s worth of files since my last amateur back-up: I want to know everything up to an hour ago is safe.

Fortunately Apple have put disc back up software directly into the current operating system, so all I had to do was get the hardware, and I duly found a 1Tb (that’s terabyte, or 1000Gb) hard drive that looked ideal, for £130. That’s 12.9p per gigabyte – remember how excited I was at the pound-gigabyte parity? Keep watching and it’ll be a penny-gigabyte balance instead, and not too far in the future. To put this sort of capacity into context, I have it on good authority that the BBC’s MP3 archive of all its surviving radio output to date is around 30Tb.

Remember that old marketing chestnut phrase ‘plug and play’? It used to be all the rage and now most things claim that they are ‘plug and play’, but rarely is it a case that you literally plug it in and it gets right to work without any further action. But the back up software (called Time Machine) recognised the hard disc drive and … Well, basically just got on with it. The first truly “plug and play’ experience I’ve ever had with any piece of hardware short of mouse and keyboard. “Set it, then forget it,” says the info page on Time Machine.

And so it is: there it sits on my desk, occasionally jumping into life for a minute and making some copies before retiring again for another hour. From that respect it’s the most boring piece of hardware that I’ve ever bought, because of course it’s the thing you never want to have to need to use. To need the backup drive means there has been a disaster, at the very least a mistakenly deleted key file but more likely a disastrous failure of the main computer in some way. I’m hoping that owning a backup drive is like taking an umbrella with me on a day of dubious weather and that the very taking of it means that it won’t rain.

(Actually, Apple make the backup software a little too dazzling for its own good. Time Machine has such a startlingly different interface on the world of backups that you almost want something to fail to give you an excuse to go play with it: it presents you with a timeline going right back to the earliest backup, and you move down the timeline seeing the state of the Mac as it was at each save point. Literally, it’s like travelling back in time – all against a nice sci-fi background of stars to complete the effect. It’s quite awesome – at least, as awesome as backup technology can ever really be!)

In the meantime I can bask in the pleasure of being among the Properly Prepared for the first time, and I look back upon the says of ZIP drives and USB sticks with the kind of patronising smugness typical of the newly converted. While it might be a boring piece of hardware (although it does have a nice LED display on it that moves back and forth like a Cylon … Ahem.) it’s already contributed positively to my peace of mind. And I can marvel at the fact that I own a storage device with one terabyte of capacity.

And yet … And yet …

At the back of my mind, I’m wondering: how long before that one terabyte starts to feel just that little bit too snug for my liking?

Review: Eagle Eye

October 11, 2009 in Films with Leave a Comment

(Contains some mild, non-specific but still spoiler-type comments.)

Perfectly decent action thriller, even if not a particularly memorable or outstanding one. It’s mostly likely to give rise to memories of the superior Enemy of the State (which is helpfully invoked several times in dialogue just to make it clear) but Fugitive, WarGames and Matrix are also directly referenced and in particular the film features 2001’s HAL’s dream date in ARIA.

Oddly though it’s Hitchcock that this film most seems to want to be like, from the “innocent man on the run from the authorities” plot line, the hero and heroine shackled (figuratively) together – and the final assassination scene strikingly like the climax of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” even down to the son being held hostage.

But where Hitch would have built tension to breaking point, this film follows the modern tradition of throwing lots of action (even if very well staged), sound and fast editing into making the story borderline unintelligible at times, and certainly lacking the tension that the Master would have pulled off. The plot shift from the early ground-setting to the start of the main story is so sudden, unheralded and lacking build-up that it’s a huge opportunity wasted.

The film also strays too far into the ‘unbelievable’ at times with ARIA’s capabilities that undermines the central paranoid Big Brother warning that the film appears to be trying to convey.

The film is also very humourless, a shame given LaBeouf’s undoubted comedy skills that worked so well in his last collaboration with director D.J. Caruso; LaBeouf is fine, Monaghan is one-note, Billy Bob Thornton is his usual self leaving just Michael Chiklis as a surprisingly effective Secretary of Defence.

