Archive for July, 2004

Cre­ativeBits has an inter­est­ing lit­tle piece on image manip­u­la­tion from the ter­mi­nal using sips. Pretty cool stuff (at least for lighter-than-light hack­ers like myself), but what really hit the spot was the claim that you could use this exact tech­nique to pull:

Now, that I told you about this com­mand, you tell me what can you use it for, besides get­ting chicks of course?

Why didn’t any­one tell me about this before? I was at Bryggen yes­ter­day pack­ing a 12″ Power­book, sit­ting among loads of girls dressed in almost noth­ing. If I had known that a lit­tle image manip­u­la­tion would have worked won­ders, I might not have focused on con­sum­ing stu­pid sam­plers of ice teas and crisps from bad ass multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions. Note to self: Add a forum for leav­ing tips and tricks on life to pollas.dk…

Seems that the Nokia 7610 won’t iSync. The synch­ing of my lap­top and my phone really is one of the fea­tures I like the most of this whole portable lit­tle elec­tronic tools setup. Sim­ple — but impor­tant. So maybe one should wait for an OS X update before shelling out the cash for a new phone. I’m not sure the Nokia 7610 is that great, but I’ve seen it and at least it’s a bit smaller than my cur­rent brick of a 3650, has a bet­ter cam­era and bet­ter firmware. That’ll just have to do until phones have wifi and Dan­ish tel­cos offer EDGE. It’s plas­ticy, but so are all other phones for some rea­son. I like light­weight and not hav­ing to pay dou­ble the price, but it feels weird hav­ing a pretty slick lap­top made of good stuff — and phones appa­rantly made at Fischer-Price…

[via Mobile­Whack]

Sit­ting at the local cafe, doing the morn­ing rou­tine; pour­ing cof­fee into my sys­tem, catch­ing up on mail and news. Two brew­ery deliv­ery guys have just fin­ished load­ing what­ever these guys load — now they’re both enjoy­ing a pint of lager. It’s not even 10AM — in a cou­ple of min­utes they’ll be back on the street, dri­ving an 18 ton truck through the city. Hmm…

Mobile­Whack on a NYT story on tech­nol­ogy chang­ing our lives:

What caught my eye, how­ever, was this image. It was so rem­i­nis­cent of and seemed the always-on era coun­ter­part to those pho­tos you find in “feel-good-50s” cal­en­dars… you know, the ones of smil­ing fam­i­lies gath­ered around the din­ner table, Mom serv­ing up her famous apple pie. Except in this instance, it’s Mom serv­ing up the broadband.

Take a look — it’s really quite funny.

From the excel­lent Lon­don Under­ground Tube Diary, an excel­lent weblog about the under­ground trans­port in the city you gotta love: All you can do is to hope it’s either fake or not permanent.

What d’ya know, Kerry is work­ing from a Power­book. Rule of thumb: The good guys use Macs, the evil ones are usu­ally using some cus­tom built PC-thingies with OSs noone’s ever seen before. At least that’s how it seems to be in the movies.…

[via 3650 and a 12-inch]

Seems like publishing-bits-for-money is pick­ing up. The debate on how to make money on blog­ging, whether blogs are good because of the inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism or bad because of the thou­sands of ama­teurs run­ning loose on our beloved inter­net has been there for as long as blogs have had just a bit of momen­tum. What’s inter­est­ing though, is that while not that many blog­gers are mak­ing money from any­thing apart from the odd Google ads, another approach is start­ing to emerge.

The last cou­ple of months I’ve noticed how some sites, mostly indus­try pro­fes­sion­als within the web devel­op­ment / dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­mu­nity have started to offer arti­cles as down­loads, either as ‘a sin­gle down­load for a fixed price’ or as part of a sub­scrip­tion plan. 

