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Useful tool for determining fare code or class availbility on different flights, seems to be pretty good. Helpful if you want to see if there is availability in the fare code for an upgrade.
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Pleased to have in some small way enabled this conversation between wet lab scientists and those who understand software, looking forward to more of this on Nature Network
March 2008 Archives
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Pretty, but expensive stainless steel desk system. It looks lovely, but at 1600 dollars including UK delivery I think I'll stick with ikea...
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Analysis of the background app / network access issue for iPhone apps from Craig Hockenberry. It is all about battery life, radios drain batteries really quickly, so one at a time and no background does make sense.
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Some good stuff in this interview with Steve Jobs, particularly on Apple culture, hiring and saying no.
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Rumored Canon 5D replacement spec
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Amazin video of a very stable walking robot, survives snow, ice, being kicked hard and it can even jump
I've been using Amazon Prime in the UK and was loving it, then I looked at my ordering history and have decided that the combination of Prime and On Click is too polluting. Order things more than 90 minutes apart and they come, at no extra expense, in separate deliveries. Needless to say I've turned off One click and now consolidate my orders into something sensible.
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Interesting discussion of the focus performance of the 85 f1.2 II Canon prime lens. It uses the largest Canon ring USM motor at 77mm. Its focus is slow, but accurate.
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Super clever Qcode creator for moo cards from Richard Pope
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gapingvoid
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Summary of a book by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel. Published by Oxford University Press.
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Provocative and amusing look at white people, from the comments too close to the mark for some people. Quite american and a bit patchy, but fun.
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Objective-c twitter engine
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Flocking behaviour in people
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Short summary of the main panel ideas on customer service and marketing
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design history for a dialog box in the macosx app things
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Crawl rates and server response times with huge volumes of content being made available to Google et al.
I'm headed to sxsw this week, I'll be on a panel on Tuesday, entitled Green software, Really? Following up on the green code ideas from last year. I'm slightly overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that are happening at sxsw and the number of ways to organise the information. I've pretty much packed, so I should head to bed. See you there perhaps.
I was at TOC08 back on the 11th and 12th February. I spoke on the Tuesday on social software and publishers, giving a talk on how publishers can take their existing book catalogues and turn them into social catalogues tracking the activity happening on the web about their books back into their catalogues. The slides and my speaking notes are on slideshare.
The ideas in the talk come from a wide variety of sources, but the BBC work I did with Tom Coates, Matt Biddulph and Mags Hanley was certainly formative in my thinking about this area.
To follow up on this area, Tom's web of data talk is a great summary of how to attach meaning to entities on the web. His 2006 Future of web apps talk gives a good framing around why and how people create content and share it online and how you can interact with that. Matt Biddulph did similar work with thinglink (pdf) and and a talk on weblike design for data. I got interested in the political angle on this and made the European Constitution into a social document via the project talkeuro, I wrote a paper on that work for xtech05.
The aim of the TOC talk was to get book publishers to realise that they all had something which could be turned into a shared object by interacting with their readers directly and not just treating them as buyers. I've had some really nice feedback about the talk from a range of people, so thanks. One last point, this is possible, I didn't say it would be easy.
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Amazing footage if a lufthansa plane coming into land in Hamberg and abandoning the landing due to wind (video clip)
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Lovely case for a MacBook Air, taking Steve Jobs at his word, a vinyl and fleece liner.
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Wishing someone would fix this bug, it makes firefox deeply un mac like
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Good information on how to see if there is an issue with your nice Canon 1Ds III slr, seeing this on a potential new 5D would be good
I'd quite like an iPhone and slightly regret my 18 month contract with Orange and the new Nokia N95. Though to be honest it is the free data plan that is one of the attractions for the iPhone, seamless access to the internet from a small device would be great. Orange seem to be reluctant to even try to match the data bundle that comes with the iPhone, eight pounds for 30MB is their best offer.
