Ah well… It HAS been very quiet here for the past while. And I mean like totally really way too quiet. And currently I really think that that’s pretty silly, and something (however temporary) had to be done about it, so I’m now adding something in the hope that I might remember to add a bit more in the future. Possibly more interesting, more useful or academic things. But they’ll come a bit later hopefully. For now, muse upon this…

Well after maybe 2 months of downtime due to me getting muddled with the deletion of my MySQL database (nerdy stuff, don’t worry about what it means! Haha!). I thought it would be a good idea to restore a backup from February and then update the pages from Google’s cache (which thankfully worked! Yay!).

Anyway, just an update, I’ll post more about my exciting times in due course!

I’m still here, I was just in Southern California and Mexico for the last few weeks. I’ll try and get some more stuff up when I return, but for now, here’s a brief outline of my trip!

Home –> Los Angeles (Hollywood) –> San Diego –> Ensenada –> San Diego –> Anaheim –> Home

Yo all!

Just a quick message here to let you know that I do have some fairly incredible photos of the Mars Volta (from the Mars Volta gig) to post when I get a chance. I also should have some more Neil young ones too… I just have to get around to tweaking them slightly (in the case of Neil Young) and uploading them (in the case of TMV). In the latter case I used my old Kodak P&S cam to get some pictures without looking like press/carrying around a bulky camera, so as a result the pics probably did suffer loads.

I did however did just suddenly realise how amazing RAW is for shooting images in potentially crap conditions. It’s probably just as excellent in normal more optimal conditions, but I find it really does excel when the light’s pretty low and faces are washed out with flashes and bright lights. It’s probably prettty silly admitting this now - considering I’ve had the camera for 2 and a bit years and it’s never really occured to me to try RAW. The huge file size and slower relative speed probably hindered me trying it. But now that I’ve got a 8gb fast card (from only the best CF Card manufacturer - Lexar) I pushed the boat out and gave it a go! It takes longer to write to the card (read: the red button lights up for longer) but it didn’t seem to hinder my photo taking pace too much (large (enough) buffer size?), which really shows how excellently well made my EOS 350d is. You can read all about how amazing RAW is on various places on the internet, so I won’t be going in to them now - I’ll only mention that some photos that I would have normally discarded due to the overly white light flooding the faces of the subjects were ‘repaired’ to fix this issue almost entirely. Believe me, I was surprised when playing about with the RAW sliders in Aperture when the pic actually began to look good!

This also brings me onto a few finer points about the Canon 350d that I have. While rather old (almost 3 years since released) in a quickly aging digital camera market, it performs excellently. It has had numerous revisions (350d -> 400d -> 450d) which has improved upon/changed one aspect or another of its design/features, but they haven’t necessarily been that great. One issue that I maybe slightly have is that the LCD screen is too small at only 1.8?. While it is entirely practical still for reviewing photos - it would be nice if it was larger (only if it consumed the same or less battery life). There is the LCD status screen (backlit too) which is excellent for sorting out shutter speeds and settings etc. which has been removed from the revisions in place of a larger single LCD that displays the info (albeit not all the time and using more battery life?). I haven’t used the current single lcd system, so I’m really unsure as to it’s advantages at the mo, then again I’m happy with what I have. Another quibble is the APS-C sensor size (or whatever it’s called) where there happens to be a 1.6x crop/zoom on the FoV. This is sorted in larger more expensive lines - but currently it annoys me when using a 17mm fisheye!

The new models also have a feature where the sensor can be cleaned/dust shaken off? - whether this is completely necessary and useful I’m not sure, but it sure sounds fancy! Then again if you do go for one of the newer revisions, then you’d have more meagapixels thus a larger pixel density on the same size CMOS sensor, thus possibly increasing noise in the image (but also allowing larger images to be printed). I saw a rather good argument about it somewhere, but basically it stated that more pixels doesn’t necessarily equal better quality! So in a sense, I think that 8 MP is probably good enough for the camera I have and the photos that I take.

