July 19, 2008
More iPhone app reviews
Well, there seem to be lots of people out there on the web looking for iPhone app reviews, and I've just acquired a pile more apps. Obviously they're not cheaper by the dozen. But there you go.
One general point about apps; many of the apps seem to run better if you reboot your phone first. Now, that's not very Maclike; but I think what's happening is that some apps are strewing cruft around where other apps trip over it. So this is worth bearing in mind.
Banner Free is free and feels like it could be very handy in those noisy, crowded places where it's difficult to attract people's attention or make yourself heard. It scrolls a banner message (like an LED banner sign) along your screen. Nice and big, you just type the message. Bubble Wrap is also free and simulates a little piece of bubble wrap. Handy when you're stressed out.
After I mentioned eReader, a friend told me to pay actual folding money for Bookshelf. This has several nice features; it reads several ebook formats already, with more to come; it loads books over WiFi by looking in the eBook folder on my desktop (desperately handy), and then transfers books onto the phone in a few seconds. I've read a novel using it, too, which was perhaps not as pleasant, but much more portable, than carrying the book. £5.99.
Critter Crunch is a very cute action puzzle game which has had excellent reviews on other platforms. I still feel like I'm learning and am making silly beginner mistakes; which often prove fatal. I do like games of these kinds but normally get the most fun out of them in that sweet patch between sussing them enough to play effectively and exhausting their normally limited strategy. £5.99.
Motion X Poker is getting rave reviews everywhere. This is an implementation of that fine old standard of beginning programmers, poker dice. But what a version; dozens of gorgeous sets of dice each with their own sound effects and lovely rendering. You roll the dice by shaking your phone, and manipulating the dice to hold and release them is super quick. I bought it for its secondary mode, where you just roll dice; handy if you're one of those people who can never quite find a pair of dice when you need them. But in fact I've played the poker dice quite a lot; I just want to unlock all the dice sets now. £2.99 which is a total bargain. Everyone's asking for two-player support but top of my wish list is a big ask which would probably be a slightly different program; I would like support for rolling an arbitrary number of dice (more than the 1-5 now supported), but even more I would like support for the commoner sorts of polyhedral dice. Because frankly it would be easier to carry around an iPhone than a dice box.
Brain Challenge also has pretty good reviews, but for me the jury is out. I enjoy the 'daily challenge' on these games, but as yet I've unlocked very little and have little enthusiasm for repeating those minigames I've tried. I may review this one again in a few days. £5.99
iDrops looked quite pretty at 59p, and it is a very sharp implementation of a puzzle game that I've never liked; where you click on groups of squares to remove them; as you do so the squares squeeze up and you have to get rid of all the squares to progress. If there is any strategy here beyond blind luck I have never found it. But this is nicely done, with sweet jellied edges to the squares.
Guitar ToolKit is probably best value if you're a guitarist, but I bought it because it has a splendid electronic tuner, which is another of those things, like dice, which I want to keep in my pocket at all times. It also has a sweet metronome with a tap the beat feature; I would like it to have more better beats (at least 6/8 and 5/4 please, both of which I use quite a lot). The feature which I don't use but obviously would if I was a guitarist is a chord diagram library with over 200 chords in it; the feature that doesn't quite hit the mark for me is reference tones, where I could do with all 12 like a pitch pipe but instead this just has the strings of standard tuning. Which is a little odd as the tuner offers you, as well as 'any note', a choice of dozens of different custom tunings. £5.99
Posted by Alison Scott at 12:25 AM | Comments (2)
July 15, 2008
Shiny new iPhone
Yes, of course I have a 3G iPhone. I now have a proper, bona fide, Apple queueing experience under my belt also. Which resembled a silent movie in which primitive iPhone hunters of Walthamstow ran back and forth between the O2 shop and the Carphone Warehouse shop depending on which was currently being the least disorderly.
CW won the day for me at least; they had more iPhones, and they were better organised. O2 had only 15 iPhones, and could only sell them to people who were upgrading as their systems had crashed. CW had clearly rather more than 15 iPhones, and could sell them to anyone, but only new customers could easily walk out of the store with them, because the credit check for existing customers required a search on the O2 system, which was just as crashed at Carphone Warehouse.
Anyway, after a couple of hours I had an 8Gb iPhone 3G, so that was one game won I suppose. I realised I had no idea how to transfer my SIM over, or even where the SIM was. The internet clued me into the need for a paperclip; we appear to live in a post-paperclip society but I eventually found one. Days later I discovered that the 3G iPhone comes with a Official SIM extraction tool.
The new phone is very nice, and 3G and GPS are £99 worth for me at least (yes, I know there's a contract extension too, but in the UK at least the tariffs are perfectly reasonable.) I noticed the yellow tint before reading about it.
I immediately set about getting apps for it, including social networking and games. AIM and Twitterific will work better once the much-heralded message count in background is implemented. AIM is a bit pointless if you have to actually be in AIM to tell if someone's messaging you. The best free app to give your mates a laugh is Carling iPint. Yes, it's advertising. That doesn't stop it being funny. The best free games appear to be the rhythm game Tap Tap Revenge, the currently unavailable Cube Runner and match-3 RPG Aurora Feint.
Other handy free apps include Apple's iTunes remote control (but just as with the Apple remote, better to control everything on your Mac, not just iTunes, and I'm sure someone will offer this soon); Light, which turns your phone into a handy torch; and eReader, which should read your eReader.com and fictionwise.com bookshelfs, but in my case at least only reads eReader books. It's a start, but I'm waiting for FBReader.
Exposure, a slick Flickr browser, demonstrates a likely iPhone business model. Like Twitterific, you can have this app free and ad-supported, or in a premium, paid-for, ad-free version. The App Store doesn't appear to support free trials in any obvious way, so this is an alternative approach. Exposure delivers a powerful hit of icy-cool future shock, with its 'Near Me' button; click it, and you can see the photos on Flickr taken near where you happen to be at the moment.
And what of paid apps? I've bought two so far. Super Monkey Ball is the poster demonstration game for the iPhone, and well worth £5.99 to amaze people. However, as other reviewers have noticed, it's incredibly hard and unforgiving, and it breaks the first rule of portable gaming, which is that you should make it easy for people to quit and resume at any moment. It also breaks the second rule of portable gaming, as I discovered while playing as a car passenger; whenever we drove round the corner, my poor little monkey flew helplessly into the ocean. So, it's very pretty and very clever, but you can't really play it when in motion, or when you only have a few minutes to play.
The second was Zen Pinball: Rollercoaster. The iPhone's a good shape for pinball games, and this table's reasonably interesting and a good price at £2.99. As I wasted many many hours playing the various Pro Pinball tables, I'm always slightly disappointed by other pinball sims. This one is a bit cluttered; some of the shots are not obvious and the modes are not as imaginative as they might be. But it's a reasonable attempt, and after all, you're gaming on your phone.
Which brings me to the great catch of iPhone gaming. Will the iPhone be a serious competitor for the Nintendo DS? No. Why not? Because the iPhone already has the battery life of a geriatric firefly; a few minutes' gaming and it's turning up its toes. To test the games I've bought, I've played with the iPhone plugged in; at which point it drains power faster than it charges.
The solution is clearly to power my phone through my bra, either by solar power or harnessing my natural bounce. I can't wait.
Posted by Alison Scott at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)
June 11, 2008
The Dark Lord's Tower
Our train pulled into Northampton station, which was odd in itself, because it wasn't supposed to go anywhere near Northampton. I'd asked to sit at a table; I like the tables, and they seem to be dying out. They foster conversation on trains, which is, on the whole, a good thing. And I was whiling away this slow and deviated journey by conversing with the other people at my table. The man sitting next to me pointed to the tower, and asked us to guess what it was. We were all wrong. Repeatedly. But I was wrongest, with my explanation that it had fallen through a rift in the space-time continuum from one of those fantasy worlds where the evil-doers build very tall and largely featureless towers. All the better to drop things from a very great height, you see.
Like, say, lifts.
Photo from Simon Hammond's Flickr stream; CC licensed for which thanks
Posted by Alison Scott at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2008
Comic Life Magiq first impressions
I got an email from the lovely people at Plasq offering me a cheap family pack of the new version of Comic Life. The new edition is Leopard only because it uses all the lovely Leopard core functionality. As a test for this review, I made this collage of some of the photos Steven took of the morrismen on Bank Holiday Monday. I really liked the extract feature, which isn't perfect but is good enough, and amazingly quick. I liked the flexibility around lettering, panel shape options, the great array of comic fonts that come bundled in and the starter templates. And I liked the overall ease of creating comic pages. You can see above that for a local club, you can create something really fun very quickly.
What's not to like? Well, a fair bit actually. Do you remember 'Kai's Power Goo'? It was a great little image editing program with a really silly interface. Looks like Plasq remember it too. If you decide to do complex editing on an image, it throws up a large palette in the middle of your screen, with a tiny editing window inside that; perhaps 640x480 (see screenshot below; either that editing window is very small or very far away). There are no context-sensitive right-click menus, and almost none of the elements are smart. Layout programs with layers need easy ways to see what layers are under your mouse at any given time and bring the right one out to work on. If there's a way to do this in Comic Life, I haven't found it yet. I want it to be perfectly obvious how to, for example, flip an image or object 180 degrees horizontally; I never found a way to do that at all.
