22 Mar 2010
Pop-up shops
If there's a possible bright side to the recession, it's the phenomenon of the pop-up shop: local people take over a vacant shop in an otherwise bland and homogenous shopping centre, and suddenly there's a place where you can buy lovely, quirky, one-off, hand-crafted things made by local people.
If you're in Birmingham over the next few weeks, there are two pop-up shops to visit. First there's the Pavilions Pop-up Arts Shop in the Pavilions Shopping Centre, which will only be open 5 days from 2nd-7th April, and features Mr. Bsag's prints, if you'll forgive the obligatory spousal plug. Then there's the Created in Birmingham shop, which is in the Bullring Shopping Centre. Both are fine places to have a look at interesting things made by talented people.
04 Jul 2009
New photoblog
I've been irritated for a while by the setup I had for my photoblog, Wings Open Wide. It looked nice enough, but I had to upload my photos manually, title them, describe them and set the location and so on. That was annoying when I was also uploading to Flickr, and thus duplicating effort, so I started to post fewer photos to my photoblog. I could have just swtiched to Flickr and directed people over there, but it feels a bit impersonal. Flickr is great for the social aspects, but it doesn't feel like my space. I also upload more stuff to Flickr than I want to display as my photographic portfolio.
I considered a variety of different approaches, which varied in complexity and functionality, before stumbling on Flogr. It's a fairly simple but rich PHP photoblog, which pulls your Flickr photos into a gallery that you can style to your liking. By default, it gets all of your photostream, but you can also restrict it to certain tags or photosets. I've set it up to pull in photos with the tag 'photoblog' which makes it easy for me to be selective. Optionally, you can cache the photos and information in a MySQL database, speeding up display somewhat. If you click the 'Details and Comments' link, you can see — well — details and comments, and you can click the comment link to go to Flickr to leave a comment. There's also a nice Lightbox view for the recent photos, allowing you to navigate between them, or view them full size by clicking the title at the bottom left.
I like it a lot, so I've set it up here. I didn't want to break any existing links, so I've left a link to the archived Wings Open Wide on the new page. I might do a bit more restyling of the page, but I'm pretty happy with it as it is. One thing I haven't quite sorted out yet is the display of thumbnails on this blog. I've used the Flickr badge, so it shows the right images, but links directly to Flickr rather than Wings Open Wide. That's not a big issue, but I might see if I can fix it at some point.
28 Jan 2009
Revived tumblelog
I've just revived my old Tumblr tumblelog, slipstream. The latest version of Tumblr has some very nice features, and now with Disqus, I can get commenting working there too with very little difficulty. I'm probably going to use it for short posts and links (particularly for photographs, audio and video posts, as Tumblr is set up nicely for those) and leave this blog for longer articles. That's the plan anyway! I've gone through several different styles on slipstream over the past week or so, so the appearance may well change again before I feel comfortable with it...
06 Jan 2009
15 Dec 2008
links for 2008-12-15
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Useful plugin to list Twitters on your site if you have a static page.
07 Dec 2008
links for 2008-12-07
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Excellent update to LaunchBar. The clipboard history feature in particular is very nicely done, and the calculator has become much more powerful as it can now be invoked with its own hotkey, and uses the *nix utility bc.
03 Dec 2008
links for 2008-12-03
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This looks like it would be very handy at times: just paste in date (or upload a CSV, XLS or TSV file), change the format of individual cells and it applies those changes intelligently to all the other rows. At the end, it cleans up the file and lets you submit an email address to get the new file sent to.
29 Nov 2008
links for 2008-11-29
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Photographer David White recreated the camera that Robert Howlett used to take the famous portrait of Brunel standing if front of a cascade of huge chains. White's series of photographs of Brunel's various works around the country are wonderful and the long exposure times filter out fast moving things leaving only Brunel's wonderful, solid architecture. I'd love to see the prints in person.
22 Nov 2008
links for 2008-11-22
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A new e-magazine in PDF format. Great quality design and good articles and reviews. It even introduced me to a few new applications which I hadn't heard of before (rare for me, because I read so many Mac-related sites).
04 Nov 2008
links for 2008-11-04
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"We think http://www.rousette.org.uk/blog/ is written by a man." Uh, no. The clue is in the name of the blog, really
29 Oct 2008
links for 2008-10-29
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"On the 13th of October in 2003, with the first issue of PLoS Biology, the Public Library of Science realized its transformation from a grassroots organization of scientists to a publisher. Our fledgling website received over a million hits within its first hour, and major international newspapers and news outlets ran stories about the journal, about science communication in general, and about our founders—working scientists who had the temerity to take on the traditional publishing world and who pledged to lead a revolution in scholarly communication... " It will be interesting to see what happens to scientific journals in the next 5 years.
15 Oct 2008
links for 2008-10-15
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"Take the thumbscoop, for example. It’s the indentation that allows you to open the display. If the scoop is too deep, you put too much pressure on the display to open it. If it’s too shallow, you struggle to open the display. It may seem incidental, but if the thumbscoop is well designed, it makes the difference between a bad experience and a good one. The challenge of the thumbscoop was to create a crisply machined scoop that was still comfortable to use. The designers at Apple worked on hundreds of versions of the thumbscoop — even examining them under an electron microscope — to get it right." This is precisely why I like Apple products. When they get it right, the care and attention to detail is phenomenal. Even though they are mass produced, they feel crafted.
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A great, simple idea: forget about the grids of traditional diaries or day planners and have a blank page with an analogue clock outline in the centre, on which you can mark off your appointments. Then the rest of the page is free to do whatever you want with. It acknowledges the fact that the stuff we do tends not to be evenly distributed over the day.
08 Oct 2008
links for 2008-10-08
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Drool. Forget your fancy home cinemas, if I had millions of pounds to spend, I'd build a library just like this, assuming that I had a home bigger than this library, which I currently don't.
07 Oct 2008
links for 2008-10-07
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As a not very well self-taught programmer (I blame the teacher!), I'm always curious about what people learn in an official CS education.
04 Oct 2008
links for 2008-10-04
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Beginners tutorial on making iPhone applications. Long live the NDA! It's great that developers can now share these kinds of tips.