The one surprising facet of the story is that the villain of the piece is, in alternate readings, also the hero – the embodiment of the people, protecting the constitution, righting a horrible wrong ordered by the president. It’s a shame that it’s just a mad computer plot at the end of the day.

Rating: a perfectly enjoyable *** out of 5

links for 2009-10-09

October 9, 2009 in Bookmarks with Leave a Comment

Moving pictures, and how to get them

October 8, 2009 in Technology, Television with 1 Comment
Tags: , , , ,

About five years ago, Steve Jobs memorably dismissed the idea of adding video to iPods, pointing out that while you can listen to music in the background, movies require that you actually watch them. “You can’t watch a video and drive a car,” he said. “We’re focused on music.”

This little blip in Jobs’ future-gazing capabilities is often used by detractors to show that even Apple’s great leader can and does get it wrong. Of course, they’re less quick to mention that – regardless of what Steve Jobs’ personal opinion on the matter might have been in 2004 – it didn’t stop the company from quickly adapting and making a truck load of money out of video-capable iPods and especially out of streaming video sales through the Apple Store. The last laugh is with Jobs and his bank account on this one.

Actually, though, I’ve always rather agreed with Jobs’ old opinion on this one. I use my iPod when I’m walking to work, or working at my desk, because music is something that doesn’t interfere with walking around and concentrating on other tasks. But add video and it’s quite different: it becomes an all-demanding immersive experience. You can’t walk along the street let alone drive a car while trying to watch a video.

But the biggest obstacle of all when it comes to mobile video seems to me to be: where do you get the videos to watch in the first place?

When I got my iPhone, I decided that I had to at least try the whole video thing once before deciding it was a waste of time. So I bought a couple of TV episodes from the Apple Store, put them on, used them for ‘demo’ purposes when talking to people about the iPhone, and … Never watched the episodes themselves. They’re still sitting on there, unwatched, a year later: I’ve never felt I’ve had the opportunity to sit and give my undivided attention to the episodes that my psyche tells me that ‘proper’ programmes must have to be appropriately watched. I’ve just never found a time when I’ve thought, “oh, perfect time to watch that” – yet the amount of music and podcasts and audiobooks I’ve listened to in that time is legion.

That little test run “proved”, to me at least, that video-on-the-go had very little appeal. Moreover it highlighted the problem that the content had to come from the Apple Store at a price (almost two pounds for an hour-long episodes), or … Where else? You could download BitTorrent TV programs, or find an illegal and nefarious way of ripping a DVD, but when it came to legal sources of video to watch on your iPod, then the alternatives were limited. And costly.

I did find one way of getting video content to the iPhone: I have a DVD Recorder that saves on-air recordings to a hard disc, which I could then burn onto a DVD, take the disc across the room to the Mac, and rip and convert this non-copy protected disc to iPhone format (H.264 since you ask) and then copy it into iTunes for syncing. Of course, this burning/ripping two stage process took as long if not longer than watching the source material in the first place, so you can imaging how many times I actually did this: once. A proof of concept run. But clearly this didn’t work in practice and I was still stymied.

I’ve always figured that the Apple TV product would be the eventual answer to this problem. When it first came out it seemed to me to be a rather pointless piece of hardware that added a hard disc to your TV to store downloads from the Apple Store, and not much else. I can see why Apple hobbled the product in this way – as it stands, Apple TV must drive a lot of sales form the Apple Store, after all. But I’ve always been mystified at why anyone would spend over two hundred pounds for something that is, essentially, doing exactly what your Mac or PC already does.

Surely Apple TV should let you watch and record TV as well? And allows you to watch the recorded programmes on your TV, Mac/PC or mobile device seamlessly, whichever you wanted? In other words, make it a PVR (personal video recorder) that bridges your TV, your Mac/PC and your mobile devices? As a way of making Apple TV relevant and worthwhile this had always seemed to me to be the obvious way forward; I could understand it not being in the 1.0 launch product, but surely it would be in the 2.0? But no – I’ve waited and watched and Apple TV is still about as dumb and pointless (to my mind) as when it first started. I guess it’s either legal copyright issues, or more likely that the sales it drives to the Apple Store that are worth protecting more than trying to boost sales of the product itself by making it, you know, useful.

