OK, so I was playing around on YouTube after finding that Darth Vader clip, and I found this one too. I am so looking forward to the next series of Doctor Who… especially if Davros is in it.
And a nice piece of understated, fanboy-ish advertising on the part of the BBC there too. Well done.
A while ago I wrote about why I sometimes give articles I like the thumbs-down on StumbleUpon and I then stumbled it. I was stunned to look at my stats and see that there was a jump from 50 visitors per day to over 1200! I’ve read several bloggers’ comments on how StumbleUpon can send a vast amount of traffic your way, but I wasn’t prepared for this.
But is it “ethical” to stumble your own material? Here’s my take on it:
StumbleUpon, Digg, and all these other sites are democratic in nature. That is, the community elevate or bury articles based on what they think of them. So, if I submit a pile of poo, people are perfect at liberty to bury it by voting it down again. On the other hand, if I write something absolutely brilliant, then why not submit it to the community and see if others think the same thing?
What do you think? Would you Stumble your own content? Do you do it already? If it’s not acceptable, why not?
Well, not quite, but this is a bit disappointing.
TV-Links has been shut down and the owner of the site arrested (source here). Now, I agree that the site may not have been entirely above board, but I would have thought that since none of the shows or movies were hosted by TV-Links the worst that could happen is that the owner be told to take it all offline?
No, he’s being charged with aiding copyright infringement, which is a bit like me being arrested for telling my friends that you can get cheap movies down the Barras.
A sad day indeed, both for people who want TV on demand, and for “Internet Law”.
I haven’t blogged much recently, since I’ve been away at a conference for a few days, and when I got back I slipped into playing Halo 3 and The Orange Box.
The Orange Box, if you don’t know, is the latest episode in the Half-Life 2 series. Well, to be more accurate, it’s Half-Life 2, and HL2 Episode 1, Episode 2, a game called Portal, and Team Fortress 2. “5 Games in One Box”, the box proudly proclaims and, while I have no doubt that’s true, I’ve only played 3 of them.
Half-Life 2 is great (I wanted to go through the episodes in the right order, so I started at the beginning). It took a bit of getting used to playing it on a console – I played HL1 on my PC – but it’s pretty easy to get used to. The story is engaging, as usual, and the graphics look decent enough. My only complaint in the graphics front is that it’s not as pretty as, say, Gears of War. Some of the textures look a bit blocky, like they were designed for a lower-resolution system. I realise this is going to be pretty much a port of the xbox version, and perhaps I’m being a little too demanding of my next-gen system, but I thought the days of blocky textures were fast coming to an end. Anyhow – Half-Life 2 – pretty good.
Portal? Thoroughly confusing! In a good way, though. When you look through a window to see yourself standing there, but then realise it’s through a portal that’s really next to you… it hurts my head sometimes. The basic idea of Portal is that you wake up in a “testing centre”. I don’t really know what’s being tested, and the overseer, or controller, or whatever it is that’s giving you instructions has referred to me as “android”, so I don’t even know if the character is human. She looks human, but that’s no guarantee is it? Anyway, I’m rambling. You wake up in a testing centre and have to reach an exit point in one chamber after another. You have a portal gun, which basically shoots entrances and exits. So, shoot an entrance on the floor… and exit on the ceiling… jump in and you pop out falling from the roof. Despite it being a little confusing, Portal is absolutely brilliant.
But the real star of the show, for me, is Team Fortress 2. Team Fortress was one of the earliest “class-based” online shooters, and TF2 has kept that basic formula. It’s an incredibly well balanced game, with a class to suit most play types. My personal favourites are the Engineer and Spy. I prefer a support role, so the Engineer’s ability to build turrets and ammo/health dispensers is perfect for me. The balls-out fighting can be left to someone else 
The Spy has the ability to cloak himself and sneak past people un-noticed, or to disguise himself as one of the other team’s players. Again, much more suited to my playing style than the head-on approach.
There are some really nice touches too: you get killed, and the game shows you a snapshot of the person who did it. If they kill you several times, they become your “nemesis”, opening up the opportunity for you to get a revenge kill later on. It’s incredibly satisfying to get someone back who’s been beating you down for the whole game… and it’s nice to see that kind of thing acknowledged in the mechanics of the game.
Visually, TF2 is quite cartoony, which actually makes it look better than HL2. Perhaps it’s just that I can be much more forgiving of a game that’s meant to look like a cartoon, but I prefer it.
Looks like I’ve found a new favourite game
This one strikes me as a little bit odd, but it caught my imagination. There’s been quite a bit of interest in the Hindenburg recently – I guess because it’s the 70th anniversary of the famous disaster. Not exactly the best advert for zeppelin travel, is it? But, perhaps on the back of this, there seems to have been a bit of an increase in the idea of actually making zeppelin travel work again.
Can you imagine that? Airships soaring in over London or New York, gracefully drifting over land and sea? I’ve read somewhere that the spire on top of the Empire State Building was originally intended to be an airship mooring mast… I’d love to see that actually happen
Just last week I read an article by a reporter who had been taken on an airship flight, and for the life of me I can’t find it again! I thought it was on the BBC website, but it’s not there. So much of this is going to be from memory and I hope you’ll go easy on me if I get something wrong. What advantages are there to travelling by airship?