Another small thing to point out - I just noticed this and it well, made me happy, is that when the card is still writing to the camera and you switch the camera off (whether accidental or not) the images continue to be written to the card. This is probably (like RAW) a standard feature of DSLRs, but I just realised how great it is! Other small things continue to amaze me - and I’ll try and point them out in due course! On a sad note unfortunately, I lost the rubber eyepiece hood thingummy while away in Europe and while it doesn’t really make any difference to the functionality of the camera, it looks a bit silly and costs too much to warrant replacing!

Quite a while back on this site I happened to post a picture of me and the car that I had at the time - a Peugeot 106. One that I was hopefully going to learn to drive on and pass my test in. Unfortunately this didn’t turn out to be the case due to a few small reasons… a) I’m not particularly lucky or skilled at driving tests (yeah, some of it is due to luck), and b) The bodywork didn’t reallyl last too long…

In saying the bodywork didn’t last, I mean the bodywork you couldn’t see didn’t last. The outside of the car looked fine - it was all shiny and in fairly good nick. But, apparently, according to the garage that carried out the MOT, the underside had holes or something of that sort and needed welding - something that would cost £700, which you may agree is a fairly extorionate amount for a car that I subsequently sold for £102 on eBay! Maybe I would have been better off with a slightly more reliable car such as a (Toyota) Corolla or some Japanese invention, but in all cases, living by the sea doesn’t do many favours for metalwork. It was a good car at the end of the day though, and maybe if I had been a slightly better/lucky driver at the time then I may have been able to drive on my own in it. Oh well, that’s life…

Finally though, the point in saying this is that I did finally pass my driving test and I can now drive on my own! Yay!

Though the title of this post may seem fairly complex and all confusing, I assure you it will not be so. It’s merely a collection of thoughts that I decided not to name ‘More thoughts’ or something along those lines…

As for the logic part, while looking around Waterstones (that would be a bookstore) in Edinburgh early last week, I found a very interesting book among the ‘… for Dummies’ and computing books - ‘The Fundamentals of Logic Design’ by Charles H Roth Jr. When leafing through it then, I realised that though a lot of the information contained in it may be really quite obsolete, and not necessarily relevant in these days of computers and so on, it is very fundamental to the understanding to all of the current technologies. To be honest, ever since reading iWoz (Steve Wozniak’s autobiography) and reading about how he managed to redesign computers with fewer (and a more optimal number of) chips, I’ve wanted to be able to learn how this was done, and essentially work out how to do this myself - as it would undoubtedly lead to better understanding of logic systems (which are just slightly fundamental to lots and lots of things!). Anyhow though, this book didn’t even have a price tag in Waterstones, it was obviously too deserved to have one or maybe it just fell off, but later checking of it on Amazon revealed it to be a University level text costing between £45 and £80 - pretty damn expensive. I also found that there was a newer edition that then the one that I had briefly read. Luckily though (and Amazon marketplace comes to the rescue here) I managed to get it for £5 or so! There was a slight delivery charge on it too, but that really was pale in comparison to the £5.75 had to pay to ship it to me (I only had to pay the Amazon flat charge of £2.19 or something like that). So ultimately though I didn’t get the newest edition (I got the 4th) I got it such a reasonable price that no-one can complain! Haven’t started reading it yet, but I’ll definitely mention something once I have!

The other thing I feel compelled to mention is this glaring error in Leopard:

It should obviously be ‘None of your preferred wireless networks IS available’ but obviously there are still some bugs present in Leopard.

This will comprise pretty much of a list. They’re essentially things that would be silly if they had their own post. Something like Twitter would probably be better for this… Oops! Enjoy.

-The Eels are pretty awesome music to listen to. Mildly depressing at times, but I’ll get over it. I currently have Beautiful Freak (a steal at £4 no?), Shootenanny and Electro-Shock Blues! All pretty awesome to be honest.