The program keeps guessing about what it is you're trying to do, like Clippy. Several times, it decided for me that I wanted to insert an object into the frame of a different object. Er, no, ta; why would this ever be the default for anything other than an empty frame? And on one occasion Comic Life created a smart object out of two different elements, for no reason I can see, and I couldn't retrieve them except with Undo. 
There's a weird circular editing tool that brings up a wheel of seemingly random options; its purpose is completely opaque to me. I guess my problem is that I'm not looking for 'intuitive' or 'whimsical' user interfaces; I'm looking for a neat array of tools with clear menus for their use, and a program that takes full advantage of my screen real estate.
Having said all that, I do think this is a great program. Comic Life has been used not just for comics and for family greetings and snapshots, but for a whole range of instructables and manuals. This version extends its functionality and provides enough editing tools for most non-power-users' needs. And the core of the program -- making comics to share with your friends and family -- is as much fun as ever.
Posted by Alison Scott at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)
May 06, 2008
Smultron and LilyPond
Regular readers will know that I'm a great fan of Barfly, a great .abc reader for the Mac. And, in fact, a great fan of abc, the simple music file format that's very popular with folk tune collectors. Barfly's now been upgraded to work fully with Leopard. It's splendid for dealing with long abc files with many tunes in; it plays them really well, and it generates sheet music instantly.
However, nobody could claim that Barfly's printed output is beautiful. For that we turn to LilyPond, a Free Software music engraving program. The output from LilyPond is exceptionally lovely; the program has been designed from the ground up to make elegant sheet music. LilyPond itself is not exceptionally lovely; it's a command line program. It once had a nice Mac gui front end, but this has broken in Leopard. Instead, it's now supported on the Mac with a tiny bit of Applescript. So you do have to roll up your sleeves to use LilyPond at present. And although LilyPond includes an abc2ly converter, I can't make it work. Hand-coding from scratch is taking me about ten minutes a tune at present (this for 'ordinary' 32 bar English tunes). So I will not be producing a 2000 tune tunebook any time soon. But for tunes I'm actually learning, it's fine. In fact, it's causing me to think about the ways in which the abc that I'm working from is different from the tunes as played by the better melodeon players around me.
LilyPond has a reputation for fearsome syntax; I had little trouble with straightforward tunes, but as soon as I tried tunes with chords or books of tunes, I started to struggle. It's worth persevering though, because when it does come right the results are spectacular. I'm not exactly stretching it, with easy monophonic tunes. The most complicated thing I've coded so far is a You can use LilyPond to produce multi-part orchestral and choral scores. But you might die in the attempt.
At heart this is a markup language, and for that you need a text editor. Plokta famously uses SubEthaEdit for collaborative working, so I hadn't tried other text editors. The text editor of choice for LilyPond is Smultron, which is a lovely Maclike editor that supports LilyPond syntax colouring. I'm not exactly a power user of text editors, but this appears to me to be both easy for beginners to use, and has some key features (like keeping track of nesting). For some reason the Mac isn't overly provided with good, free text editors, so it's nice to find one that's actively supported.
Posted by Alison Scott at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2008
Corflu Silver
What are you doing this weekend? Well, over in Las Vegas, they're holding Corflu Silver, the 'core fandom' convention (and oh, how I dislike the term 'core fandom'). And they've got a live video feed. Well, not now, because it's the middle of the night. But there's a linked chatroom, so you can watch the feed, chat in the box, and generally lose track of time. Fun.
Posted by Alison Scott at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2008
More MacHeist
If you missed MacHeist, or just love software bundles, MacHeist have released a 'retail bundle' of Mac apps. You'll have most of them if you been a MacHeist player all along. But if not, it's pretty good: it includes several apps from previous MacHeists that have found their way into my daily workflow, such as iClip, Awaken, Overflow, and the most beautiful iTunes controller ever, Cover Sutra. It also has the writer-focused word processor WriteRoom (I use Scrivener, in the same space), personal finance program Cha-Ching, personal organiser DevonThink Personal, password/data manager Wallet (I use 1Password), utility to remove excess code from your programs XSlimmer, and three different Pangea games. Anyway, not a bad bundle for $49, and you can get it here. Disclaimer: that's a referral link and I get prizes if you buy the bundle.
Posted by Alison Scott at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2007
Catching Up
We are overwhelmed with school admissions. People who haven't done this have an eye-glazed-over moment when I mention it; people who have are all sympathy.
I'm very taken with Music Arcades, where David has put his music collection on Shuffle by Album and is writing about it one day at a time. I don't know how many albums I have; there are currently 20,820 tracks. The next album up on Shuffle is "Sing a Song For You" by Anne Briggs; her albums are perennial seller despite her turning her back on singing and recording after only a few years in the limelight. And for all the glories of the current folk revival, I don't think there's a singer of traditional material to touch her.
Posted by Alison Scott at 02:23 PM | Comments (1)
August 29, 2007
Testimonial: eFrame.co.uk
One of the nice things about having a blog is being able to do the odd product review. Now, I have a house full of odd bits of artwork and other things that need framing. Some of them are 8x10, or A4, or can somehow be coaxed into a mat and a standard frame size. But lots can't, and I find myself down at the local frame shop Giving Them All My Money.
The standard advice on this is to make your own frames, but honestly, life is too short. I don't get that many frames. What we need is a website that makes frames to order and sends them to you for a reasonable amount of money.
Enter eFrame. You put in the exact length and width of the thing you want framing, and they sell you one of a wide range of frames. You have great control over frame mouldings, mounts, and so on. I tested it out, tentatively, with the rather nice and quite oddly-sized Hugo Nominee certificate that came in the post the other week. The frame, without mount, arrived after a little over a week, and fits perfectly. Total cost, including a hefty p&p that would be much reduced by buying several frames at once, was about twice what you might spend for an A4 certificate frame. That's about a third of the amount I spent when I last had a Hugo certificate framed. The frame's nicely made and came with picture hanging string and loops for me to fit once I'd added the picture.
Posted by Alison Scott at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2007
Chore Wars
Unsurprisingly, the Kittywompus household is totally up for Chore Wars. We've defined multiple common tasks, with bonus points for particularly nasty ones, discounts for particularly pleasant ones, and plenty of easy kid-friendly tasks, and we're starting to adventure in the morning. I wonder if the kids will be up for it? After all, we already get Jonathan to help tidy by telling him that we're tackling Bedroom Level 2. Or whatever.
Posted by Alison Scott at 12:44 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2007
Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture
John Dennen wrote to remind me about the Douglas Adams Memorial Debate, this year on May 3 in central London. The question under discussion is 'Is SF good for the public debate'; with a variety of interesting looking speakers. These are mostly academics and do not appear to include any SF professionals. Which feels a bit odd to me but what do I know, I'm only a begonia*. I've never yet managed to squeeze one of these into my overly compressed life but I've heard good reports.
*Wrong talking plant, I know.
Posted by Alison Scott at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2007
New broadband, old Eastercon
A qualified thumbs-up to Virgin Media, who have, by and large, done what they said they'd do at the times they said they'd do it. The only downsides were the long wait for a day when an engineer could come and I could be in for him (complicated by Easter), and the fact that they simply did not send me the required serial number (complicated by my being an existing (ntl) customer), requiring me to phone customer service and hang on a line. Nevertheless, the service slot was today, 8am-12noon, and I'm sitting with improved telly and broadband, at 10:47. I did not get them to run cable through the house and fix the modem in the study. I believe my long-term broadband solution is the new Airport Extreme stacked under the Mac Mini or the Wii.
A complete thumbs up to the Crowne Plaza Chester, who looked after us splendidly at the Eastercon. There are few exterior photos of this hotel, and those that exist tend to be artful, being as how it's built on the top of the Trinity Street car park. But that's the short stay shopper's carpark for Chester, so for the first time for ages at the Eastercon we were bang in the middle of one of the finest city centres in England. I didn't do much shopping, but we did walk round the walls with the kids, eat at several nice restaurants, and go to the zoo. We also produced multiple copies of the Contemplation newsletter, The Navel, and they're all online now. Including, for the first time at an Eastercon, colour editions. We were helped there by having a relatively small membership; fast colour printing is still out of reach of Eastercon budgets.
Posted by Alison Scott at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2007
EMI Breaks Ranks
Blogged everywhere, and of course I'm delighted; EMI music will be available DRM-free through iTunes. Higher quality, slightly more expensive for singles. But it will be the same price for albums and I do particularly buy albums; I've only bought a trickle of individual tracks on eMusic, for example. I am quite pleased with the idea of becoming an iTunes customer, though I'm not sure in practice how much stuff there'll be that I want and don't have.
The really odd thing here is that EMI have been particularly virulent about putting DRM on CDs, completely ineffectually as far as the Mac is concerned.
