We are just unpacking some more furniture and we have discovered that the
spacers inside the boxes were made up of cut up pieces of IKEA furniture,
probably items that had been returned. It reminded my of the cells ability
to recycle old components.
Last night I got my first UK 6a boulder problem at the Castle climbing wall,
it's been a while since I was making progress with my climbing, so that was
great.My climbing diary is here: http://jottit.com/h94hx/
I just discovered this after poking around for an inordinate amount of time.
The trick is to use Time::HiRes instead.
Now someone should write a bridge function that overloads the Time::HR
functions with Time::HiRes functions which would make a code change as easy
as loading the overload module.
I had a great idea yesterday while I was engaged on a personal odyssey on
London buses. I was on the top deck of, I think it was the 176, heading down
past Old Street into the square mile, round St Paul's (with a quick glimpse
of millennium bridge, and then on into the strand. The bus went past so many
statues, churches and historical buildings, but I knew only a few of them.
It struck me that a podcast that could be used as an audio guide for great
bus routes. You could chapter the audio guide by street so that it was easy
to navigate according to different traffic conditions.
The Dublin Tourist Office does something like this already for walks around
the city
http://www.visitdublin.com/multimedia/DublinPodcasts/iwalk.aspx?id=275,
but with London, or other big cities, providing same for bus routes seems
like a good idea.
tags: podcast, idea, cool, london, tourism.
Well, a prediction about a new market that will spring up (perhaps it
already has) around the iPhone. So it costs $99 dollars to get an app that
you have built onto the phone through the App Store. If I design a vanity
app I'm not going to want to pay that much, but I might pay 5, 10 or even 15
dollars to see the child of my creativity bouncing around on the little
device. Some dev shop is going to offer to use their app key to load other
people's apps to the App store for sure.
Well, I just read through the engadget report on the iPhone SDK and it's
looking pretty good. I'm in the middle of downloading the free SDK, mainly
so that I can have a virtual iPhone to play around with, but last night I
got to thinking about what kind of applications I personally would like to
see on the device.
I live in London, but I frequently travel to Europe. I have friends that I
like to keep in contact with in the US as well. Most UK mobile phone
contracts suck for someone whose social network is evenly distributed across
the world. Data rates through T-Mobile when I go the the mainland are
exorbitant, and I only use my N95 as a camera on such occasions cos I can't
afford to check email or look at maps. The two main problems with mobile
tech in Europe at the moment are:
1. No single european-wide tariff for data and calls. As long as the phone
companies get away with making pots of cash it's going to remain this way,
sigh.
2. No free WiFi, it exists in patches, but it's just shit really. One town
in Ireland was recently blocked from rolling out free municipal wifi by the
EU on the grounds that it was anti-competitive (phone companies might loose
revenue). I guess at some point in the future this will change, but for the
time being it sucks monkeys.
So the apps I want to see are:
1. Offline storage of web content, so that I could process, for example,
feeds or emails, while I am in a high danger zone tariff wise.
2. Offline access to a google-maps kind of an interface. Apparently for the
N95 one can download local sheets for areas that you are visiting and browse
them whilst offline, but the software for doing this is PC only. I could set
up a copy of MS on my mac, but frankly I don't have time. I'd like to be
able to dial in a city that I am about to visit, download maps and related
info, and then have that on the go while I am tootling around the place.
This
article in Guardian today is describing a method of restoring colour to
some original BBC tv shows whose master tapes were wiped in a purge of the
BBC archives.
The shows were originally made in colour, then the master tapes were
destroyed to make more room in the BBC archive, however black and white
copies were made for distribution to countries which didn't have colour TV
capability. The black and white versions were on a smaller format (16 mm)
and of a lower resolution.
The method of recording was the following, the colour shows were displayed
on a large screen and this was re-recorded onto the 16mm tape.
During this process owing to an artifact from the colour, on the black and
white film there is a speckled fingeing error.
It describes this problem in the article as follows: "However, there is a
more relevant problem. Any black and white telerecording of a colour
programme is prone to pick up interference from the colour encoded video
signal. This manifests itself as a pattern of small grey dots, called
chroma-dots, across the picture."
A filter used in the re-recording process could eliminate this error, but at
the time of the recordings the error was considered so minor that often the
filter was omitted. Back then TV was throwaway and space in a basement was
considered more valuable than any idea of cultural heritage. Now we look
back at the decision to scrap the original recordings as somwhat akin to the
burning of the library of Alexandria. Storage, especially digital, is
bountiful.
However, owing to what was then considered to be noise, an error, an
imperfection in the process, James Insell has devised a technique to map
back from these chroma-dots to the original colour. And so by looking at the
finest structure of the current artifact through HD recordings of the 16mm
film we can recapture a state of the past that might have been lost to us.
Digging in the digital detritus has uncovered gold.
The formats of our cultural heritage are changing, and there is ever the
danger that we might loose large chunks of our past when the ability read a
certain format disappears. For specialist cases, such as the BBC archive,
there will be, for some time to come, the likes of James Insell who will be
willing to do the archeology needed to reconstruct from the remnants, but
looking at the growing sprawl of media in my home I have a number of digital
cards that can't be read any more, a zip drive that may or may not contain
code from a summer of astrophysics, and some very personal movies on
betamax, that lie in their boxes, becoming more tomb-like as the years roll
by.
Aside from the personal onus to maintain my own history, I was really
excited by this guardian article. I loved the idea of recovery from
the minutia. It is an interesting example for the need for losses
compression techniques.
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dtfm9hj_30ccsw79f4
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dtfm9hj_30ccsw79f4
This is funny, and a little bit scary too.
