I don’t typically make new year’s resolutions, but for 2012 I do have one ambition:
*One deliberate caveat: The film will be very short, with just one or two characters, a simple premise and no real budget. I have no ideas yet, but I want to keep it simple and get it done!
Professors Steve H. Hanke and Richard Conn Henry at Johns Hopkins University are proposing a new calendar in which each date falls on the same day of the week as it did the year before.
“All of the major (other calendars) have involved breaking the seven-day cycle of the week, which is not acceptable to many people because it violates the Fourth Commandment about keeping the Sabbath Day,” Henry says. “Our version never breaks that cycle.”
The two men also propose eliminating time zones and adopting a universal time around the world to streamline international business.
(via Professors’ proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days – edition.cnn.com)
I love it. It’ll never happen.
I’ve had a busy evening on Twitter! I recently made a Christmas cracker hat for my Twitter avatar, and I offered to do the same for any of my followers who were interested.
There were a few takers…
I won’t reiterate all the details of the Frozen Planet fakery ‘scandal’ that’s gotten the BBC into a bit of trouble recently, but I do think that documentaries should be more open about the techniques used in filming and editing, just as a matter of principle.
One final Star Trek render (for this weekend at least)…
View full size (1200 × 675) or in glorious HD (1920 × 1080) on Flickr.
An 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
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).
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).
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.
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
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.
The Cardiff University Distinguished Lecture Series continues this December with three lectures looking at the future of books, ‘data centric networking’ and the limitations of social networks.
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.
For my recent post about the terrible quality adverts appearing on WordPress.com sites I created a nice high resolution blue glossy version of the WordPress logo. Then I was inspired to make a few variations.
They’re made avaliable here as 1000x1000px PNGs, with transparency, under a CC BY-NC-SA licence. Feel free to share and enjoy, but please remember to give credit (to Foomandoonian), ideally with a link back to this page.
Buyer beware: A recent iOS update seems to have broken the shortcuts this app produces. I haven’t investigated any fixes/alternatives yet. I probably won’t bother.
Icon Project (£0.69) is an iPhone app for designing iOS style icons to use as shortcuts on the homescreen.
These icons can be used as shortcuts for making calls and sending SMS or email messages to specific contacts. You can also create shortcuts to web pages or web apps, just like you can from within Safari, but with your own icon. This is where things get interesting…
Last year I designed a logo for a conference to be held at the University of Birmingham called Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds [PDF], with a variety of talks and workshops on the subject of ‘developing personal and institutional narratives in support of LGBTQ students’.
I was pretty happy with the metaphor behind the final logo, and I think the conference put it to good use. You can see my exploration and development process below.
Simple can’t come to the UK soon enough! It’s about time banking had some innovation.
Just look at the care and quality that has gone into their website, their app, even the package they send your card in.
Compared to this, using HSBC internet banking is a trial. They don’t even have an app for regular customers yet.
The other cool personal finance product I would like to see come over from the States soon is Square, an iPhone accessory that lets merchants swipe credit cards.
Would you be comfortable with an atheist president? 2011 US survey says…
Overwhelming majorities of Republican and Democrat voters say that they would be uncomfortable with an atheist serving as president (80% and 70% respectively).
And as the Friendly Atheist blogger points out, 14% of Democrats would actually be more uncomfortable with an atheist president than a Muslim president!
via Lunch Breath (via)
“But wait, what does Halloween Day have to do with giving birth? Or any day, for that matter? Don’t women just have babies when the time comes?” Well, apparently not, because, according to researchers at Yale, women can and do choose to avoid bringing their babies into the world concurrently with the “Festival of the Dead.”
I’m not just talking C-sections — the phenomenon inexplicably holds true for C-sections and spontaneous births. And Halloween isn’t the only holiday that has women strongly influencing their birth timing, either. This research ultimately leaves me with more questions than answers, but sometimes that’s the best kind of science.
(via Women defy biology to avoid giving birth on Halloween – trynerdy.com)
halfblog.net 