Posted by Alison Scott at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2007
Dept. of Implausible but True
Thanks to the Londonist for the critical data that the local authority area with the highest level of dog ownership is...
Posted by Alison Scott at 08:06 AM | Comments (0)
March 26, 2007
I fancy a trip to Boise, Idaho
Somehow I think it unlikely that I'll be headed out to Boise in mid-July. But I wanted to show you the exceptionally pretty logo for this year's joint International Stereoscopic Union and National Stereoscopic Association convention. It's a parallel pair, so you view it by defocusing your eyes as if you were gazing rather inconstantly at the moon or similarly distant object. Eventually the images will separate sufficiently that there is an overlap, and it will gradually come into view. You know you've got it right (rather than cross-eyed or pseudo-stereoed) because there's a little fish at the front of the pic. The logo's by Terry Wilson, with the 3d conversion by Ray Zone.
Posted by Alison Scott at 10:15 PM | Comments (1)
March 22, 2007
Online Postage
I've been using the Royal Mail online postage service for a little while, for my eBay and Amazon packages. It's a great service; you type in the weight and size of the parcel and it offers you the full range of Royal Mail services. You then type in the address, and pay, and it prints you a postage label. Not to be confused with the SmartStamp service, which costs money over and above the postage.
What would really make it better, I mused, would be to link it to the Paypal payment details. That would remove the requirement to retype the address and save several clicks. I may have even mused on the feedback form.
Anyway, I went into my Paypal account today, and there it is. "Print postage label" -- links directly through to the RM service. This is going to save me a significant amount of time and trouble.
Posted by Alison Scott at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2007
Hell may be freezing over
Or at least, the Victoria line platforms at Victoria. I saw this sign on the tube this morning. It's like living in the future! Of course, this morning was distinguished by being so cold that a baking hot underground would have come as a blessed relief.
Posted by Alison Scott at 09:07 PM | Comments (0)
Contemplation
Just to remind you that if you haven't got memberships yet for Contemplation, this year's Eastercon, there's still time. Just. Postal registrations close on 25th March. In Chester, which is a great city to spend a long weekend in.
We will be there in force doing the newsletter. Look for us in the bar. We want your spiffy digital photos also.
Posted by Alison Scott at 09:50 AM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2007
EasyCrop and EasyFrame
Sometimes Photoshop is just too darned chunky. I followed a link to Yellow Mug software from another blog, and discovered that they say that their pictures are resized and framed for the web using EasyCrop and EasyFrame in under 30 seconds. For EasyCrop, you drag a picture from anywhere to its well, drag a crop window (or define the size), set a slider to change the resolution, and then, once all is well, drag the result off to your desktop or other program. You can send the output from EasyCrop to EasyFrame. To be fair it must have taken me a full minute to generate this picture, but that's because I tested all the frames. You can even upload your own frames to this program, and I probably will. Brill. EasyCrop and EasyFrame cost a few dollars each, or you can buy a bundle that does this, plus a similarly sweet screenshot program, plus a pile of interesting utilities, for $40, or $50 for a family bundle. I love family bundles and that is what I'll be getting.
Meanwhile, isn't this a cute photo? From 2000, at her Grandad's wedding. I'm just fixin' to sell the little red dress on eBay. Unless you know a particularly gorgeous three year old who needs it.
Posted by Alison Scott at 02:27 AM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2007
Eye Candy
I'm far too well-behaved to put this in my sidebar, though I was tempted. (There's a vertical version too). This is a mini-version, from last.fm, of my beloved iTunes screensaver. I wish it used all of my albums rather than just a few.
Posted by Alison Scott at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)
January 05, 2007
Happy New Year
Over Christmas people started spamming the blog, so comment notification is turned back on. Meanwhile, I'm getting 500 errors on key page rebuilds. I find that the prospect of rebuilding Movable Type again fills me with gloom and is unlikely to happen till March at the earliest. So I cannot edit the Potted Music page. Meanwhile, Spiers and Boden have a new website, and all the links to music from their site have now broken. Joy.
The correct links are:
Bold Sir Rylas
Sportsman's Hornpipe
and for Bellowhead, Fire Marengo.
Mad Spiers & Boden fans should also note that I 'quite often' have a CD of sea shanties on which Spiers and Boden appear for sale on eBay.
The Tate Modern slides may or may not be art, but the level 5 slide is the largest slide in Britain and they are free. Höller argues that slides combat depression and improve mental health; I think what he means is that it's great fun. Go, but go early in the day; we picked up timed tickets for noon and 12:30 at about 10:45am, but TM warns that late-arriving visitors will not be able to get tickets. I was so excited by the experience of sliding that I almost forgot I'd brought my stereo camera with me. They could do with recycling arrangements for the tickets of those who wimp out on the higher slides; the top slide in particular was notably under-subscribed.
Posted by Alison Scott at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
November 18, 2006
Politically Correct Meat Products
Daily Express journos are frothing at the mouth with the discovery that a school was planning to have a Christmas dinner with halal chicken instead of turkey. Which seemed odd to me; lots of people have chicken instead of turkey for Christmas dinner (or, indeed, at our office, lots of people go and have curry or meze for Christmas dinner, on account of how disgracefully expensive Central London turkey dinners tend to be). What's the big fuss. And Jonathan's school (whisper this bit) both serves a Christmas dinner and serves only halal meat. So they may have been doing this for years without it exciting comment. Anyway, the school has now backed down.
Meanwhile, a search on 'halal Christmas dinner' reveals that it is possible to get a traditionally slaughtered halal turkey, and a good thing too given the apparent rise in demand for a traditional British halal Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. Mixed marriages are blamed there.
It is, of course, no stranger for Muslims to celebrate Christmas with a tree, presents and turkey than for our family, where we don't revere Christ even a little bit. However, we celebrated this bizarre modern advent season yesterday by going to see The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3d, on its first day of general release here. It was in the new Disney Real 3d, which delivers a polarised image using a single digital projector showing 144fps. I'd not seen the film before, so I was watching the film as well as the 3d. It is terrific; perhaps the best 3d movie ever, and all the better because of a notable lack of eyepopping 3d effects. It was just charming and real. Oh, yes, and great 3d skeletal reindeer. It is also very careful with its descriptions of how Christmas works as a holiday. The film never actually says that half the planet worships Santa Claus, but it doesn't exactly deny it either; Santa is clearly the most important person in Christmastown.
Meanwhile, I learn from BoingBoing that over in Wales, Trading Standards have come down hard on Welsh Dragon Sausages, demanding that they be relabelled to avoid confusion for customers who buy them expecting them to contain actual Welsh dragon meat, rather than pork, leek and chili.
Posted by Alison Scott at 08:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 13, 2006
Friday Roundup
I have a cold and am feeling very sorry for myself. I have stuck to my resolution not to play video games, despite the fact that at my current intellectual level, I could no more write my dissertation than fly.
My mood was not improved by attempting to preorder a Wii from a large and formerly reliable games shop: it's rejected both my credit cards on a range of different browsers. I conclude that it's just overloaded or something. Phone booking line is closed; I'll try again tomorrow.
On the other hand, Cute Overload has capybaras today! Definitely my favourite Rodent of Unusual Size. Also in the blessings count; I ordered a tshirt of my melodeon marmite design (reworked into a more tshirt friendly shape) from TShirt Studio. I picked them more or less at random because they had the colour of shirt I wanted (oatmeal) and their site didn't break using Camino. But the tshirt is lovely; by far the nicest custom shirt I've ordered. It just doesn't have any of the normal flaws of custom shirts. So I'll be using them again, for sure.
If you haven't yet voted in the Cumbria Top Dog competition, then by all means go and support the very sfnal Hugo "PaperbackWriter" Gernsback, the not-so-tiny Basset Hound.
I ordered and received Maggie's Melodeon, a D/G tutor book with CD. It's a very agreeable tutor, starting from 'this is which way up you hold it' and taking you through to 'off you go to a session and practise'. There's a strong focus in this one on learning to play the basses rhythmically (in march, waltz, jig and hornpipe), with only a little at the end about different bass patterns, different bass rhythms and row crossing. I could have really done with this book six months ago, before it was ready! Now it feels like good material for consolidation but I find myself faunching for the next book. The key thing I want to know: how, when you hear a new tune, do you work out which basses will sound really good with it? I suspect this is a bit like chicken-sexing, and after you've played for 10,000 hours, it's easy. Also this week, I have for the first time managed to play a song and sing along to it at the same time without it sounding absolutely awful. The song is Burl Ives' The Lollipop Tree (sorry, the official Burl Ives website is so ghastly I can't link to it), which I was very fond of when I was six or so. I need to do a photoshop to go with this tune though, ready for when I record it in Garageband.
Make it Folky, one of my favourite podcasts, on Cambridge Community radio, has a new episode available. They've also started pledge-driving, so I've sent them some money and offered help with the show. I also renewed my membership to Radio Britfolk, who hadn't emailed me to let me know it was running out, apparently in an effort to avoid spam. Also in my 'recently added' music are a couple of free Tom Waits downloads from eMusic, and the Spiers and Boden Womad set from Radio 3 (you'll need Audio Hijack or similar to save it). But about 60% of my listening at the moment is still Bellowhead. I'm sure I'll get tired of it at some point.
