Yearly Archives: 2011

‘We Are Cardiff: Portrait of a City’ the documentary

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An IndieGoGo funding campaign to film a documentary featuring the many and varied residents of Cardiff and their stories: We Are Cardiff: Portrait of a City.

We’ve always said we wanted to give a balanced version of the kind of city we live, in rather than the one dimension (drunks/chavs/benefit scroungers/hen parties) you get from most national media.

But if you look at the We Are Cardiff website, you’ll see we’ve still not really achieved that. We have a collection of lovely stories from lovely people, but there are parts of the city that we don’t have any stories from, and countless minorities and community groups who deserve to be featured.

We Are Cardiff is already a fantastic project and they only need to raise $4,500 (about £2,877) by February 17th to make the film happen. Frankly, they deserve a lot more!

“If I were a daily visitor to their site, I sure as hell wouldn’t put up with our ads”

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More truth from The Onion:

Ford Looks Down On Website That Would Let Itself Be Plastered In Ford’s Ads

DEARBORN, MI—Ford Motor Company officials chastised news and commentary website Masthead.com Friday, conceding they were embarrassed to be associated with a publication that would allow the entirety of its award-winning content to be hidden behind splashy, distracting ads for the Ford F-150.

According to the car manufac­turer, Masthead‘s decision to allow the “garish” full-screen advertisement—in which a red pickup speeds across news articles, overrunning them with tire-tread marks until readers manage to find the tiny “close” button—suggests the media outlet has zero respect not only for itself, but also for the amount of work that goes into its astute political and cul­tural coverage.

“They should be ashamed of themselves for letting us come in, plaster our logo everywhere, and, for a measly 50 grand, pretty much destroy the reputation they’ve worked so hard to build,” said Erin Robertson, an ad buyer for Ford who scoffed when Masthead immediately agreed to all of her terms and even sug­gested its creative staff could write articles mentioning the F-150. “Their coverage of the debt crisis has been pretty insightful, but then they cheapen it by allowing us to completely obscure their writing with a video of a truck bounding over sand dunes.”

Ford Looks Down On Website That Would Let Itself Be Plastered In Ford’s Ads – theonion.com

Superstitious users and the FreeBSD logo

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Beastie the BSD daemonAn amusing story from the FreeBSD mailing list:

Everyone:

I just got a call from the owner of a hotel for which we provide hotspot service. She says that a guest spotted the “Powered by FreeBSD” logo at the bottom of the login page, and was offended; the guest was convinced that either we or the hotel management “worshipped the Devil” and refused to stay at the hotel unless the logo was removed. The owner could make no headway by explaining that the besneakered mascot was a cartoon character and was a daemon, not the Devil. And she feared upsetting the guest even more if she said that large portions of the same software are inside every Mac and iPad. The hotel stands to lose more than $1000 if the guest, who had originally planned to stay for a long period, moves out.

One of our tech support people also got a call directly from the hotel guest, who claimed that having the logo on the page constituted “abuse.” The guest also claimed to be “losing money” because she wouldn’t use the hotspot if there was a “devil” on the splash page. He didn’t even realize what she was talking about at first…. He couldn’t imagine why on Earth this person was calling him and going on about devils.

Attempts at misguided religious censorship notwithstanding, I don’t want to see one of my ISP’s customers lose business. And I’d like to keep a FreeBSD logo on our hotspot page. Is there artwork that doesn’t include horned creatures that might offend the ignorant or superstitious?

–Brett Glass

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Galaxy class

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I’ve just finished watching season 1 of The Next Generation, and I’ve been inspired to get back into LightWave 3D to produce a quick homage (or two).

Enterprise D

View full size (1200 × 675) or in glorious HD (1920 × 1080) on Flickr.

This is a faithful reproduction of one of the most widely-used promo shots of the Enterprise D (see below for the originals).

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Bathroom products for guys: an icon system

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Imperial Leather SkinKind hydrate cotton extract & oat milk BODY WASH hypoallergenic

Imperial Leather SkinKind hydrate cotton extract & oat milk BODY WASH hypoallergenic

As a non-single guy who has relinquished control over the buying of bathroom products, I am regularly confused when confronted with a new selection of unfamiliar bottles. For example, I was just faced with Imperial Leather’s “SkinKind hydrate cotton extract & oat milk BODY WASH hypoallergenic”. At least here the keywords are capitalised, but I’m pretty sure it’s often the case that marketing jargon entirely replaces the keywords (Shampoo, conditioner and body wash or shower gel) that I’m seeking.

Perhaps the soap companies could spare a little space on the lids for a simple icon that quickly explains the intended use to the uninterested user.

In these quick examples below, the first icon is a shampoo and conditioner, while the second is a body wash.

Please and thank you.

Half-Life: Origins

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Everyone remembers the first time they stepped onto the Black Mesa Transit System and into the shoes of the unexpected hero, Gordon Freeman. Half-Life Origins is a short film that takes you back to where it all began.

Half-Life: Origins by Infectious Designer

Short, but very sweet. If Half Life were to become a television series, this would be the perfect title sequence.

Trivia: In the tram you can spot a poster for another Half Life short film by Infectious Designer: Beyond Black Mesa.

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Excerpting policy

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From the Business Insider excerpting policy:

We excerpt others the way we hope others will excerpt us.

