July 2010
38 posts
Telegraph: Whitstable oysters have herpes →
A shortage of fishermen means that neglected Pacific oysters now grow too big. “They weigh an average of two kilos,” says West. “Who in a restaurant wants to eat six of these as a starter?” Only the smaller ones are saleable, and then at just 70p each. And now there is herpes to deal with, which typically kills 60 per cent of young oysters and which has already affected...
New Amazon Kindle! →
Looks fantastic.
On sale directly in UK for first time.
Now has wi-fi as well as 3G/GPRS/EDGE
Reduced price (£109 wi-fi only, £149 wi-fi + 3G)
21% smaller, same screen size
15% lighter
Battery life now 1 month with wireless off
Storage doubled
20% faster page turns
Quieter buttons
Reading light built into Amazon’s own cover
Improved contrast
Better PDF reader
Twitter/Facebook...
Guardian: Listen to the silence →
Stuart Jeffries is going on a silent retreat. But there’s a train journey to endure first.
Trying to achieve silence in a quiet carriage is like trying to catch water. They were not invented to provide sanctuary; they were invented to cause rows that distract passengers’ attention from the train’s other shortcomings – the fact that there is no soap in the soap dispenser, the...
"If everyone is special, then no one is" - Ayn... →
I saw Pixar’s The Incredibles for the first time last weekend and naturally loved it (despite BBC Vision butchering the end credits.) Of course I was able to recognise the scene inspired by Speed, but this is a great summary of those more philosophical references you may have missed.
There is an immediate visual cue — when the movie’s protaganist, Mr. Incredible, returns to...
The Web’s Five Most Endangered Words →
“Let me think about that.”
Slate: How Often Does Your Phone Drop Calls? →
These days, it’s possible to find accurate performance data for most of the major purchases we make in our lives. If you’re shopping for a car, you can find out its gas mileage. If you’re shopping for a plane ticket, you can look up each airline’s on-time rate. When you go looking for a new cell phone, though, you enter a data-free zone in which every company is free to...
Making of 'Relic: Guardians of the Museum' →
Gemma Arrowsmith (‘Agatha’) writes at length about the work that went into making this CBBC series.
There’s a great deal of editorial policy that you don’t even consider as a viewer. If the contestants are eating leeches, you must make it clear that it’s really just licorice dipped in treacle and no-one at home should try eating leeches. It’s called “copyable behaviour”. We usually...
Wired examines Apple's relationship with AT&T →
Looking back, it’s clear that the cracks in the Apple-AT&T relationship began forming as soon as Jobs announced the iPhone in January 2007. It was the first time the public got to see the long-rumored device — and, shockingly, the first time AT&T’s board of directors saw it as well. (Apple refused to show the phone to all but a handful of top AT&T execs before the launch.) The split...
Seth Godin on why you should under-promise and... →
I have worked with someone who is very good at the promising part. She enjoys it. And when the promises don’t work out, she’s always ready with the perfect excuse. This is a great strategy if you have a regular job and the excuses are really terrific, but if you need internal or external clients, it gets old pretty fast.
Anandtech: Analyzing Apple's iOS 4.0.1 Signal Fix... →
If you only read one article about iPhone reception - and I really would encourage you to read one or fewer - then Anandtech have spent all day driving one with one trying to calculate the signal strength needed to show different numbers of bars..
West Ashfield tube station →
There lurks on the London Underground network a tube station that wont appear on any tube map, past, present or indeed future. In use on most days, yet no trains ever call there and no passengers ever use it. Fully fitted out with Oyster card readers, signalling and display boards, it isn’t an old abandoned station.
This is in fact a fully fitted out fake tube station built by London...
Andy Ihnatko: The Buttafuoco Point →
Name a huge national news story of little or zero national importance… Chances are that I know the broad strokes of the story (a little girl was brutally murdered in her home; apparently she used to participate in beauty pageants) but little else.
Why? Because I made it a priority … to try very hard to know next to nothing about stories like that one. This story doesn’t affect my...
Martin Kettle: Cameron has been good for Britain →
Cameron has not just taken to the realities of coalition better than any other Tory. He has also done it infinitely less condescendingly than Brown or any Labour leader would have done. He recognises that he is delivering a deal, not a sell-out. Yet in doing so, he has pulled the Tory party further towards both the centre ground and an acceptance of coalition politics – and pushed Labour off...
Todd May (NYT): Friendship in an age of economics →
Consumer relationships are focused on the momentary present. It is what brings immediate pleasure that matters. Entrepreneurial relationships have more to do with the future. How I act toward others is determined by what they might do for me down the road. Friendships, although lived in the present and assumed to continue into the future, also have a deeper tie to the past than either of these....
Airport security: Intent to deceive? →
Can the science of deception detection help to catch terrorists?
[Spoiler] No.
BBC award new weather contract to Met Office →
… avoiding a mass migration of weather forecasters and several thousand complaints from regional news viewers.