Back home in Walthamstow, the big event tomorrow is our Apple Day celebration at the Vestry House Museum. A grand day out to be sure. Last Sunday we went on the Walthamstow Family Bike Ride for the first time and had a very jolly time. It's really rather nice to be riding out with a group of people who understand the business of taking children on bikes. That ride happens on the second Sunday of the month, but I think November (which we will miss) will be the last one. We fetched up in the forecourt of the Nag's Head for a well-earned pint, fortunately before their 7:30pm Child Curfew.
Posted by Alison Scott at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)
October 02, 2006
The Vow of Electronic Chastity
Well, I have missed the deadline for my dissertation. Desperate measures are called for. I have vowed to play no video games* until it is complete. That little asterisk is the exceptions, which are:
- I can play DDR, because it makes me fitter and because I can't play for long enough to truly bugger up the dissertation.
- I can play Nintendo or moby games if I'm stuck somewhere unexpectedly with nothing to do.
- Er, that's it...
This still rules out 99% of all known games. And I have done no gaming since Thursday. Which has given me plenty of time for non-gaming activity. Like, say, blogging.
I definitely need to plug Fission, which is the new stripped down lossless audio editor from Rogue Amoeba. Rogue Amoeba's products seem to be designed to reflect real life workflows. They observed that many people were using Audio Hijack Pro to grab a lengthy audio file, and then needed to trim it a bit and split it into tracks. And the programs that could do that were either high-end, complex or lossy. Or all three. Fission still feels a little bit 1.0ish, but it basically does the exact task that I need to do all the time. And I think the icon, which is dead simple and reflects both audio editing and nuclear fission, is perhaps the finest I have ever seen.
Over at Melnet, somebody asked me about my Edirol R-09, and I wrote the following:
I basically love it; it replaced a minidisc which I'd used for several years after buying super cheap on eBay (I would still, I think, recommend second-hand minidisc recorders as a way to get started recording on the cheap). Basically, the festival workflow went from 'look for blank minidiscs, curse lack of blank minidiscs, try to find somewhere that still stocks minidiscs, fill backpack with minidiscs, put blank in recorder, record, curse lack of adequate level meters, keep eye on watch because disc runs out in 80 minutes and many sets are longer than that, keep eye on watch because batteries run out completely randomly, make sure minidisc record-protection is set because it's incredibly easy to tape over them by mistake, carefully spend spare time at festivals labelling and sorting minidiscs, get home with massive pile of minidiscs, slowly get round to transferring them at 1-1 time to the computer using Audio Hijack Pro over the course of the winter' to 'put R-09 and mic in pocket (and it doesn't actually matter if you forget the mic, which is a win), record, change batteries between concerts, transfer files in a couple of minutes when you get home'.
When I first started using it I was using a 2Gb Kingston card and it was apparently prone to corruption; I didn't lose any files but I did have to transfer some of them at 1-1. I have since switched to Sandisk since when I have had no problems. Touch wood. Weirdly, I am fairly sure my Sandisk card is a fake. But it works.
The only other criticism I have of the R-09 is that it has a massive and incredibly obvious red light-up record button. I am sure this is handy if you're recording legitimately, but given how small and inconspicuous the R-09 is otherwise, a record button that's clearly visible 100 yards away and incredibly distinctive is not the perfect choice for anyone who might be stealth recording (perish the thought). It is the same weight and very slightly larger than a minidisc recorder (but substantially smaller than, say, a minidisc recorder & a pack of five discs).
I mostly use my R-09 with my Sony ECM-719 mic; I've done test recordings with the internal mics and they sound fine. I am not a good person to judge audiophile quality. I am rarely recording material where purity of sound is the key consideration, and I am a coarse recorder to boot; I record in MP3 and I leave AGC turned on. (Because recording is normally very much a secondary consideration; I'm mostly there to enjoy the music).
I probably should also have mentioned that it runs on AA batteries (good!) but that the battery case is so badly designed they ship a special warning (bad!). And there have been reports of weaknesses in the mic input.
Anyway, the combination of the Edirol and Fission mean that there's some realistic chance of my processing all the live recordings I make now. I do still have a big minidisc backlog.
Headphones for neighbours appeal: One of my 101 things is to play in a band. For the last few days, Steven, Marianne and I have been playing Rakes of Mallow, very slowly, on recorder, fiddle and melodeon. Marianne doesn't have all the notes yet (one of the trials of violin is that it's taught in a way that means you can't play tunes for ages). But she's just got her music for the 'Violin III' line in the local primary school string orchestra; given that the song is Sloop John B, we expect to be able to join in in yer actual harmony.
Keep music live: we've been getting out a bit, in fact. We saw two shows in the Spitz festival of folk, Jim Moray and Show of Hands. Show of Hands was very lively, with them obviously relishing playing in a pub full of enthusiastic fans. Jim Moray was capably aided by Jamie Delarre on fiddle and Nick Cooke on melodeon; the overall sound was very good at this one and I hope he continues to tour with traditional musicians. I don't think it's just my folkie predjudices that cause me to prefer this to his electric band.
We saw Jah Wobble and his English Roots Band at the 100 Club last Friday. We'd only previously seen an excellent festival set at Cropredy; JW had cancelled a planned gig at the Bloomsbury because it's a seated venue. We did have seats for this one, by arriving early, but abandoned them when the main band started.
We're terribly apathetic about our excellent local folk club, ignoring one choice guest after another due to inability to stir ourselves on a Sunday evening. But we couldn't ignore that their 5 November guests are Spiers and Boden, and they decided to ticket that night by selling tickets at other club nights. So we thought we'd better go along and get tickets, which would give us a chance to see Mick Ryan and Pete Harris. I knew nothing of their work, though I quickly turned up the fact that Mick wrote a song called "The Widow's Promise", covered by the Poozies as "The Widow". Marianne had remarked on it, in fact, the other day, asking me what it meant, and when I prevaricated, saying "that's because it's naughty, isn't it Mummy?"
Well, they were great; entertaining songs with uniformly good choruses, and cheery patter in between. Well worth catching if they're in your area. They were launching their new album The Island of Apples last night; they played half a dozen songs off the new album, all strong.
This week we have tickets for the Bellowhead album launch party. Can't wait.
Posted by Alison Scott at 09:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 07, 2006
Namechecks
It's all very busy and will be till the end of the month. But meanwhile, I think I need to namecheck Macadamia who wrote to ask me if I liked their music, which is sort of ambient. The entire album is available to download on a Creative Commons license -- isn't that cool? But it's zipped so I can't link to a track.
And a quick shout out to Canadian political blogger The Coast of Bohemia. Boy was I surprised to find your blog.
But the biggest surprise today was a bit different. There's this chap I stalk a bit online. Not a lot. I was in love with him, completely and absolutely and forever, when I was sixteen. I don't think he fancied me in the slightest. He has a very uncommon name; he's the only person with his name in the US. And he's never had any online presence to speak of really. You know, the occasional forum entry, directory listings, names of people who contribute to the local PBS station, that sort of thing. All at the other end of the country from where we used to live, but obviously the same chap. But, you know. No website, only work email, no real sense of being a web citizen.
Nevertheless, every few months, I stick his name into Google, just on the offchance. I'm not sure why. I'm hardly about to make contact.
And today, I found a photo. He was a finalist in a contest run by a local TV station. He didn't win, but they still put his photo on the website. Perfectly recognisable, despite having aged 25 years overnight.
Posted by Alison Scott at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)
June 24, 2006
If you're reading this blog by RSS feed...
...you won't see this message because my RSS feed has moved. It's now here. It moved when I upgraded Movable Type, but I've only just noticed. So if you've been wondering why I stopped blogging, that's why.
Posted by Alison Scott at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)
June 05, 2006
Needs an Alarmist and Armageddonist Factoid, Vern
I'm sure this is being blogged everywhere, but Greenpeace sent the Philadelphia Inquirer a press release containing the immortal line
"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."
Posted by Alison Scott at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
Alternative Browsers
I wrote a fabulous post last night that got eaten by worms. Anyway. The gist of it was that I'm trying out Camino and Shiira, because Safari runs unaccountably slowly and crashes.
A Greek chorus might say that Safari crashes because I have 48 windows open at once, but as this Exposé screenshot, taken randomly last night, shows that this is a considerable exaggeration.
Meanwhile, Shiira's unique selling point is Tab Exposé, which lets you see what's in all those rows of tabs. But what I really need is an extension to Exposé that explodes the tabs as well as the windows. Because it's not unusual for me to have 100 open tabs. Whoops.
Posted by Alison Scott at 07:41 AM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2006
Bits and Bobs
I upgraded Movable Type to version 3.2. At present I'm still moderating comments, because I'm not fond of captchas and KittenAuth is not yet sufficiently reliable. But otherwise it's a considerable improvement, though not without the normal set of trouble that always attends upgrades of this program.
