I saw this on the CBBC show Chute! By the end I was laughing out loud.
Archive for the 'internet' Category
The new video feature on Flickr has - predictably - caused a small storm with thousands of users joining a group calling for video to be removed from the site; these are Flickr purists who think the site should just be about the majesty of the still image.
But Flickr’s video is no YouTube - you’re limited to 90 seconds for one thing, which really does make it a forum for small movies that are probably - in effect - animated still images. Like Martin Parr’s BBC film of people’s houses. You’re unlikely to find TV shows or movies in 90 second chunks.
Pleasingly, a group calling itself ‘We Say No to Photos on Flickr‘ has now sprung up to mock the video refuseniks.
I’ve just had an invitation to Twitter.
Nooooooooooooooooo.
Just before I left Facebook I’d taken to trying to subvert the status thingy by typing in the names of any songs on my iPod that fitted the phrase “Giles Booth is…”. For a while a couple of people may have decided that I was fractionally more interesting, thanks to lines like “Giles Booth is being boiled”, “Giles Booth is between Kate and Naomi” and “Giles Booth is cheating on you”.
But if Facebook is utterly pointless, then Twitter is the last refuge of the insane, web 2.0, 3.0, leading edge, bleeding edge doyenne of les citoyennes du planet web. Repeat after me: “I am updating my Twitter status, I am updating my Twitter status, I am updating my Twitter status…”
Giles Booth is watching Morvern Callar, drinking cider brandy then off to bed.
…in the words of Mr William Bragg.
We were walking home tonight and saw an amazingly bright satellite tracking across the sky, far brighter than any I’ve seen before. And I’ve seen a few - I love watching bits of space hardware scooting silently across the night sky.
Back home I found a neat web site - http://www.heavens-above.com/ - that allows you to enter your location and get predictions for the brightest satellites, including star and ground maps of their trajectory.
The really bright one we saw turns out to have been the International Space Station, which is pretty cool. The kids were impressed, for a minute or two…
I’ve just done some more reading and noticed two things:
- According to their daily schedules, the astronauts spend an awful lot of time ‘formatting PCMCIA cards’ - maybe it’s code for having a dump.
- The ISS is currently docked with the Space Shuttle Atlantis, so maybe that’s why it was so incredibly bright tonight
I’m having an odd argument with Spreadshirt, the normally excellent T-shirt company. I have a Spreadshirt shop - it’s a pretty easy way of making a little bit of money from designing logos and artwork.
But now they’ve pulled one of my designs for ‘copyright infringement’ and I can’t work out why. Salbutamol isn’t a trademark, it’s the generic name for a drug marketed under many names such as Ventolin. The artwork was all mine, I didn’t pinch anything from anywhere. I agree it’s meant to look like packaging used for prescription medicine, but it’s not a copy. I’ve asked for clarification and they just keep repeating that I’m infringing copyright. Very odd. And a little stressful. Where’s my inhaler..?
They were handing out free Mentos at Charing Cross the other week - I couldn’t resist introducing them to some diet cola…
A colleague had tried it with no luck, so perhaps the trick is to do as we did, and warm the cola in a bowl of hot water from the kettle. A smaller nozzle and pin to allow controlled dropping of the Mentos would be good ideas too. I could only get the first Mento to fizz - I added 4 more and nothing much else happened.
Just found a really neat web site that lets you try out the bewildering array of free Content Management Systems that are out there. They mostly need PHP and MySQL and this site saves you the hassle of installing them and setting up a database only to find it doesn’t do what you want.
It’s at http://www.opensourcecms.com/ - well worth a look if you’re as frazzled as I was after googling “Free CMS”.
So far CMS Made Simple is looking good…
Like a lot of people on Flickr I made Dave Gorman a contact when I spotted him on there. I liked his pictures and I liked his stuff on the telly, so why not?
Then a few weeks ago a friend posted a comment on one Dave’s pictures. The gist was that the picture was okay but he didn’t think it would have garnered such a large number of favourable comments if Dave wasn’t famous.
Dave Gorman removed the comment, but wrote a polite note explaining why he’d removed it.
Last week I spotted this Dave Gorman photo on a Flickr group for objects that look like faces. It looked remarkably similar to this one I took - and posted to the same group - a few weeks before:
Now I know that my photo is technically inferior - a bit blurred and taken with a cheap compact camera. But I think it’s a better photo because of the group thing. I think it’s funnier. But of course Dave has many more positive comments and favourites than me - only to be expected as he has so many contacts.
I posted a link to my photo on his with the simple message ’snap!’. There, that’ll show ‘em I thought. But since then FOUR more people have commented on how great Dave’s picture is…
Our friend Georgina and I both love to hate Jon Ronson. His Guardian column makes us both scream and yet we always read it, week in week out. That and Charlie Brooker’s TV review are the only things I always read.
This week Jon has Googled himself and discovered that some bloggers have said horrible things about him. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Jon in my blog, so obviously I have to put that right, right now…
I kept dreaming of a new kind of laptop. I kept drawing it and doodling it.
It would be about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, have Wifi, run some kind of Linux and - crucially - have no hard drive. A Cambridge Z88, an Apple eMate for the internet age.
Turns out the One Laptop Per Child project are thinking along the same lines. The project aims to design and build cheap, robust laptops for the third world. $100 laptops. Not for me, of course, but for children who really need them.
There was some ballyhoo in the media a while ago that the project - whilst still not going commercial, not selling them in Europe or the US - would let you buy one if you bought one for the developing world. A brilliant idea. Buy 2, get 1.
It’s not quite clear from their web site if they’re really going to do this or not. I hope they do. I want one of these so much, it hurts.
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