6. 2010-05-14

    Narrowcasting : Just how demographically targetted can a facebook ad be?

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  8. 2009-06-09

    Because I've been in the mood for photo housekeeping, here's the remainder of the photographs from our trip to Manhattan last Christmas. They're mostly concerned with a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge which occurred on the very morning of Christmas day.

    NYC Christmas, part Two

    We took the train down to Brooklyn and just leisurely walked across. The weather and views were rather stunning, and the city much quieter than usual. We did run into a bit of footpath congestion at the Manhattan terminus; the comic image of a frustrated, lycra-enveloped cyclist failing to exert his right-of-way, in opposition to the crowds, camply yelling "Hello! Bicycle lane!" will stay impressed on my memory.

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  10. 2010-02-24

    Ocean robot 'plans experiments' : The Gulper AUV, using an embedded software engine called 'T-Rex', can navigate autonomously, and make planning decisions about how best to schedule its task list of experiments.

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  11. 2009-06-07

    Thanks to some free air miles obtained when I signed up for my last credit card, we managed to get an entirely free weekend's accommodation (self-catering apartment, right in the city centre), and flights (BA, return from Gatwick) to anywhere in the closest European zone. The only catch was that they needed to be cashed-in before the end of February '09. We elected to re-visit Dublin, as Mrs S. spent several months living and working there, back when she was studying towards her degree. That was several years ago, neither of us have been back since.

    It hasn't changed much. Right before we left, we discovered the exciting news that we were in the family way . This rather curtailed the traditional Dublin entertainment of drinking stout (the Guinness does taste better, you know) and bar-crawling. Perhaps the most striking change was the effect of the recent economic turmoil upon the sterling exchange rate. Dublin was never the cheapest city, but now things were positively eye-watering; a pint of Guiness was pushing five pounds, a decidedly average meal for two (with no alcohol) in a vegetarian restaurant easily overshot the forty pound mark. Luckily with free travel and accommodation leaving enough elasticity in our spending budget, we managed a relaxed weekend break without risking bankruptcy.

    The February weather was cold, windy and occasionally damp. Wind-swept and grey rather suits this city by the sea. On on the evening we flew in, the night of the 14th, we somehow managed to blunder straight in and secure a last-minute table for two in a little Italian bistro, minutes after we'd unpacked; saving us from having to hurriedly improvise a meal with limited shopping options.

    Most of the rest of the time we just cruised around the city streets, feeding the ducks in the park, dipping into second-hand-book shops, cafe's and what proved to be an astonishingly well-stocked Gibson guitar dealer, where I ogled an array of the fancy new auto-mechanical-tuning robot guitars. I was particularly taken by the effect of the grimy, yet bright, winter sky reflecting off the mosaic-tile pools in the Garden of Remembrance.

    Dublin: Feb '09

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  12. 2010-01-23

    That A.C. Newman, he has an enviable work ethic. New TNP album is due May 4th! I presume that's a USA release date.

    Rather excitingly, the recording sessions featured St Vincent , Will Sheff , and slightly less excitingly, the Dap-Kings horns , and Zach Condon . The album title is 'Together'.

    The New Pornographers are due to play this year's Primavera Sound, although I suspect I will be giving it a miss this time around.

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  13. 2009-06-02

    PatchMatch : A randomized correspondence algorithm for structural image editing.

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  14. 2010-01-23

    I can't believe it's taken me this long to figure out, but PhotoBooth is amusing for babies.

    Photo on 2010-01-23 at 10.10 #4

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  15. 2010-01-22

    Pixel Qi : Amidst all the talk of OLED and speculation about colour e-ink, this modal hybrid display might be quietly revolutionary.

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  16. 2009-04-27

    In Britain, butterflies are also on the wane. In the 19th century, they would flock in the wild in quantities sufficient to obscure your view. Now as populations dwindle , they're a rare treat.

    I've see a lot of encouraging signs of rehabilitated wildlife, as I wander round the green corridors of Bristol, walking that dog . We don't see many butterflies.

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  18. 2009-04-26

    I often travel with a laptop. I almost invariably travel with a charged mobile phone. I enjoy using the fancy multi-touch trackpad in my MacBook Pro, but an odd thing happens sometimes when I've put my phone down nearby on the desk; I reach automatically to try and use the phone as a computer mouse. One of those amusing peculiarities of muscle-memory and reflex that can surprise, when you're engaged by something, within the computer, verging upon a liminal state.