What does that mean? It means that if you think our stuff is worth bringing to your readers’ attention, we are honored and grateful. Please excerpt it as liberally as you want. In return, please just give us clear credit, links back, and an incentive for interested readers to visit our site. (Not all readers–some.)

This is an issue I agonise over a fair bit, and it’s interesting to learn that BI are actually somewhat more permissive in this area than I would expect them to be.

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“Linux and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again.”

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Matt Haughey interviewing CmdrTaco:

Matt: What’s your biggest disappointment in the tech world these days?

Rob: The internet is simply not as free as it was when Slashdot began. Government is increasingly legislating away our rights and criminalizing actions that are impossible to regulate. I know it’s inevitable, but it’s still disappointing to witness. The joy of logging in to an IRC chat room in the early 90s, to talk to people who were innovating powerful technologies simply for the sake of it was absolutely intoxicating. To be able to talk to the guy who was responsible for some component of your system. We were all pseudo-anonymous strangers brought together by the technology that we loved, and the belief that an open future was spread out before us. The future will be exciting for my children, but I’m afraid that their technology will come in boxes welded shut at the factory. Their software locked down. Linux, and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again. I hope there are still air cracks by the time my kids are old enough to jam screwdrivers in there.

Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda – interviewed by Matt Haughey – webstock.org.nz

WordPress introduces WordAds

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I’ve just submitted this blog to be considered for the new WordAds for WordPress.com blogs.

We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.

My blog may get too little traffic or not be focused enough to easily pair the content up with appropriate ads (or the reviewers (hello there!) may simply not appreciate my post about the bad ads on WordPress.com), but I have my fingers crossed.

If you run a WP.com blog with a custom domain, you can apply for WordAds too.

The Telegraph thought councillor thought cloud computing depended on rainy weather

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Telegraph fail Today The Telegraph reported that a (non-existent) ‘Councillor thought cloud computing depended on rainy weather‘ (dead link). A quick Google search reveals a forum post on this same ‘story’ from 2009, and blog post from four days ago. Both of these places found the story and quickly identified it to be a hoax. Neither of these places are a national news source.

Making this kind of mistake is embarrassing, but I find it unconscionable that any organisation that even pretends to have any journalistic integrity considers it acceptable practice to simply remove stories from their website, with no retraction, as though the mistake never happened.

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WordPress Users Wales

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WordPress Users Wales logo The first WordPress Users Wales meet-up is on Monday 28th November (6.30pm – 8.30pm) at The Atrium in Cardiff. The evening is free, and you can sign-up on Eventbrite.

Thanks to Pippa and Chris for organising this user group. I think it will become a useful companion to the Cardiff Blogs events for those bloggers who want to get a bit more technical and tinker with the nuts-and-bolts of blogging.

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Jambox

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If you’re trying to find a great Christmas present for a gadget-loving somebody (or just thinking of something to ask for in your letter to Santa), I’d just like to throw in a timely reminder for the Jambox.

They’re not cheap (around £150), but I’ve never regretted buying mine. The audio is good, and they’re fantastic pieces of industrial design. I have the black one above, and use it every day. It’s one of my favourite gadgets.

Road accidents in Cardiff over 10 years, mapped and visualised

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Ten years of road accidents in Cardiff:

Road traffic accidents, Cardiff, 2000-2010

This is a screenshot from an interactive map on The Guardian, which covers the entire UK:

The numbers are horrific: 32,955 killed, nearly 3m injured between 2000 and 2010. This is 10 years of deaths and injuries on Britain’s roads. But how do you visualise that level of disaster? Transport data mapping experts ITO World have taken a little-known but forensically detailed police dataset called Stats19 – published by the Economic and Social Data Service – and produced this powerful map ahead of Sunday’s world day of remembrance for road traffic victims. You can zoom around the map using the controls on the left or search for your town. Each dot represents a life

via Road casualty UK: 10 years of deaths mapped and visualised – guardian.co.uk

Note: The final sentence ‘Each dot represents a life’ is disingenuous inaccurate at this scale*. Each dot represents an effect on a life, but only the big squares represent a fatality.

The Internet is a belief system

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Brad Burnham explains how the Internet is designed to empower individuals, not control them:

The Internet is not just a series of pipes. It’s core architecture embeds an assumption about human nature. The Internet is designed to empower individuals not control them. It assumes that the if individuals are empowered, they will do the right thing the vast majority of the time. Services like eBay, Craigslist, Etsy and AirBnB are built on the assumption that most people are honest. Other services like Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, and Soundcloud assume people will be generous with their ideas, insights and creations. Wikipedia has proven that people will share their knowledge. Companies like Kickstarter show that people will even be generous with their money. This does not mean that there are not bad people out there. All of these companies spend a lot of time and money to battle spam and fraud. The companies are simply betting that there are many more good people than bad. The architecture of the Internet shares this assumption. It could have been designed to prevent bad behavior. Instead its design empowers good behavior.

The entertainment industry does not share this view of human nature. […]

I Believe In The Internet – The Content Industry Doesn’t – bradburnham.tumblr.com

Well said.

Rosa

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ROSA is an epic sci-fi short film that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where all natural life has disappeared. From the destruction awakes Rosa, a cyborg deployed from the Kernel project, mankind’s last attempt to restore the earth’s ecosystem. Rosa will soon learn that she is not the only entity that has awakened and must fight for her survival.

Rosa by Jesús Orellana
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