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"An experiment I’ve been running for more than two years now is over: running two Macs is more hassle than it’s worth. I write not to praise synchronisation technology, but to bury it." Roughly what I'd always guessed, but Fraser is careful and detailed, and makes some sensible points. I just hope Aperture doesn't chug as much on the new MBPs as it did on the old ones, for his sake.
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"Yes people use the Internet to do bad thing, and quite possibly Twitter is one of those services that bad people use. But they also plan bad things in coffee house but for the last 300 odd years we’ve realised that trying to legislate against coffee houses is a bad thing for society." I recently finished Markman Ellis' book on coffee houses, and so Tom's post had a special kind of relevance.
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A neat summary of what's available out there; I use Blueprint for prototyping, but it's interesting to see what else is available – particularly the more stripped-down frameworks.
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"A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia." Awesome.
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"Flaming Lips vocalist-guitarist Wayne Coyne brought with him what he dubbed the 'Guitar Hero guitar,' an Epiphone double-neck with the lower, six-string neck replaced by a five-button variant and wired to an oscillator. '[It's] because a lot of kids out there think this is actually the way you play guitar…'" Awesome.
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"Imagine if Apple had decided to make a MacBook that was priced like an iPod. That's what Asus is doing."
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"If you've ever needed to produce PDF documents before, in Ruby or another language, you probably know how much it can suck. Prawn takes the pain out of generating beautiful printable documents, while still remaining fast, tiny and nimble. It is also named after a majestic sea creature, and that has to count for something."
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"EA has confirmed that the advert was paid for by Obama."
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"I wasn’t concerned when Netscape started losing market share to Microsoft. I didn’t sweat it when the stock price stalled. The reason I started thinking about my next gig was, months before either of these two events occurred, one of the lunchtime bridge team left. The game stopped. The small group of four no longer spent a long lunch quietly, unknowingly defining the culture of the company and everyone who was watching noticed."
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"The 2 opponents perform magical gestures with their hands to create their supernatural weapons – spells. Some are so potent as to be able to blind a man, call forth terrifying creatures, or even kill the unfortunate victim instantly. Consequently each wizard must rely on his own cunning to be able to time enough defensive spells to avoid the brunt of his adversary's attack, yet force in sufficient offensive spells of his own to crack the magical armour of his opponent, and kill the wizard outright. The game is an attempt to capture the spirit of such a battle in as simple yet exciting way as possible." The "waving hands" game by Richard Bartle.
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"…we're always being told art should disturb. Moore makes artists like the Chapmans look like the middle-class entertainers they are. He's a real force of imagination in a world that is full of fakes. If there was any justice this man would get the Turner Prize."
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"Basically WipEout HD is the first game I've come across that seems to be operating with a dynamic framebuffer. Resolution can alter on a frame-by-frame basis. Rather than introduce dropped frames, slow down or other unsavoury effects, the number of pixels being rendered drops and the PS3's horizontal hardware scaler is invoked to make up the difference." Interesting – and technically fascinating – post on Wipeout HD's dynamic framebuffer, used to keep the framerate at a rock-solid 60fps at the expense of horizontal resolution
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"Truth be told, I don't think in terms of absolute F/stops and shutter speeds. They are not what is important. It's the relationship between the different light levels that is important." This is why I love David Hobby: he talks about photography (in general) in the same words as me. Exposure isn't about numbers, it's about sliding scales.
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Wow.