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LoadingReadyRun are playing non-stop Desert Bus for charity. Their high score is 6 so far. They have been playing for 4 days. They are insane. And have raised $20,000+. They rule!
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UK-based games swapping site. Looks really rather good – might well be worth investigating.
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Just ran into this myself this afternoon. Very annoying! Hope it’s fixed soon.
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“Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files.” Apparently now does FLAC transcoding, too, which is useful.
A pet peeve of mine is the lack of a documented shortcut in Ruby’s #strftime to function to return the hour of the day, in twelve-hour clock, without a leading zero. To wit:
puts Time.now.strftime("%I:%M") # >> 03:29That’s not particularly attractive. I could strip the leading zero with some string manipulation, but this is getting sledgehammer-ish to crack a nut. Fortunately, this works:
puts Time.now.strftime("%l:%M") # >> 3:29That’s a lowercase L in the formatting string, which returns the number of hours in a twelve-hour clock sans leading zero. Result! And yes, that’s undocumented everywhere I’ve looked. Thanks to my colleague Colin for pointing that trick out.
Now, if only I could get it to return am/pm without having to call #downcase
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“Chinaderas is the nomenclature assigned [in Mexican Spanish] to imported goods from China, usually those that are knock-offs or replicas of other branded commodities…” Delightful etymology behind it, too.
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A remarkable story of commando training under Fairbairn and Sykes.
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“The web is not suffering from a lack of canonical design. It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be.” I have wrestled with so many people about what “design” on the web means. This helps me understand myself
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ies4osx rns lots of versions of IE under Wine on OSX. Looks nifty.
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Mark Pilgrim looks at Kindle through what’s been said about it so far, and what’s been said about the act of reading in the past. His comparisons prove depressing, and worthy of at least some consideration.
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“If you’re a parent, I would be [concerned] about the conflation between consumption and consumerism and citizenship (in virtual worlds)… our kids are being taught that to be a good citizen of this world you got to buy the right stuff.” Sadly, yes.
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“Are we absolutely sure that this is the very best we can offer young people?” [Lord Puttnam] asked. “Do we really want them to think of themselves as not much more than consumers?”
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Yes. A healthy tonic to all the mind-numbingly irritating rants going around the place about making the web “prettier” and “more distinctive” and “more art directed” and whatever. It’s a medium in its own right. Now work out what that means.
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Wow – Jack Kirby did an unpublished treatment of the Prisoner. Really, really striking.
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“DataMapper is a Object Relational Mapper written in Ruby. The goal is to create an ORM which is fast, thread-safe and feature rich.” Looks very interesting; I rather like the migration-within-the-model thing (a la Django). One to watch out for.
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Guest edited by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison: a special issue of the JCMC on social network sites. Must return to this, because there’s lots to sink one’s teeth into.
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It’s a tracker. A tracker for Windows/OSX with VST instruments and effects support, a built-in sampler, and more. Certainly worth a play!
Deliberance
18 November 2007
Time for my second post about the Epson R-D1, which I was lucky enough to play with when my colleague Lars bought one recently.
Along the top surface of the camera is what looks like a film-advance lever: the winder you crank to move to the next shot on a film camera. Obviously, there’s no film to advance on the digital camera. But the lever still serves its other traditional purpose: it re-cocks the shutter for another shot.
I’ve marked it in the photograph below.
Initially, I thought this was another of the R-D1’s ersatz “retro” features. After all: there’s no real need for such functionality. Even the Leica M8 abandons the film-advance lever. But once I used the camera, the lever made sense to me.
Firstly: it’s somewhere to rest your thumb. That may sound like a silly thing to say, but if you’ve ever used a rangefinder, or an old SLR with a slim body and no moulded grip, the lever becomes a useful way to counterbalance the body in your hand. It’s nice to have that familiar anchor-point to rest on.
But far more importantly than that: it makes the act of taking a photograph more considered. It brings to mind one of my favourite quotations about photography, from Ansel Adams:
“…the machine-gun approach to photography is flawed… a photograph is not an accident; it is a concept.”
I love that. Photographs are not something that is taken; they’re something that is made. An image is considered, composed, and then captured. And the life of that image ends there. To take another, you must re-cock the shutter, and start again.
And so the shutter-cocking lever makes the very act of making a photograph with the Epson more deliberate. That “ersatz” retro touch is actually fundamental to the way the camera demands to be used. As a result, you end up taking fewer photographs with the Epson – there’s none of the mad “double-tapping” that sometimes becomes habit with a DSLR. It feels more genteel, more refined – and I think the pictures you end up making with it are all the better for that.