Steven tried to get me to join up with a complex online life management program so that I could use the shared calendars feature. After struggling for a little while, we went over to Google Calendar. 15 minutes later, we had a selection of seven family calendars imported from iCal and subscriptions to a couple of public ones (eg Waltham Forest School Term Dates), with easy sharing and intuitive date entry. Tip for Google Calendar: edit your custom view to display "next 3 weeks" and then make it your default view. Result: a sensible day by day view that shows about 10 items per day with start times.
Myspace continues apace, with the fabulous Last Night's Fun and the Demon Barbers both having spaces, and tracks for download, now. From MySpace I learnt that Jim Moray will be launching his new album on Wednesday night at the burlesque club Madame Jojo's. Google Calendar, meanwhile, helpfully let us know we're quadruple booked.
We'd recommend Belgian CenterParcs; much like UK CenterParcs, but with better beer. And our weekend was cheaper than it would have been in the UK, but we had the villa for an extra day because they book Friday-Tuesday over Easter weekend. Other differences from UK CenterParcs were the brilliant indoor pirate play area Discovery Bay (Arrrr!), that children are allowed in the spa and sauna (though ours were too loud honestly, and we stuck to the (rare) Brit-friendly swimwear allowed sessions), and mayo or satesaus on the chips.
Posted by Alison at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)
March 05, 2006
Accordion Hero
Erik Olson wrote to tell me that the button-melodeon teaching game I was searching for actually has a web site. It's called Accordion Hero, and is the latest game from Schadenfreude Interactive, the company that brought you Need For Speed: Underhill, Grand Theft Ottoman and Hannibal Crossing.
I want one.
Posted by Alison at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2006
Friday Night, Saturday Morning
So, why, oh why, did none of my friends tell me how good Veronica Mars is? Most scary thought; it apparently gets better in the second half of the season. Why is this scary? Because we sat down to watch a little yesterday, having bought it from Play, and watched six episodes, one after the other. Only stopped at 3am when it started to become difficult to stay awake. This show is a rough combination of Buffy and Twin Peaks, except sassier and with better music.
In other news, I have pre-ordered the UK edition of Guitar Hero. From Game, becuase I believe, possibly erroneously, that they should be experienced in handling prioritising preorders of games in short supply. It's hard to imagine a game that is more precisely targeted to me.
And then I fell to thinking. Why guitar? If you did 'Keyboard Hero' or even 'Melodeon Hero', you could teach the rudiments of the actual instrument through the video game. You could require people not only to hit the right button at the right time, but also with the right volume (ok, that would require Hammer Action Keyboard Hero, and it might be a bit expensive for a video game controller). You could wire up a Streb e-Melodeon to a video game and make people work through morris and sea shanties to the greatest hits of John Kirkpatrick, Sharon Shannon and Kepa Junkera. Of course, development costs would be high and about three people would be interested. But there you go. It does slightly worry me that I'm about to invest quite a lot of time and energy in a video game that will not actually teach me to play the guitar.
Posted by Alison at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
February 09, 2006
Rounding up the loose sheep
I realise I haven't written much about the melodeon, largely because when I think about it, I tend then to go and play it. Nicking a joke from Private Eye, it's brilliant! You can take it with you everywhere and it plays thousands of different tunes! Though at the moment it seems to be rather better at playing ditty little nursery rhymes than it does at, eg, the Flight of the Bumble Bee.
Luckily, if you practice specific tunes until you can get a AA* on them, you begin to unlock more tunes. More worryingly, you seem to also unlock more melodeons. I now have two, and plan to get a third. And Steven is making worrying perhaps-I-should-get-a-melodeon noises too. This is known as MAD, or Melodeon Acquisitive Disorder.
My two are both second-hand two-row Castagnaris; a G/C Roma and a D/G Studio. I bought the latter because all English teaching is done (pretty much) on D/G, and I'm off to Melodeons and More next month. The Studio is a no-frills Castagnari starter instrument with only 19 treble buttons -- much less smart than the current Studio. The Roma was heavily modified and tweaked by Castagnari to suit its former owner and is probably pretty much unique now. The Roma is a much better sounding instrument, and not merely because it is posher. D/G melodeons are squeaky through much of their range, so morris tunes congregate around the bottom keys in a way that's incredibly obvious once you know it's there.
I'm mostly learning by thinking of tunes and seeing if I can play them, but I'm also downloading tunes in the very wonderful abc format and playing them using the equally wonderful BarFly. It's difficult to overstate how cool this is; abc tunes are text files which are so cleverly and intuitively designed that with a very little practice you can read the tunes right off the page. Barfly takes a single text file with a list of these tunes (for example the files of Lewes Favourites), and turns it into a complete songbook with staff notation, lyrics, and midi-style playback.
Apart from that I'm working with the first of the amazingly difficult John Kirkpatrick videos, and playing along to Radio 2's rather triff virtual session. And yes, I'm pretty much stuck on everything.
Like everyone else, I giggled all the way through The IT Crowd. And I've lost count of the number of people who've told me I should be watching The Thick of It. But can I find a torrent?
I've never been much of a fan of music DVDs, though I've acquired a few over the years. But now that iTunes and the iPod (though not mine) support videos, I quite like storing music videos with the rest of my music. Handbrake is a freeware one-step video conversion tool, and Dive Into Mark has a very straightforward tutorial. So now I have all the songs from the Oysterband's 25th anniversary gig in my iTunes collection. I actually blogged the set list for that one; Angels of the River, Hal-An-Tow, Dark Eyed Sailor, By Northern Light, Tumbledown, and We Could Leave Right Now were played but didn't make it onto the DVD. Ah well.
I also adore my Nintendo DS, and in particular Metroid Prime Pinball (which hasn't been released in the UK but which is readily available from importers). This game was released to 'low expectations', being a pinball tie-in to the Metroid series, where the main character can turn herself into a powerball. It defies those expectations. The physics are good, the board is static (scrolling boards are the worst of many video pinball sins) the game uses the DS touch screen very effectively for nudge, and there's rather wimpy force feedback that adds to the sense of playing a physical game.
Although there are many non-pinball elements to the game (various different aliens to shoot with balls or bullets, a 'wall jump', rain, your ball can lose health, and so on), they all seem to fall reasonably naturally from the pinball mechanics. I've played many, many video pinballs over the years, and this does a very good job of making it feel like you've got a pinball machine in your pocket. It is not as realistic as the Pro Pinball series, but I think it is better than any other video pinball I've played. I think the trick is that the ball never does anything stupid; yes, there are aliens wandering across the table, but you just hit them with the ball as if they were moving drop targets.
It is slightly easy for me (and I am only moderately good at pinball); and tellingly, on 'expert' mode there are fewer extra balls and harder video segments, but the actual pinball mechanics are no harder. I would have preferred if the shots had been a little harder to make, the board had been faster, and the slope a little greater so that untidy shots didn't go round ramps. The board is designed with very few dangerous shots, too; even when you miss things it tends to send the ball back to the flippers.
Nevertheless, the game is well-designed; you collect 'artifacts' on 2 starting tables; once you've gone through several modes you can visit more worlds to get the last two artifacts from bosses. Then there's an 'artifact temple' where you slot the 12 artifacts into 12 holes to cash in for the endgame; more bigger bosses. Weirdly, I've never been much of a fan of videogame bosses, but the concept works really well in pinball, which always was about setting up a difficult sequence of moves to deliver a particular outcome. Once you've done all that, you start again only harder. And there's an online high score table, and I even managed to get onto it very briefly.
I'd better mention the fabulous Richard Thompson Box Set from Free Reed. 99 tracks over six CDs, together with a lengthy book and James Adie's Vincent catalogue. Many delights here; most tracks are rarities but there was clearly a cornucopia to select from. It's a mix of unusual versions of well-known songs, songs not recorded elsewhere, covers of other people's songs (including "Ca Plane Pour Moi", an interesting choice to represent punk as part of 1000 years of popular music), other people's covers of his songs, and so on. It's great; and at about 50p a track, cheaper than iTunes.
Plastic Bertrand, meanwhile, demonstrates the level of the bar for famous Belgians; having been a one-hit wonder more than 25 years ago is enough to do.
Posted by Alison at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2006
Leviathans
There is a baby whale swimming up the Thames. It swam right past my office; if I'd been at work today rather than at Warwick Business School, I could have joined the crowds of people gawping.
And the Horslips DVD, Return of the Dancehall Sweethearts, arrived while I was away. It's a two DVD set with the documentary, and a second DVD with many full tracks and other delights. It includes the full version of the clip I linked to on my music page.
Meanwhile, in a totally random sample of successful senior public sector managers who took a mock of CIPFA's Strategic Business Management exam (one of the final parts of the CIPFA qualification), only five out of twenty-one passed. What conclusions would you draw about (a) the calibre of public sector management, (b) the content of the SBM syllabus and exam? (6 marks). In our defence, we had had no teaching on it whatsoever; our tutors were testing the theory that we'd all pass by miles without help. I gloriously achieved the lowest score in the entire class; the first time in my entire life that this has happened to me in any subject not involving a ball. By contrast, on our very first go at the other part of the final exam, the designed-to-simulate-real-life case study, one of our number (sadly not me) had a score higher than the highest national score when that exam ran for real.