-The VOIP app for iPhone/iPod Touch is awesome - if only the mic worked with the iPhone! Not entirely sure that I understand the whole SIP thing… isn’t Skype good enough for everyone? Somehow though I managed to make calls through this SIP service (OMG, it works!) but all the other person gets is some silence, a nasty shock. I’ll just have to wait and see how it goes!

-The Bedlam In Goliath (The Mars Volta) is rather heavy, though Thomas Pridgen is a very very good drummer so it seems.

-Massive Attack are also very good. It took me quite a while to get into them, starting with Mezzanine, which was described somewhere as a rock album - thus a good place to start. But now I’m so into all of the trippy stuff, woooooh!

-People love Coda, I see why it’s so good, but the Tramsmitting/FTPing of files is annoying with only one window pane thing. Ideally it needs a split pane for local and remote files (like the proper Transmit).

-The Core Image memory leak is so tedious. I really do enjoy Pixelmator, but it working properly would be nice. If you haven’t a clue about this leak, then you’re probably best off not knowing about it or Googling it. I gather that it’s some system thing that isn’t specific to Pixelmator, it’s just that Pixelmator has used CoreImage like no other app before. The result of this leak, in usability terms, is that when working with larger images (e.g. 8 megapixel jpgs), when you try and do some alterations to it (such as Blur) then it is incredibly slow - and rather unproductive and irritating.

-iPhysics is easily one of the best iPhone games! So I’ve read it’s a iPhone clone of the game Crayon Physics, but I don’t see how such a program could function any better on any other platform except the iPhone (or at least another touchscreen platform with accelerometer capabilities). So far I really like the included level - Crayon Physics. I find some of the other so called ’similar’ level packs take it too far with the complicatedness of their level design, almost removing the fun element!

-Apparently the charging of an iPhone through anything other than an USB 2.0 cable is bad. That means that I’ll have to stop using my Firewire cable… especially so because I doubt I have any warranty on my phone! It’s just annoying that USB only charges when the computer is on and Firewire is fine when it is sleeping… Grrrr!

Once upon a time I used to go ecstatically crazy over a Macworld launch and write all sorts of stuff about it and so on and so forth. These days I find it easier just to sit back and look at all of the cool things unfurl.

If you’re very new to the internet, or never really look at newspapers or take part in any other forms of communication between people, then you might not be aware that firstly, Apple has launched a new laptop (or notebook (which I believe is the more generally accepted term (at least in the US) these days)) and secondly, it has received lots of criticism.

Fair enough some of this criticism is probably due, for it has one USB port and no media drive. You can make up your own opinions about what you think of this, personally though, I don’t really mind these things. The one USB port seems limiting in most ways, is it really though? How often do you have more than one peripheral connected (AND IN USE) when you’re out and about. Most likely you’ll have a USB key, a printer, an external mouse, or an iPod connected. These wouldn’t all be at the same time though. You might want to use a USB key and a mouse at the same time, which is understandable given the frustation of most trackpads… (AAAGH eeePC!) As we are told though, the MacBook Air’s trackpad is a) multitouch and b) larger. This should hopefully make it more tempting to stick with the trackpad instead of changing to an external mouse. I say ‘might be’ in this case because to be honest I haven’t a clue what the trackpad is like on these things, but if the iPhone is anything to go by, then I’ll probably be impressed. With printers, enough of them are WiFi enabled, or connected to a WiFi network so that the need for a USB cable with a printer these days (unless it’s some huge image files…) is waning. That said, you would only use a printer to print off a document and then most likely unplug the cable and walk away, so having one usb port would not be too annoying. Same goes for an iPod, you’d only sync it on there (that would take a comparitively small amount of time), the charging could be done at the wall. The only usb object left would be the usb drive, something that might be useful, but not always used. So I come to the conclusion that only one USB port might just be bearable and usable!

