Headmap

Back when we were doing our social media thing in Tokyo, Caroline introduced me to her friend Ben Russell, who ran a rather excellent site/publication (this was pre-blog) called Headmap, devoted to locative tech and its phenomenology. Lovely stuff. I only met Ben once, when we spent a day walking …

Jack and FLAC

Have updated my music player to use the JACK low-latency realtime library for output, and replaced Mplayer with alsaplayer as the media player. Have also dropped the Meridian 518 and Yamaha decoder from the output chain, feeding audio straight into my Bryston via the music box’s onboard DACs. Given the hardware (and purpose of the box), there’s little benefit to be had from the low-latency features of JACK, but the realtime support helps keep the output smooth in the face of other stuff running on the box (CD ripping, for example). And something in the combination of the simplified signal …

Days Like These

Every day, I receive emails, newsletters and catalogues informing me about some small subset of the thousands of potentially interesting things on in London. If I’m really paying attention in the moment, I might actually get around to typing some of them into my ipaq and maybe even get around to booking. More usually, though, the moment that I see the information is a moment when my attention is mostly occupied with something else: looking though email for an important messsage from a client, or opening letters in the hope of finding a long-chased invoice. Most event invitations simply get …

Feed Me Weird Times

I’ve been looking at the practical details of open calendar services and schedule aggregation/syndication. Seems, at the moment, that there are sufficient tools to make calendar syndication possible, and a gentle bubbling-under of interest in the idea. Personally, I’m of the opinion (a more reflective post on why to follow shortly) that schedule aggregation might well be the Next Big Hyped Thing, so I’ve wanted to check out the state-of-the art. So far, iCal and SunBird seem the best mainstream tools for creation of standards-based, internet-accessible calendar information (over the web via webDAV). The best tool for web-based publication (of …

Vivid

Busy week. Have been in Amsterdam (lovely) and South of France (also lovely). On Sunday we went to a hifi show in the wasteland hotels near Heathrow airport. Many average or averagely good things, and we ended up short of time, so didn’t get to see everything. But the standouts, by far were the Avantgarde Duo and Vivid speakers. The Duos demonstrated (at least from vinyl, through decent valve amplification) the most transparent sound I’ve ever heard. The Vivids, on the other hand, seemed ready for absolutely anything — not as ætherial as the Duos, but as happy with every …

Anubis and Other Automata

Since the 80s, Paul Spooner, Matt Smith and a few like-minded craftspeople have been turning out hand-cranked wooden automata which are in varying degrees witty, dark, twee and incredibly intricate. Once upon a time, their work lived at the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in Covent Garden, now long-gone. Since then I had lost track of the whole scene, but according to the Observer last weekend, this stuff is now considered very collectable. There’s a retrospective starting at Gallery 27 in Cork Street on September 20th. Evidently Spooner’s intricate mechanisms are inspired by the four-volume Ingenious Mechanisms for Designers and Inventors, edited …

Outlook vs Newton

Back in 1995, my Newton could do stuff like schedule meetings when I made a note that I needed to, say, meet Tim on Friday, and even made a good heuristic attempt at guessing which Tim. Here we are in 2004, and if I get an email from Peter asking if I can do lunch on Friday, Outlook can’t parse that and offer to put it in my diary for me. Progress.

Sui

I’m on my third of these Sui worklights from Artemide. The first one, which we bought in Rome, was broken by the movers last year. The second one (which arrived after a 4-month wait) turned out to be ex-display and damaged. Finally, almost a year to the day since the move, a new one turned up at SCP. I love these lights — the actual illumination is a grid of 18 white LEDs, and on battery they will last a couple of hours between charges. And they feel good in the hand, if somewhat surgical in their ergonomics.

Hand[le|el](s) with Care

Back in the day, Mac programmers had to deal with what their tattered copies of Inside Macintosh called handles: doubly indirected pointers to data structures. Handles made memory management easier — the actual data structures can be created anywhere, and moved around, without software authors having to explicitly deal with garbage collection and other memory management issues. Good Mac programming involved always working on objects only through their handles (^^PictRect for example). Back to digital media: the progression {unique original to instance of clones, to pointer to — not originals — but architectures in flux, constantly being revisted and tweaked …