Posted by Alison at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2006
Queen Mab's Music
Oddly, sometimes agents have mp3s and photos on their site even when the artists don't. No, I don't understand it either. Anyway, Queen Mab's Music represent some of the UK's best folk bands, and if you're wondering what all the fuss is about, there's a full mp3 from each tucked away under the 'resources tab'. Delights include the Demon Barbers' Katy Cruel, The Lusty Smith from Horizon Award nominees Ben Murray and Rosie Doonan, and bellowhead's amazing version of the Rochdale Coconut Dance. Go grab before they change their minds, though you probably have to be considering booking them or something.
Over at the Show of Hands website, the band have released the single Crooked Man as honesty-ware. You can download it; if you like it, go back and pay them 79p. Separately, a double album from Show of Hands has turned up at my very favourite legal mp3 site, eMusic. It features many of their 'popular hits' -- you know, all those songs that everyone at the festival knows every word of. Good trick that.
Posted by Alison at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)
January 06, 2006
Two Quick Things
I really like parent hacks, and in particular the suggestion that if your child is currently obsessed with, eg, dinosaurs, you should visit Flickr's dinosaur slideshow. Instant happy toddler, for sure.
And yesterday, I went swimming for the first time at Oasis, which is about 10 minutes from my work, has a heated 25m outdoor pool, and was absolutely fantastic. A swim is £3.30, plus 20p for the lockers. It was exactly like swimming in a hot tub; by the time we went (6pm) it was really dark, and cold, and you could see the steam coming off the pool.
Posted by Alison at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
September 30, 2005
Plugging the Demon Barber Roadshow
I mentioned this in the sidebar, but it needs promoting*. The Demon Barber Roadshow is Britain's premier live folk extravaganza.
The Demon Barbers are very much to my taste, with a mixture of folk and electric instruments, and a proper bass section. Damien fronts of course, and I think one of the finest things about this band is that he has a brilliant authentic folk voice. I can't think of another electric folk band with such a strong, traditional vocalist (I know, you're going to give me dozens in the comments). The songs are traditional but obviously the arrangements are not, and it's good and loud.
The Roadshow is something really fine though. I am not a big fan of clog but the clog is well-done, and wisely set to the full band music. Dogrose Morris call themselves "Morris with Altitude" and I don't think I've ever seen morris dancers jump so high. But the showstopper is the rapper. Rapper is a dance for five athletic young men with flexible swords who weave in and out at high speed. Black Swan Rapper are just about the best rapper side there is at the moment. And if the fabulous dancing weren't enough, they also use glow-in-the-dark-swords. It's a complete showstopper.
We've seen them live twice, most memorably at Cecil Sharp House where we were about ten feet from the dancers. And very exciting it was too.
I think in an effort to persuade people to book the Roadshow, they've put together a promo DVD, and you can download it all from their website. You'd probably want broadband. The videos are pretty good quality for internet downloads, and include studio versions of all three of the dances, songs by the Demon Barbers, and festival footage. Oh, and some very cute footage of a schools workshop with kids doing rapper with balloon-animal balloons instead of swords.
When I tell people I like electric folk music, they sort of wince and you can see they're thinking of late sixties stuff played by people in floaty dresses. I have to say, no, I like the stuff that's new and exciting now. And hey. Now there's a website I can point them at.
One more thing. You won't see it live because they're never repeated it, but at Sidmouth a couple of years ago Black Swan did a rapper firedance. Because they are nutters. Actual nutters. And you can download the video for that too. It is the most amazing thing and required watching for anyone who thinks English dance is dull. There is a bit of a flaming pentacle issue though -- I'm not sure if they'd worked out that would happen in advance.
hot flaming pentacle action
*Admission: Damien said I could have one of the actual DVDs if I plugged the band on my blog. But you know, they're brilliant, I'd go to a festival just to hear them play and I have everything they've ever recorded.
Posted by Alison at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)
September 16, 2005
Overheard on 6Music
Phill Jupitus was reading the papers. Turns out they're using stem cells from mice to repair sheep hearts. It looks likely that in time they will be able to use mice to generate heart cells for people, and possibly other sorts of cells as well.
"Which means", he said, "we're finally going to have Marvellous Magical Mouse Organs.
Posted by Alison at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)
September 04, 2005
Katrina
I'm not writing a lot here about the flooding in Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states. I've posted some links to the right, of various types. I encourage people to consider what they can sensibly do to help. I visited New Orleans when I was really too young to properly appreciate the city; it would be nice to return.
I lived in Houston for a while as a teenager. It's not a city that gets a good press in the UK, and Texans as a whole do no better, but I found them friendly and kind. The people of Texas, and particularly Houston, are, in huge numbers, opening their homes to strangers and near strangers, and finding all sorts of furnishings and equipment to help people out with. Good for them.
Posted by Alison at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)
July 05, 2005
Back on my Hobby Horse
A super quick plug for The Mini Morris Company and its indefatigable proprietor Liam Robinson ("sometimes my girlfriend helps out too"). Lots of different semi-traditional arts, mostly schools work, with set up from the Princes Trust.
Liam kept very busy at the Crawley folk festival, running a workshop on melodeon in which I got to play with a one-row box (I might be hooked on squeezeboxes, yes), and one on Molly dancing. He also sold us a set of sheet music for Lincolnshire dance tunes, and gave us the demo CD by his band Pigeon English.
Oh, yes, and he did two hobby horse workshops, making highly traditional osses using none-too traditional craft foam and a glue gun. We ended up with a pair of fine hobby horses and a hobby moose. Yes, I know it looks more like a hobby goat; those orange twiddly things are metaphorical antlers. Still, this is by some margin the Best Children's Craft Workshop Ever. Or ever so far. "Do you do birthday parties?" I asked, plotting.
Posted by Alison at 12:32 AM | Comments (0)
June 28, 2005
Designed by a Man
The last few times I've walked down Whitehall I've seen the new Memorial to the women of WWII, draped in a cloth.
Today it was uncovered, presumably for photos; it will be unveiled next week. It's a bronze slab on which are hung a variety of women's uniforms.
I hate it. One of the problems with the way that the women who served in the last war are remembered is by their clothes. There's a sort of weird fetish thing going on about 40s women and their clothes. This memorial perpetuates this; by focusing only on the clothes it implies that they maketh the woman, that the important thing we need to remember about these women is the clothes they wore.
Of course, I automatically assumed the memorial was designed by a man -- and so it proves; John Mills, who has made a bit of a career out of memorial design. There are official explanations of the choice of memorial here (note the repeated references to 'girls') and here.
Posted by Alison at 10:07 PM | Comments (1)
June 11, 2005
Statement of Intent
I'm back, I'm staying back. Comments are cleansed, trackbacks have gone.
Trinkets have gone -- I'm still doing sidebar links but they're now at Del.Icio.Us. You can generate an RSS from that or add it to your consolidated set of del.icio.us links.
I know it's still untidy. My excuse is that I've been busy, and I've been listening to a lot of music -- the next post. I've also bought one of these. It's lovely, and the Migration Assistant meant that I plugged my old iMac into my new iMac, waited an hour or so, and then had all my stuff right there and working, just as I like it. The easiest new computer set up I've ever had.
And it means this blog has now come full circle and lasted me through an entire desktop lifecycle. I do miss my beloved anglepoise iMac; it would still be highly saleable on eBay, but is now my daughter's computer. She's delighted and is learning to type. Every five minutes or so, she turns the screen towards me to show me some cool thing, and I do miss being able to do that. I console myself with the knowledge that I could put this computer on a sturdy arm if I wished. My son, a playing-in-boxes baby when I got my very first Mac, is now in school, and a dab hand on computers himself. We've acquired several other Macs in the last three years, and have influenced numerous friends; SF cons here are overrun by Apple laptops.
I've been busy; with work, with Interaction, with the Postgraduate Diploma in Public Finance and Leadership, with the Nikoli puzzle site (particularly Nurikabe and Light Up), and with lots and lots of music.
So I did wonder whether to stop blogging; retreat to LJ, del.icio.us and even fanzines. It would be a sensible break point. But I still have things to write about.
Posted by Alison at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2005
Rebuilding the Blog
A quick and boring entry, to say that I'm rebuiding the blog to get rid of the uglinesses, so it's going to spend a while just looking like a default MT style while I sort things out.
Posted by Alison at 11:57 PM
February 03, 2005
Just what I needed; an excuse to buy two iPods at once!
I think I may need an iPod Photo stereoscope. I can't believe I hadn't thought of this already.