The DVD drive (or lack thereof) is a different case altogether… But it does resolve itself in a similar way to the USB issue. Apple probably have thought (and fought) long and hard about this and have come to the conclusion that it is not necessary to have one. That is, assuming you follow their way or living (in reference to digital media that is). As explained in the keynote, there are a few things that you would commonly use CDs and DVDs for. In my case these would be…
-Installing BIG new programs (like Leopard, and someone raised the case of Windows w/ Boot Camp)
-Adding CDs to iTunes (I despise the iTMS in terms of listening to music and the culture surronding it as it kills the album, which is an entity in my opinion)
-Watching DVDs
-Converting DVDs to iPhone format.
If this MacBook is not your primary computer, then there’s no real need to do most of these things on it except the installations. You might want to watch DVDs, but you may have a DVD player and a widescreen TV for that, or there’s the iTunes Movie Store, or even you could convert it to a suitable format before you leave home and stick it on your HD. In any case, you could probably manage without it.

Though the MacBook Air has been receiving lots of criticism about it’s revolutionary new features/things that it doesn’t have, most of them are not particularly well deserved. The obvious drawbacks all have reasons behind them, most of these are pretty legit given a fairly normal scenario. So in essence, I think it’s a great little product, with some excellent engineering behind it all, even if I wouldn’t buy myself one in the near future…

There was recently a big deal made of the whole OLPC program, which produced a sub $100 laptop to help children (aswell as adults actually, should have thought about that Negroponte! Oh wait, the keyboard is too small and rubbery for adults to use…) learn and play and so on and so forth and do what ever they want to do with computers. Yes, this is probably a good idea, I’m not going into the ethics at all behind it, but in general, education (if these laptops help promote such a thing) is good. As Sir Francis Bacon once said, ‘Knowledge is power.’

But surely in this day and age, with the threat of global warming and rising seas and adverse weather conditions, not to mention other such non related things like terrorism and coups, a laptop is not sufficient to solve these problems. True, it wasn’t designed to do such things, it is around to promote education for children and adults alike, be that in Africa or Alabama. What is really needed, is something that may well stand a better chance of solving these problems, something that may have an effect on carbon emissions, or the rising seas…

Well, at CES, or most likely before that (the exact date is largely irrelevant!) the people’s car was launched. I’m not referring to any VW (VolksWagen -> Folk’s Wagon -> People’s Car), I’m talking about Tata Motors’s $2500 ‘1-Lakh’ Nano. A car made with the intent and purpose that everyone is now able to afford a car. While that’s good, looking at the specs in more detail make it clear that this runs on petrol… a product of a fossil fuel and thus produces Carbon emissions and uses oil. Wouldn’t some renewable energy, or hydrogen fuel cells (granted they are more expensive) work miles better? If they plan to do what they say and make it so everyone can afford to buy it, then surely they don’t want it relying on such a thing as petrol! That age is surely over - at least when developing something that will be widely used in a country such as India!

Thus some project, along the lines of OLPC, yet maybe backed (and financed too anyone?) with some good industrial support that doesn’t leave halfway through and make a competing product would be suitable. Hence the OCPF - One Car Per Family. Yes, it sounds like some smalltown anti-(multiple) car association, but only in the same way that the OLPC programme could be a similar group lobbying to decrease the number of laptops children have! The aim of such a program would be to create and manufacture a cheap automobile, suitable for ‘everyone’ and running on ‘as environmentally friendly as possible’ sources. It probably is a hard thing to sort out, taking time, money and effort that people can’t necessarily spare, but something like this is needed! The technology exists and is all the time getting faster, more efficient and people are coming up with new designs - take, for example the Automotive X Prize. One competitor has a vehicle - the Aptera Typ-1, that does a good 340mpg. Now something of that magnitude would be good for a potential OCPF program.

All that is needed is someone to lead the project…

Just a brief festive message to wish everyone seasons greetings, and a happy new year!

Enjoy!