Take con­trol of your Air­Port net­work offers insight on just that for a mere $5, Cre­ative mag­a­zine Design-In-Flight has over 40 pages of reviews, arti­cles and com­men­tary for $3 or four issues for $10. Sine­l­ogic Press had a week of free down­load of their Bud­get Design arti­cle before it landed af $9. There are plenty more out there and this model has been around for years. How­ever, it looks like it’s catch­ing on.

They all deliver in PDF, some as a down­load, some as emails. So it looks as if sub­scrib­ing to a whole weblog isn’t the most obvi­ous model after­all. But, Dar­ing Fire­ball is try­ing just that.

What’s most appeal­ing to adver­tis­ers is quan­tity. More read­ers, more hits. More traf­fic. More page views.

What most appeal­ing to you, the reg­u­lar read­ers of this site, is qual­ity. Atten­tion to detail. Appre­ci­a­tion of nuance. Depth.

An adver­tis­ing rev­enue model leads to try­ing to appeal a lit­tle bit to very many people.

He’s a good writer but doesn’t do 20-page arti­cles appro­pri­ate for down­load. But if you want his insight, you might wanna con­sider pay­ing a few bucks. Sounds fair, right?

What­ever the rev­enue model, I’m glad that peo­ple are start­ing to real­ize that with weblogs and other forms of web based writ­ing, even though much have changed, the good writ­ers offer­ing rel­e­vant and inter­est­ing mate­r­ial will always come out on top. And just as every­where else, they can’t do it for free.

Don’t under­es­ti­mate the power of peo­ple writ­ing for free, either in their own time or as an inte­grated part of their work. Peo­ple with love to the medium and a non-profit approach will always exist and as long as they feel they learn some­thing, can get their fund­ing from some­where else or just feel like mak­ing a dif­fer­ence, good, free stuff will be out there. This is in many ways what has dri­ven the weblog phe­nom­e­non. But imag­ine how much extra work can be put into writ­ing and invent­ing if just a few thou­sand peo­ple pay a buck or two each… If you find an inter­est­ing share­ware appli­ca­tion? Try it out — it’s not expen­sive. If some­one offers good stuff for $3 per down­load? Don’t even think twice — pay up and see if you like it…

Just the kind of site I like: Macs, cre­ative tools, tips and trick — Cre­ative Bits

Bits of infor­ma­tion about the Mac OS X sys­tem and the pop­u­lar graphic design appli­ca­tions. Be cre­ative, effi­cient and make the most out of the bits in your Mac.

[via Mac Net Jour­nal]

3650 and a 12-inch points to a beau­ti­ful screen­saver fea­tur­ing black and white images from what also hap­pens to be my favourite city, London. 

You’ll also notice that your’s truly has the same phone/laptop setup as the afore­men­tioned blog­ger (who hap­pens to run a really cool blog I’ve found a lot of good stuff on) — hope­fully that will soon change. 

While I’m still in new­found love with my 12″ Power­book, I’m start­ing to get sick and tired of my Nokia 3650. It’s butt-ugly but that I knew when I bought it. What I didn’t know was that even though it takes a 128MB card, once you store more than 2MB of data on it, the phone goes slo-mo. Sav­ing images from the cam­era takes a good 30 sec­onds, it often needs reboot­ing (these phones are _not_ com­put­ers, damnit) and quite often strange error mes­sages pop up for no appar­ent rea­son. I guess it could ben­e­fit from a firmware upgrade, but I don’t really feel like pay­ing to get my phone to do what it was sup­posed to do in the first place… On top of that, I’ll lose my settings.

Note to self: Please try and stay focused in the future. Don’t let your asso­ci­a­tions run wild.

Yet another rea­son to love Ham­mer­smith:

The OYBike Sys­tem is a street-based rental sta­tion net­work that allows you to hire and return a bicy­cle 24/7 via your mobile phone. The OYBike sys­tem is based on the avail­abil­ity of rental bicy­cles at key locations.

[via Smart­Mobs]

You should grab a bike and drive to Ham­mer­smith Bridge…