Finally I decided to try to DIY it. I got a TV Tuner from Elgato, a company that specialises in video products for the Mac. I was a little wary of this since I’d be primarily using Freeview, and the reception in my area is patchy to say the least, so I could have spent a lot of money to get a product that didn’t really work. But I was lucky and with a bit of juggling with aerials I found that I could get a better signal for the Mac tuner than I can for my main TV set. I had finally added a capability that I’d wanted ever since my first computer back in the 80s – the ability to watch TV on my Mac.

At a stroke, what I got is the ability to schedule recordings of any Freeview channel, have it formatted for an iPod/iPhone and automatically sent to iTunes for the next sync to the mobile device. So at last, I have a purpose for video on an iPod – watching programmes that I’d recorded that I just didn’t have time to watch at home. Yay! But now the question becomes, “Was it the lack of source material after all – or just the fact that Steve Jobs was right all along and watching TV on a mobile device is just not that appealing?”

The first programme I recorded for mobile viewing was the practice sessions for the most recent Formula 1 Grand Prix (anyone who doesn’t know about my motorsport obsession clearly hasn’t checked out my companion motorsportind blog!) Since this was being held in Japan, the practice sessions started at an eye-watering 2am on Friday morning; and since I had work the next day and needed to show up reasonably sentient, watching live just wasn’t an option. Fitting in 90 minutes of viewing on the Friday evening wasn’t viable either, and on Saturday things would have moved on to the official qualifying session and Friday practice would no longer be relevant viewing. In the past that’s meant simply not watching it, but maybe now with video-on-the-go it would prove possible?

This first “proper” recording through the Mac tuner worked as advertised – the converted file was waiting, ready for synching in the morning and was duly put on the iPod nano (smaller screen, but perfectly fine for this type of thing – and I wanted to protect my iPhone battery life for other things such as calls, texts and tweets) to take into work. And sure enough, I watched it – on the train (only 15-20 minute stints on my commute, but good for catching snatches of something like this – not so good for narrative drama), over lunch in the COI café, and a couple of other opportunities throughout the day. There was still some left by the time I got home, but easy enough to finish off at this point. I was impressed by the quality and watchability on the iPod screen and I had a real childish glee of “Ooooh, look – I can watch TV on the iPod!” as I viewed.

Enduring success or one-hit wonder? The next thing to be recorded was – predictably – the Saturday practice session the next night at the same time from Japan, but by the time I was up and about the next morning it was already time for the proper qualification session, and that was such a breathless and exciting event that it rather eclipsed the earlier practice session, which now seemed rather … missable, frankly. So that’s still sitting on the iPod nano awaiting a viewing, several days after the Grand Prix weekend concluded. I suspect its chances are not good this long after the event.

I guess that makes the score currently one-all in terms of “will I watch video on the iPod with this new arrangement?” and it seems to come down to timing. It worked on the Friday because watching on-the-go was the only way of getting the programme watched in time; it failed on the Saturday because there was simply no such opportunity to watch it in time, mobile or otherwise. It also clearly depends on the source material, with just-aired sporting events having just the right sort of balance between timeliness and not having to watch too closely, as dipping in and out, stopping and starting is fine with this sort of sporting material but would kill a good drama or comedy. We shall have to await a tie-breaker and some longer-term data.

But regardless of whether the “watching on iPhone/iPod” experiment proves successful, the thing I’m really enjoying is simply having live TV on the Mac. It’s lovely being able to watch a programme as I work in a little box on the desktop; it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s totally different from trying to keep on eye on the actual TV while working on the computer; it’s particularly useful for having something like BBC News 24 on in the background as I work, which has been what has accompanied the writing of this blog post.

And if you’ll excuse me, I have to turn over the channel now and listen to In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 …

links for 2009-10-06

October 6, 2009 in Bookmarks with 2 Comments

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