It's more a proof-of-concept idea. I'm already using my Clié TH55 to carry stereo pairs around with me. The Clié has a screen resolution of 480x320, so a vertical pair has resolution of 240x320. By comparison, the iPod photo is 220x176. With this stereoscope you'd be able to see every pixel. A little while ago there was a Nokia product called the Kaleidoscope; it struck me at the time that a pair of these would make an excellent electronic Viewmaster, but again, screen resolution (270x228) is just too low.
The advantage of the iPod photo solution is, of course, that you can store all your stereo photos; and, as the writer suggests, you can output from S video to a dual projector set up with fabulous quality.
Posted by Alison at 08:27 AM | Comments (2)
January 30, 2005
Praise where Praise is Due
I've fallen out of the habit of getting electronic equipment repaired, even under warranty. I've found the processes that you typically go through to get stuff fixed to be so byzantine and stressful that it's easier to just assume the risk of a certain amount of systems failure. Many companies make it as hard as possible to work out how to send stuff back, operate their warranties to the minimum limit of the law, require you to comply with all manner of weird requirements. All to avoid their legal obligations or stated warranty cover.
Just before Christmas, one of the pair of cameras I use to take stereo photos stopped reliably taking photos. I use Fuji cameras for this because their vertical format allows me to attach a pair of cameras to a bar using their tripod points, with a separation of only 73mm (only slightly more than typical eyes-apart distance). I've owned 5 Fuji digital cameras over the years, taken thousands of pictures, and have never previously had a problem with any of them.
It was still in warranty, about ten months old, though I bought it as an end-of-line clearance item. My previous experiences with warranty repair didn't give me good heart, but I couldn't replace it easily, so if I didn't get it repaired I was faced with buying two new cameras. But then I looked at the Fuji UK website, complete with clear instructions for both in and out of warranty cameras and an unequivocal 'we'll do what we can to keep your camera running' message, and sent it off with a copy of the paypal receipt because I could no longer find the invoice.
I got a receipt for the camera after two days, and my camera back less than a week after that, repaired under warranty and in perfect working order.
Posted by Alison at 06:25 PM | Comments (1)
January 05, 2005
Rebuild the Planet One Video Game at a Time
Astraware emailed me, to say that they're donating 100% of the purchase price of Bejewelled registrations all January to the tsunami appeal. Your chance to put one of the most addictive games ever on your handheld and get a warm feeling inside at the same time. (I've already got Bejewelled, of course; my Clié is actually a thinly disguised GameBoy, storing my calendar, address book, to do list and 30 different games).
At home I'm warping into a parody of myself; as my children complain about their homework, tidying their rooms, eating their dinner, I find myself saying 'You should think yourself lucky that you have a home to tidy, a school to give you homework and dinner to eat, because there's a million kids out there who don't any more'.
Posted by Alison at 10:29 PM | Comments (1)
January 03, 2005
Not Waving But Drowning
Movable Type is now requiring comment moderation on all comments on this blog, despite my best efforts to configure it otherwise. However, it's not bothering to tell you that when you try to comment (sorry, Mike). My attempts to sort this out have messed up the look of the blog, and made the comment page in particular pig ugly, but have not improved matters. I need to think seriously about taking my blog down; I have better things to do with my life.
Posted by Alison at 11:18 AM | Comments (2)
December 14, 2004
The Better Mousetrap (Christmas edition)
So there was a big pile of Krinner Christmas Tree Stands in Homebase. "oh, yeah, that's a no-brainer", said Steven. It works just as described; open ratchet, insert tree, ratchet up levers, let go; total elapsed time about 8 seconds vs. 10 minutes or so for old tree. You only save 10 minutes a year, but goodness, it was a stressful 10 minutes. It also looks loads smarter than our old tree stand (and in fact smarter than the tree skirt we had covering the old tree stand). As for the tree, this year we have a Fraser fir, which smells divine, looks the right shape for a Christmas tree, and has branches strong enough to hang ornaments on and sparse enough that there's room to. On all these points it compares favourably with the incomprehensibly-popular-in-the-UK Nordman fir; we will have to see how the needle drop is.
Posted by Alison at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)
December 12, 2004
Dates for Your Diary
Anyone coming to the UK for Interaction next year and who likes the sort of music I do should note that Cropredy 2005 is definitely happening, and is the weekend after Worldcon. Gosh, I do hope they get Richard Thompson, Levs Acoustic and Jah Wobble.
Alternatively, if you're looking for a really good reason to come over to the UK (ie, not a Worldcon), then you might like the first Big Session Festival, which is 17-19 June. No website yet (we learnt about it at the gig last night) but confirmed are Oysterband, Eddi Reader, Eliza Carthy, Show of Hands, Martin Simpson and obviously more to come. Main stage is indoors I think (the De Montfort Hall, Leicester) and tickets go on sale tomorrow. We really enjoyed the last mixed indoor/outdoor festival we went to (Crawley). We will almost certainly be at both of these I should think.
Posted by Alison at 11:10 AM | Comments (1)
September 13, 2004
A Visit from the Airbrush Fairy
OK, so I still haven't managed to track down a copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It was clearly Around at the Worldcon. People tell me it's good. And Big. People tell me it's Big. Meanwhile, here's a picture of Susanna. This is, pretty much, what she looks like, you know, here in England. This picture comes with a little note explaining that this isn't what she looks like in America -- in America, Susanna looks like this. It must be some weird glamour. Ottakar's Yossarian suggests that she's had a visit from the Airbrush Fairy. Update 28/9/04: The book arrived from Amazon yesterday, and I'm devouring it in great chunks, blinking as I return to reality every so often for, eg, meals. It's difficult, though; my doctors have told me to avoid lifting heavy weights.
Posted by Alison at 09:52 PM | Comments (4)
September 07, 2004
Bad Science of the Day
The headline screams Having Children Significantly Lowers Parents' IQs (all over the Interweb, but I got it from Bloggerheads). When you read the article, you discover that it shows that parents' IQs, when tested when their baby is six months old, are lower than before the baby was conceived.
OK. So that headling ought to read Six Months of Systemic Sleep Deprivation Significantly Lowers IQs. But that might not be quite so newsworthy, right?
I noticed that my brain function reduced substantially while my children were tiny, mostly due to sleep deprivation and exhaustion but also to some extent not having time for intellectual pursuits. And of course, as everyone ages, some mental skills wane while others improve. But overall, I think I've now recovered most of the faculties I lost in childbirth, and I'm quite sure that I wouldn't score 12 points lower in an IQ test than I did at age 18 or 30. (Not least because in most IQ tests, there aren't 12 points more to score; they top out at about 155).
Posted by Alison at 01:45 PM | Comments (1)
August 20, 2004
One Minute Medley
glenn macdonald is ceasing writing his excellent music column The War Against Silence. He's getting married and moving on. But before he goes, he's provided a quiz for people who found the LiveJournal intros quizzes a little bit trivial: 41 intros in 58 seconds. I knew lots of them but could identify very few.
Posted by Alison at 08:24 PM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2004
As Others See Us
This Popular Science article first surfaced online a few weeks ago, but here's the proper link. Much of the action referred to takes place at <plokta.con>; surely our members aren't unusually bearded or pedestrian in appearance compared to the readership of Popular Science?
Posted by Alison at 11:13 PM | Comments (2)
Scriptorium
I got my regular newsletter from Scriptorium, who are busily begging people to link to them. I realised I'd never blogged about them. We love Scriptorium, who have several hundred fonts based on historical lettering. If I'm trying to produce a piece of art-with-lettering in a specific historical style, Scriptorium is the first place I go to get ideas. This year's <plokta.con> badges were done using various weights of their Captain Kidd font, and the Middle Plokta cover of Plokta used their Brandywine font.
They have free web fonts, free trial versions of many of their fonts, and the full fonts are cheap enough that it's realistic to buy them for use in fanzines and other homebrew projects. As well as the display fonts, they also have several lovely text fonts based on historical fonts; I particularly like the Morris lettering True Golden. They have some more exciting monospaced fonts than you see elsewhere, and they have fonts with wild collections of alternate characters.
As well as fonts, they sell collections of out-of-copyright images by famous designers, often linking artwork, tiled backgrounds, frames and fonts by a single designer. They also have a really neat set of fonts for designing antique maps.
Posted by Alison at 09:50 AM | Comments (1)
August 08, 2004
Gosh isn't the Internet Cool? (part 94)
A couple of days ago, I got an email from a staff writer on the Tacoma News Tribune, asking if they could use my passionflower photo to illustrate an article for this Saturday's paper. And here it is. No, I have no idea what their designers thought they were doing with the contrast.
Posted by Alison at 11:09 PM | Comments (2)
July 03, 2004
New Vincent motorbikes
Another illusion cruelly shattered.
Posted by Alison at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)
June 30, 2004
It's on the tip of my tongue...
Over at LiveJournal, lyrics quizzes have evolved into the much-less-googlable Intros Quizzes. Basic model -- a zip file somewhere contains 21 intros, points given for title, artist, and creative interpretation. Or something like that.
Here's one by my ex and his girlfriend, and here's another and another.