Rory Cellan-Jones on the £105m business-link... →
The site is the work of a major outsourcing company called Serco, which has sub-contracted the technology to a little business called BT.
Opéra Store Raises Apple Retail Experience →
A detailed account of the new Paris Apple store opening.
Interesting not so much because it’s Apple, but from design, customer service and event management perspectives.
Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price →
Alternative titles:
Why an iPad could ruin your life.
Who’d have thought multi-tasking could be bad for you?
Don’t ever let your desk turn into this.
What is IBM's Watson? →
Playing chess used to be the ultimate test of supercomputers. Now it’s answering general knowledge questions on quiz shows.
President Obama's nighthawks: Top officials... →
“Here’s the bag,” the agent says, to the intelligence official. “Here’s the key.”
The key turns, and out slides a brown leather binder, gold-stamped TOP SECRET. The President’s Daily Brief, perhaps the most secret book on Earth.
“BBC Parliament - I’m not sure if there’s an obligation to have that...”
– Male (45-59), ABC1, Cheddar
BBC Strategy Review audience research
“I don’t watch QI or Top Gear but if someone said where are they on, I’d say they...”
– Female (18-24), C2DE, Birmingham
BBC Strategy Review audience research
BP: The Inside Story →
An epic summary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster by the FT (6,000 words, requires registration)
Why writers can’t live to please their readers →
Jed Perl in The New Republic:
I do not for one moment minimize the economic pressures on writers to publish—and to publish. … But writers who live for their readers—or for what their editors imagine their readers want—may end up with an impoverished relationship with those readers.
1 tag
Marcus du Sautoy on building interactivity into... →
What is a footnote, after all, but an attempt to break out of the linear structure of a book?
He makes a couple of interesting points.
Many subjects, like mathematics, are best experienced when you actually get your hands dirty, leading to a moment of understanding.
We’re now at the stage where you can use readers to contact mass-participation experiments to discuss the science...
Australian 'angel' saves lives at suicide spot →
For almost 50 years, Don Ritchie has lived across the street from Australia’s most notorious suicide spot, a rocky cliff at the entrance to Sydney Harbour called The Gap. And in that time, the man widely regarded as a guardian angel has shepherded countless people away from the edge.
Optical character recognition in Google Docs →
Just upload a PDF. It uses the OCR from Google Books.
That’s another category of desktop software at risk then…
New Kindle DX →
New high contrast screen but otherwise nothing much seems to have changed.
My Kindle wishlist:
much faster screen refresh
eventually a colour display
web browsing support outside the US
newspapers with photos
wi-fi as well as 2G/3G GSM
apps (currently in beta)
Login is not a verb →
Write ‘log in’ instead (but ‘login prompt’ is acceptable.)
Seth Godin: Do you have a right to be heard? →
Sure, you have the right to speak, but what does it take to be listened to?
In most situations, I’d argue, you earn the right to be heard. If there’s a sick person on the plane, the doctor in 3b has the right to speak up, the hysterical person behind her does not.
So, here’s a quick list of a few ways to earn that right…
1 tag
The iPhone 4 review to end all reviews →
Before we dive in, let’s talk about dynamic range for a second. For a while, I’ve talked about how iOS reports the quality metric with a compressed, optimistic dynamic range. On iOS, 4 bars begins at around -99 to -101 dBm. Three bars sits around -103 dBm, 2 bars extends down to -107 dBm, and 1 bar is -113 dBm. To give you perspective, for a UMTS “3G” plant, -51 dBm is...
1 tag
BBC Radio's Allan Robb has died →
Tribute by friend and colleague Nicky Campbell.
When Allan was working on Newsbeat on Radio 1, he interviewed the then-Prime Minister, John Major. Spitting Image was on at the time, and John Major was portrayed as an utterly grey man who was obsessed with eating peas. There was a lull in the interview, and the only thing Allan could think to say was, “do you like eating peas?” John...
1 tag
Book recommendation: Linchpin by Seth Godin →
You wouldn’t expect such an uplifting, positive book about the power of generosity to be written by someone who works in marketing.
1 tag
Book recommendation: Presentation Zen →
by Garr Reynolds. How to do Powerpoint or Keynote properly. The fact that Merlin Mann and Seth Godin have highly praised this should tell you all you need to know.
As well as buying the book, his website includes a blog and a video of an presentation he gave to Google.
1 tag
iPhone recommended apps
WeatherPro - great weather forecast app by Meteogroup (the Press Association’s weather service). Very handy graphs of predicted temperatures and rainfall. Radar images updated at fifteen minute intervals. Sunrise and sunset times. Premium service with data at hourly granularity instead of every 3 hours.
Omnifocus - superb GTD app that syncs with the Mac desktop version.
Simplenote -...
2 tags
My pick of this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival →
There’s one month to go. Here’s more than 50 shows and why I think you should see them.
How a broker spent $520m in a drunken stupor and... →
(via Instapaper)