    It's a slightly amusing quirk, but when I think further about it, I find plenty of reasons why it perhaps ought to work.

    External mice are more useful than trackpads, although not enough use to me to justify carting one around. My phone is palm-sized, about the ideal weight, is already paired with my laptop over bluetooth, has clickable buttons all over one face, and an optical camera on the reverse. In short, it already has most of the technology needed to be a wireless optical mouse.

    Most but not all. I'm a bit dubious about whether it could be done in software alone. I doubt that the lens will focus well enough to motion tracking without a special surface, and it's completely lacking the light source, but it is almost tempting enough to try. It might be feasible with some sort of very recognisable surface, perhaps a monchrome checkerboard grid, which would be very easy to render and print.

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  21. 2009-04-21

    Baby pictures
    Strickland 2.0 announced. Late October launch.

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  22. 2009-12-26

    GNEVE : An inevitable addition to the available range of of digital video editing tools.

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  26. 2009-12-12

    There's a handy little command line tool nestled away inside Apple's system WiFi framework.

    Apple80211.framework/Resources/airport

    It doesn't come with a man page, but --help will print a usage guide.


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  27. 2009-03-03

    Macropinna microstoma , the barreleye fish has unusual tubular eyes which are extraordinarily good at harvesting light. Furthermore, it can rotate its eyeballs in order to see upwards through its transparent head shield.

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  30. 2009-02-07

    This year's Bristol Comics Expo is going to be held on the weekend of May 9th-10th. Aggravatingly this is the same weekend that I'm going to be away at ATP vs the fans .

    Even more annoyingly, this makes it the second year in a row that I'll miss it. Last year I gave up, after a few attempts to survive the stupidly arranged ticket purchasing queues. Prior to that, I'd managed to go to every single one since Bristol began hosting them , back in 1999 or so.

    Intriguingly, this year, the small press (usually the most interesting aspect of the festival, for me) is broken out into a separate event for some reason.

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  31. 2009-12-03

    Leopard introduced a number of system level changes to font handling. There's a system daemon, fontd that handles runtime font registration. Some of the new features that are implemented include on-demand font activation, on a per-application basis and system font-protection, which guards against removal or disabling certain fundamental system fonts.

    There's a couple of situations where you might need to interface with the font registry database. Sometimes the system font caches can become garbled, and require a manual flush - before leopard these could be easily found under /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS - now they're squirreled away under /var and managed by fontd. Font protection might stop you from legitimately manipulating certain font files; in a prepress environment you might need to replace one of the magic System protected fonts with a custom version.

    There's a command line utility provided, called ' atsutil ' which offers a user interface to these features. It has a fine man page .

    To purge the font caches, which will fix persistant text rendering problems, you use the command atsutil databases -removeUser

    To display the list of System protected fonts use the command atsutil fontprotection -files .

    To globally disable the font protection feature, use the command atsutil fontprotection -off . Re-enable it with the -on switch.

    Don't remove system protected fonts , unless you are replacing them with a workable substitute.

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  32. 2009-11-20

    marinetraffic.com : for those moments when you find yourself in need of a realtime interactive map of all the transponder-equipped shipping on the seas.

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  33. 2009-02-06


    • Porter airlines : the only way to fly.


    • A song about the Spadina bus


    • As I suspected, Toronto isn't even cold in the wintertime. Barely dipped below zero, the entire time I was there.


    • Apricot Weißbier, nicer than it ought to be.


    • Prevailing man-hipster fashion trend: Button cardigan, bushy beard, and oversized pseudo-religious pendantry


    • Guitar hero is more fun than I'd have thought.


    • The prehistoric Trypilian culture from the Ukraine, was one of the earliest neolithic civilizations


    • If you own a Birks watch, as I do, you can get it serviced and the battery changed for free at any Birks branch.



    • Do not place your nose into any unusual looking fixtures attached to bathroom walls.


    • Iroquois false face societies , and why you cannot see their masks in museums.


    • My karaoke version of ' In The Air Tonight ' was a surprise success, but perhaps even more suprisingly, my version of ' My Heart Will Go On ', placed me in the final three.

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  34. 2009-11-18

    Executed Offenders : The Texas department of Criminal Justice seemingly publishes the last statements made by all its executed criminals.

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