Of course, the high-profile Hindenburg disaster would more than likely loom large on people’s minds, but modern airships (and there are some around) use Helium – not Hydrogen. Helium is inert and so, even if similar circumstances did arise again, the worst that would happen is that the ship would develop a leak and the crew might start speaking like Mickey Mouse. It wouldn’t explode in the same way and, with the fire-retardant materials we now have, I would be willing to bet that any fire that did somehow start (say there was an electrical fault) would be contained before it did significant damage.
But in the interest of balance, let’s think about some disadvantages to travelling by airship.
I’m sure there are more downsides, but I can’t think of any right now. Some people say it’ll be expensive, but is there a reason that HAS to be the case? Perhaps the long journey times would necessitate that?
Who knows? But I would certainly love to see airships used much more than they currently are.
This is an amazing approach to a difficult problem: how do you enable developing countries to afford wind-powered generators? Simply shrinking a turbine can make it more expensive, and involves many components which can break.
This guy has come up with a novel solution, using a strip of flexible material, a button magnet, and two coils. When wind blows over the strip, it vibrates due to “aero-elastic flutter”. A magnet attached near one end of the strip then vibrates between two coils, generating enough power to run a few LEDs, a clock, or apparently from the video, a radio!
The best bit is that this generator apparently only costs about $5 to make. Imagine, a field of these generating power for a small village. Or the example he gives is to have a strip suspended across a valley which (I’m guessing) must give more power output (longer strips would vibrate more… I think).
I’m constantly amazed at the ingenuity of people when faced with a difficult problem. I can’t wait to see if these things do get put to good use.
There’s another application I can think of; my local church really should be doing more to be environmentally friendly. We recycle and all that, but generating some of our own power would be fantastic too (and it would cut down on bills). Current wind turbines cost thousands of pounds, and are often refused planning permission because they are a bit noisy. This new generator could provide a cheaper and, potentially quieter, option.
I already mentioned I’m a Mac user – and I’m a well-convinced convert to the cult of Mac. But there’s no denying that Macs are expensive (despite what Apple tell us) so when I’m at work we use PCs (I work for a church/charity, so we don’t have tons of money to splash around). We recently got a grant to buy laptops to provide internet access for our youth club and they come with Windows Vista Home Basic. This is my first go at using Vista, so I figured I’d record my initial impressions.
Note, these are initial impressions. I don’t know all the features etc. so I’m coming at this as a bit of a noob.
First: what’s to like?
The only downside (and it’s a downside for EVERY content filtering system) is that it can be a little over-zealous at times. For instance, I can’t get into any WordPress.com or Blogspot.com blogs, and I can’t get into a few other sites that I know are OK but probably have some borderline words on them. Still, you can override the filter, which leads me on to the next point…What’s not to like?
OK, I’ll stop there. In general, Vista’s not bad. I’m probably just complaining about things because I’m not used to them, but that’ll fade. It’s still not enough to tempt me back from the Mac though…
I love StumbleUpon; there’s no denying that. If I’m bored, or just fancy something different, I hit the Stumble button on my browser and something fresh pops up. It’s great – because I’ve been thinking lately how boring the net is these days. I remember in the mid-90s the Internet was a magical place. I remember seeing my first flash animation and being amazed… but it’s getting harder and harder to find good stuff online. Stumble changes that.But here’s the thing; the same (good) material is duplicated several times online and keeps coming up in Stumble again and again. So, despite the fact that I really enjoy Dilbert, I’ve started giving it the thumbs-down. It gets a thumbs-up first time I see it, obviously, but every time after that? Thumbs-down for you.
Did you enjoy “Minesweeper – the movie”? Yeh, me too, but only the first time. “Python programming tips”? Well, I can only use the same tips one time. And there’s loads of other stuff that keeps coming up again and again. Come on folks, even if you do like something, only give it the thumbs-up once. Honestly, it gets really boring seeing the same thing coming up again and again.
I’m a fairly new convert to the whole Mac scene – I got my first Mac about a year ago… a Mac Mini (the others were just too expensive for me!). I still remember starting my Mac up for the first time, marvelling at the shiny transitions and windows effects, and at the lack of noise (my PC sounded like a Boeing 747 taking off, while this computer just has a gentle hum during normal operations). I loved the look of iChat, but was really disappointed to find that my USB webcam didn’t work with it. My only option was to buy an iSight camera, which was extortionately expensive (and went out of production shortly afterwards).
So, I left it – and, not related in any way, bought an xbox live vision camera at some point (I forget when). Yes, I’m am Mac owner and an Xbox 360 owner, so sue me.
The other day I decided to see whether there was any software that would let the xbl camera work with my mac and, to my surprise, there is. It’s called Mac OS X Turns out Apple had added native USB camera support and I hadn’t picked up on it. So I plugged in the xbl camera, fired up QuickTime, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it all works perfectly.
So why on earth is this worth blogging about? It’s just that I’m really impressed that Apple have added that support (I still don’t know if it works with iChat – I’ll need to try that out), and I’m also impressed that Microsoft have produced a pretty decent webcam.
Now I just need to find a use for it all
Update: Just to say that I’ve tried the camera in iChat, and it works!