One of the things I've realised I value about Apple is saving me from dealing with the murky world of multiple computing vendors, which I get when I look at the mobile phone industry. Apple offer clean nicely designed spaces, which lack the venal atmosphere of the rest of the IT world. The camera world is similar, at least at the SLR level, there is a simple enough choice Canon or Nikon, perhaps Sony in the future. I'm saved the hassle of picking amongst dozens of providers, I can pick the model I want from Apple, saves time and mental energy. It might not be perfect, but it works well for my computing. I wonder if this is behind the swing to Apple over the last few years.
In terms of actually getting an iPhone, I'd want to see a few things in the next model. Getting to 32G as the storage on the iPhone would be good, the iPod Touch has this so it is solely a pricing issue. A better camera with a little bit more control. Perhaps a xenon flash and optical zoom. It is never going to be a brilliant camera, but it can be better than the 2Mpixel version it comes with. The camera with my N95 is surprisingly good for the size of sensor it has.
3G would be a good addition too, I understand it uses more power and generates more heat, but with the iPhone I have the luxury of being able to charge from my laptop, so the power thing is less of a concern. EDGE is ok, but proper 3G is great, I've used my N95 a couple of times as a modem and I own one of the E220 modems that three.co.uk sell. They are properly fast. Being able to use the iPhone as a modem would be good too, but I can't see the operators agreeing to that too quickly.
The likely iTunes store powered application provision is another reason to be interested in the iPhone. I know that Nokia have tried this in the past, but their client software is overwhelmingly windows based and so alien to me. It is the simple Apple provided and potentially approved world that is appealing, with slight shades of Brave New World. I'll still go and hunt out the jailbroken tools that offer ssh and bit torrent, but I can have a decent simple to install catalog of software directly on my mac.
So enough storage that I can leave my fifth gen 30G iPod behind and just carry my iPhone, a slightly better camera and some interesting software please.
One of the things I've realised I value about Apple is saving me from dealing with the murky world of multiple computing vendors, which I get when I look at the mobile phone industry. Apple offer clean nicely designed spaces, which lack the venal atmosphere of the rest of the IT world. The camera world is similar, at least at the SLR level, there is a simple enough choice Canon or Nikon, perhaps Sony in the future. I'm saved the hassle of picking amongst dozens of providers, I can pick the model I want from Apple, saves time and mental energy. It might not be perfect, but it works well for my computing. I wonder if this is behind the swing to Apple over the last few years.
In terms of actually getting an iPhone, I'd want to see a few things in the next model. Getting to 32G as the storage on the iPhone would be good, the iPod Touch has this so it is solely a pricing issue. A better camera with a little bit more control. Perhaps a xenon flash and optical zoom. It is never going to be a brilliant camera, but it can be better than the 2Mpixel version it comes with. The camera with my N95 is surprisingly good for the size of sensor it has.
3G would be a good addition too, I understand it uses more power and generates more heat, but with the iPhone I have the luxury of being able to charge from my laptop, so the power thing is less of a concern. EDGE is ok, but proper 3G is great, I've used my N95 a couple of times as a modem and I own one of the E220 modems that three.co.uk sell. They are properly fast. Being able to use the iPhone as a modem would be good too, but I can't see the operators agreeing to that too quickly.
The likely iTunes store powered application provision is another reason to be interested in the iPhone. I know that Nokia have tried this in the past, but their client software is overwhelmingly windows based and so alien to me. It is the simple Apple provided and potentially approved world that is appealing, with slight shades of Brave New World. I'll still go and hunt out the jailbroken tools that offer ssh and bit torrent, but I can have a decent simple to install catalog of software directly on my mac.
So enough storage that I can leave my fifth gen 30G iPod behind and just carry my iPhone, a slightly better camera and some interesting software please.
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Explains a lot of the decisions behind the powershot g9
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Delightful idea to remind you of past events and memories, it sends you an email every two weeks with the most interesting pictures
