notlikecalvin news

I’ve made another short film: Commute.

Filmed entirely using my Sony Ericsson K700i cameraphone (hence the fuzz-0-vision), I shot this over several weeks of commuting – duh – into Leeds, a journey which usually involved a prolonged series of buses, trains and walking. It gave me something to do.

Commute is the second of three films that I originally planned to release before the summer, of which Landscape was the first. I finally got ’round to editing it together, just before my Mac died, as an exercise to familiarise myself with iMovie 5: now that Tranquility is back (and that’s a whole other story) I’ve redux‘d it into Final Cut, mainly for better control over the titles. Anyhew, there it is.

I once again turned to CC Mixter for a soundtrack, something a little more upbeat this time: Hit It by Jim Purbrick (which also uses samples from deutscheunschuld‘s track religion) weathered the long selection procedure to provide a suitable beat to cut to.

So Commute is also released under a non-commercial sampling plus Creative Commons licence. Mash away, play by the rules, and please drop me a line if you do.

Downloaderify: Commute.mov [8MB .mov - QuickTime required]

I’ve made a (very) short film: Landscape.

It’s an exploration of the – duh – landscape that I’ve been living in for the last couple of years: some of the sights and sounds that come with being surrounded by Yorkshire’s fantastic nature, and some practical experimentation with framing and exposure. I shot the film on a series of walks over one weekend, wandering around the Bretton Country Park with camera and tripod, setting up then waiting for the sun to make an appearance.

I’ve spent much of the intervening time trying to find the ideal soundtrack – since there’s no real plot or dialogue in the film it uses music to help drive the visual, so getting the right track was very important.

I wanted to use Creative Commons licenced music, since that would neatly step around any problems with copyright, and I found what I was looking for at CC Mixter. After ploughing through practically everything in the classical, instrumental & experimental categories – among many others – I found sHORT fACED bEAR and his Big Idea (reduced mix).

Thanks to the wonder of Creative Commons’ non-commercial sampling plus licence, I could have sampled, remixed, scritched and scratched bEAR’s music, so long as any derivative works that I make with it are released using the same licence.

So, that means that Landscape is now also kind-of public property: you can “creatively transform this work for non-commercial purposes” provided that you play by the rules: please drop me a line if you do.

Anyway, downloaderify away: Landscape.mov [16MB .mov - QuickTime required]

[Update: file now hosted at archive.org ]

Writing things down helps, supposedly.

Caveats: I’m an old-guard Apple supporter, and part of that is about being the underdog, being different. Different software, different hardware. Better hardware, even if it was more expensive and less megahertzy – that was part of the mystique: Wintel fanboys wouldn’t and couldn’t understand that. Through the dark days of Quadras and Performas and Gil Amelio there was always our operating system and those Motorola processors beating at the heart of our beige boxes. Kick that up a gear to the early PowerPC’s and we were different once again, RISC’ing a radically different – cleverer – approach to the brute force of Pentium. Shifting to IBM seemed obvious, even invisible; oddball enough to be different, but focused on performance and the user.

I’ve had a bad, twisty feeling in my gut all weekend, waiting for the news from the WWDC. I’d read the rumours and the speculation just seemed to be an unending whirl of “well, yeah, they could – but why the hell would they want to do that?”. Sure, there were plenty of pros and cons, not to mention whether this was a future-of-the-Mac thing or a some-other-device thing – a getting-x86-chips-from-Intel thing or a getting-PowerPC-chips-from-Intel thing.

But the PowerPC’s actually had better growth than Pentium recently, even if it’s missed Steve’s magic targets. PowerPC has better scalability. PowerPC is cheaper. PowerPC is smarter. It’s different. It’s ours.

How could Apple leave that behind?

That twisty feeling in my gut didn’t go away. Largely because of the oh-so-certain reporting in the Wall Street Journal – real journalists apparently aren’t allowed to just make stuff up. But there were also the twinges of 1984 about the magical anti-piracy abilities of the Pentium-D: I suddenly saw the Mac platform remolded in the light of the iPod, complete with a restrictive set of DRM gubbins that has, until now, not affected me in the slightest. I believe in the second coming of Steve Jobs as much as the next man, and I didn’t want to think that he could have been secretly angling to make Apple his own little media company at the expense of my computing platform.

But now it’s announced, annoited in the Reality Distortion Field, and I’m not sure how to feel. So let’s look at a few basics:

This is about chip supply and availability, jostling for more space in a marketplace whose public seems to think Intel is the only brand, and laptops. It’s not about processor speed, future chip development potential or unit price.

Part of what I feel, then, is that Apple is sacrificing being different (read: better) for market share. And that feels like betrayal.

Of course, there’s also the simple fact that my lovely (and expensive) iMac G5′s going to run out of new software sometime in the next one to two years. I’m a) poor and b) a cheap-ass, and Apple hardware’s always been better value for those willing to invest over a slightly longer term than your average Windows user, so this, like, really pisses me off.

Narg.

But it’s a done deal. Mac OS X has been co-developed for x86 hardware throughout the last four years. Cocoa apps can apparently be ported reasonably easily, Carbon with a little more work. OS X running on Intel will have backwards compatability with PowerPC apps. New apps can be compiled ‘fat’ for PowerPC and x86 – but who’s going to bother with that? I’m starting to feel left out in the cold.

And how many G5′s are they going to sell over the next year?

After putting it off, I finally read the coverage of the keynote. Then I went and watched The West Wing, which really lost its way in season five: empty scripts, hollow direction, the dramatic abandonment of characters I’ve absolutely cherished like no others.

Seemed familiar, somehow.

A really momentous event is about to occur: at 01:58am and 31 seconds GMT, a little over thirty-five minutes away, Unix time will reach 1111111111!

I’m almost tempted to stay up and watch it tick over. What a glorious day!

Greetings Radio KoL listeners!

When Orange gets ’round to delivering my email, there’ll be some exciting hat- and Faustus-based pics up at my moblog.

Also of interest is this week’s antic, helping you de-Microsoft-ify your life. I’ve just done a presentation for my course, and Powerpoint was really getting me down – so I switched to Eric Meyer’s standards-based slideshow package, S5.

You create all the slides in a single web-page-like XHTML document, with styling controlled by standard CSS. A bunch of Javascript behind the scenes does the slideshow-ing bits and the whole thing is extremely bloat-free. Use Firefox for best results, and OS X for the smoothest of onscreen typestyling.

The best consequence of using S5 is the remarkable ease with which alterations can be made, a whole presentation residing in a single text file. If you know enough (X)HTML and CSS to code a web page, you can easily get started with S5. Have a look at the intro slideshow to get an idea of how things work.

One less barrier to a Microsoft-free system!

The replacement midplane board arrived in a box about the same size as the iMac, plus some padding. It was really nicely packed, with hefty layers of shaped foam holding the board in antistatic wrapping. I’d already warmed up my PowerBook with the pdf of the instruction manual – but that became redundant since they’d included it in the box, along with a UPS return shipping label, spare screws and a magnetised Philips screwdriver. I was impressed by the level of detail here.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I’m hugely impressed: my replacement midplane board has just arrived. I reported it late on Wednesday afternoon and the kindly support assistant quoted “five to seven working days” for delivery. Given that we’re heading into the new year and a bank holiday, I figured I’d be lucky to get it by the end of next week – particularly given my last round of waiting for Apple to deliver.

So, for it to turn up a scant 48 hours later seems nothing less than all-round fantastic. If it had arrived next week then I’d have properly documented the process with a decent(ish) digi camera, but we’ll have to settle for my phonecam.

This had better work.