Some of the songs in these were very hard. So we decided to do an intros quiz that everybody should be able to get a decent score on, designed to encourage people to feel good about the amount of music they know! And here it is: Alison & Steven's Easier Intros Quiz for the Musically Challenged.
Posted by Alison at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2004
They Work For You
From BoingBoing I learn of the public beta of They Work For You, a site which delivers a commentable, RSS-able version of the highlights of Commons Hansard. It's a marvellous, shiny thing; allowing people to comment on practically anything that an MP says in Parliament, to search effectively for their MP's contributions, have an RSS feed for your MP, and so forth.
Posted by Alison at 09:34 AM | Comments (1)
May 24, 2004
Wonders of the Modern Age
Feorag writes of a modern Jain temple designed so that the sunlight lights a statue at a particular time. My favourite example of this from modern times is that the whole of Milton Keynes is designed so that at sunrise on Midsummer's day, the sun is aligned directly with Midsummer Boulevard & is reflected in the mirror finish of the railway station.
Posted by Alison at 09:32 AM | Comments (3)
May 09, 2004
More on Dance Mats
One feature of <plokta.con 3.0> was a plethora of programme items about the personal obsessions of the cabal. One of them was mine on dancing games, and it seemed to go quite well. People asked where I had got my dance mats; from the US with months of waiting and worrying.
I've now discovered that the very wonderful source of gaming accessories, Lik-Sang, has opened a EU shipping centre. This means that when you buy from them, you have a choice of buying direct from Hong Kong, or, for products that are legal in the EU, you can buy at higher prices to have items shipped within the EU, saving worries about intercontinental shipping, VAT and duty. And they do ignition-style padded mats (the sort I have) and, for those with lots of space, full-sized metal pads.
Posted by Alison at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2004
Phabulous Phantograms
I learnt about phantograms from Bill Burns. They're 3d pictures, designed to be printed, laid flat, and viewed with anaglyph (red/cyan) glasses at a 'sweet spot'. At the sweet spot, the object jumps out of the table at you. Terry Wilson has now posted a fabulous gallery of phantograms designed for web viewing on a monitor -- he's taken anaglyph photos of his printed phantograms. You'll need a pair of red/cyan 3d glasses to see them, which should be easy for everyone who's been following the Mars pictures. And indeed, some of Terry's phantograms are formed from the Mars images.
Posted by Alison at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2004
Never Accuse me of not being Political
Still unsure which Democratic presidential candidate is for you? Now you can see them all in 3D.
Posted by Alison at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)
January 28, 2004
Low Humour
Today's had little to redeem it on the whole, but it was bracketed by two good laughs. I arrived at the station to see in the papers that on this huge news day, with Hutton leaking and the Government narrowly escaping the vote on top-up fees, a headline writer at the Daily Star had produced a little gem.
And then Thette pointed me to http://www.cummingfirst.com, the website of the First United Methodist Church of Cumming, Georgia. They're dedicating their new organ at the weekend. As they suggest, "Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord".
Posted by Alison at 11:10 PM | Comments (1)
January 26, 2004
Not Safe For Work
And, indeed, Not Safe For Anywhere Else Either. Having discovered that goatse.cx has lost its website following a complaint, I'm almost overwhelmed with the urge to link to the Prime Number Shitting Goatse.cx Man. You'll notice I haven't done so. That's because if you understand the antecedent references, you will immediately guess exactly what this site is like. And if by some strange chance you don't, You Really Do Not Want To Know. Honestly. Trust me on this.
So. Go look it up in Google if you like. But don't say I didn't warn you.
Posted by Alison at 02:26 AM | Comments (1)
January 13, 2004
Media Special
Martin Freeman (Tim in The Office) has been cast as Arthur Dent in the forthcoming Hitchhiker's movie. This may just be the most perfect piece of casting of all time. (via)
Those sensawunda moments are becoming commoner. Not in fiction, which rarely inspires like it used to, but in the world around me. Only a little while ago, we would have had to look to SF to discover a reality television programme in which twelve unemployed people compete to win the chance of a job interview. I was practically foaming at the mouth before I sat down to watch Career Boot Camp, so perhaps it was for the best that it's been pulled from the schedules for the while.
In a sort of all welfare to work, all the time evening, that (non-existent) programme is followed later this evening by the first part of Shameless, a comedy drama about an alcoholic single dad & multiple kids, that has garnered rave previews.
Two TV programmes I want to watch in one evening. Gosh. And this all in a day when the BBC is reeling from the news that only one of their digital channels regularly gets a large enough audience to count, and it's CBeebies. Eh-oh! I could have told them that. Apparently one BBC3 programme cost £136 per viewer per hour to make. Woo. See, your license fee is good value. For somebody else.
Posted by Alison at 09:46 PM | Comments (2)
November 30, 2003
Invoking the Sale of Goods Act
Over at BoingBoing, Cory accuses FACT of intellectual dishonesty. A rare thing in the anti-piracy industry, after all. And for sure most of us are bright enough to realise that if we buy a DVD of a just-released movie from the suitcase of a lad in well-used running shoes, we might not be getting an entirely pukka product.
But, as it happens, as I was walking back from Walthamstow market today, I passed a consumer in the process of trying to get a refund from a pirate DVD seller because the picture quality was crap. So clearly some people are surprised when their £6.99 copy of Master and Commander turns out to be a hand-filmed copy with Chinese subtitles. I didn't stop to listen, but I did hear the poor bargain-hunter threaten to report the DVD sellers to Trading Standards.
Posted by Alison at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2003
Wiggly 3D
Xeni writes in BoingBoing about these wiggly stereo pictures of Burning Man (NSFW if your work is really uptight). I think this is the best no-viewer-required any-monitor-will-do stereo that I've yet seen; they're animated gifs of the stereo pair. I may blog stereo photos of mine in the same way in the future.
Posted by Alison at 10:20 AM | Comments (1)
October 03, 2003
Legal ROMs, tuppence a pound!
Over at Star ROMs they're selling Atari ROM sets for download. You play them with MAME or other emulator of your choice. Atari's the only copyright owner they've manged to bring on board at the moment, but they're negotiating with others. They have about 60 games, including Tempest, the game I bought a Griffin Powermate to play, and other longstanding Alison favourites like Tetris, Klax, Marble Madness and Gauntlet. Other games include 'classics of the genre' Missile Command, Asteroids, Centipede and so on. Most of the money goes back to the copyright owner, helping them to believe it's worth keeping their back catalogue available and encouraging the other companies to join in, and some of the profits will go to emulator development projects.
You buy credits, allowing you to download games. If you buy more credits, they're cheaper, just like arcade tokens used to be in my youth (and probably still are). The games themselves work out at between $2 and $6 each before the discount. The $3.85 I paid for Tempest must work out at about a farthing for every time I've played it. (I do have a legal version of some of these games, bought from Atari, but I find MAME purer to play). He gives you 15 free credits to start you off; that's not quite enough to buy one of the better games, but it allows you to download a basic game to test your MAME setup.
By paying for the ROMs, you get a nice, reliable, secure spot on the Internet to download them from. But better, you receive absolution, and a lovely warm feeling inside when MAME asks you if you're allowed to play Tempest.
Posted by Alison at 09:34 PM | Comments (1)
September 06, 2003
Look closely at their eyeballs
This is all over the web, but I can't resist it. San Francisico's The Wave magazine administered the Voigt-Kampff test to six mayoral candidates. The results are, well, amusing. One of the candidates spots what's going on; another doesn't know what a calfskin wallet is. (via Flick).
Posted by Alison at 09:08 PM | Comments (1)
August 08, 2003
An Inexplicable Horde of Journalists Descend on Tottenham Street
I was part of London's first flash mob this evening. We gathered in pubs in Soho from 6, and then from 6:17 received our instructions.
These contained not just where we should go, but also what we should do when we got there. Mike instantly started moblogging to LiveJournal.
Meanwhile, people syncrhonised their watches, and at 6:17 we were off! Just round the corner.
On arriving at the sofa store, all ready to excise the o's from our spoken voice, we discovered it was closed. At this point the mob milled around a bit, unsure what to do next.
Luckily, the security guard was nearby, and seeing a mob of people outside his store, he did what any sane security guard would do, and opened up the shop; this triggered the last part of the event, where people coveted the sofas with the words 'Oh Wow, What a Sofa', without making the sound of the letter oh.
And this is different from shopping in IKEA on a Saturday how?
After a few minutes we all dispersed; perhaps not quite as quickly as the inventor of flash mobs expected.
Posted by Alison at 12:42 AM | Comments (3)
August 05, 2003
What Will They Think of Next?
From 23 August, you won't be able to board a central London bus without buying your ticket in advance. This is because queues of people paying the driver slow down buses. Who'd have thought it?
You know, they could speed up buses even more by increasing the use of open platform buses with conductors. Wouldn't that be an innovation?
Posted by Alison at 12:36 PM | Comments (3)
July 15, 2003
Early Days of a Better Nation?
I enjoyed the VoxPolitics blogging seminar, though I think it fair to say that more heat than light was generated.
I didn't take my powerbook, and regretted it hugely when I saw a Hydra springin