Philips “Carousel”

I love a good tracking shot in a movie. I guess it’s a degree of smugness where I felt I’ve identified something that’s cleverly constructed even though it’s not made really obvious to the audience that it’s clever stuff. Rather like the opposite of a grandiose special effect which is a sort of “Hey! Look at me guys!!” banner-waving bit of film-making designed to impress the audience.

Scuffling around the internet I spotted this promotional film, designed for the web, for a Philips 21:9 ratio ‘true cinema’ TV range. The version below has no audio and is worth watching more than once for reasons you’ll appreciate when you get to the very end of the tracking shot.

If you like this, then I’d encourage you to head over to the Philips website where there’s audio and also some very nice ‘time-outs’ you can activiate during the playback where the action stops and a member of the production crew gives some commentary/acts over the particular frame and details its construction.

And, if that’s not enough, there’s a short YouTube behind-the-scenes commentary with more down-to-earth details on the production process of this short film.

Enjoy.

Churnalism #1: Say it with words, not pictures

In what may turn out to be a recurring topic, I rant a little about what I regard as questionable behaviour in the often free-from-criticism world of mainstream media writing. These are a reflection of my views and my standards, yours may differ.

Are you a regular visitor to a frequently updated web site that publishes every single one of its articles with a clever or ironic header image?

You know the sort of thing I mean. The type of site that tries to sell its story content (or, more frequently, the opinion of  the author) via a witty image that suggests that as much, if not more, time was spent on Google image search looking for the right semi-related image than there was spent on writing the original article in the first place.

What does it say about the belief in the quality of writing on the site or the treatment of its readership when such a site invests that sort of energy into leading the audience to form an opinion on something before they’ve even been informed of what that something is?

The double-whammy of an undoubtedly eye-catching headline (oh, I’ll cover that in another Churnalism rant, have no fear) and a sarcasticly presented image tend to lead easily impressionable readers to a certain view before they’re even aware what it is that they should be having a view on!

Are your words alone not sufficient to inform and captivate? If you cater and, more importantly, target the lowest common denominator of your readership then are you really doing yourselves or your audience a proper service?

Of course not. You’re there to churn out articles and to provoke a response in any way you can.

The litmus test: Is your article as readable and compelling without your clever/sarcastic/ironic imagery above it? If not then there’s a lot of scope for improvement in how your articles are written – and you’re not going to find the answers in Photoshop.

Post it

It’s great to see someone come up with a post-its-as-pixels novelty that dares to be more original than doing the same old schtick of recreating a sodding NES Mario sprite!

Wallpapering

Over a year ago, the always-excellent Lifehacker.com had a brief article on how using a dark and low-contrast Windows theme may help reduce eye strain from prolonged computer use.

Since then, I’ve become a fan of dark Windows themes and wallpapers. My current XP install sports a desktop theme called Razor2 Final and is accompanied by a suitably subdued wallpaper of wood panelling courtesy of the Dark Wood Wallpaper Pack. It works better than it sounds:

The laptop computer in the other room, which is used far less frequently than my desktop, sports an altogether more vibrant and feline wallpaper called Kyoko:

Classy!

It’s all about image

Backing up your data is mundane and unexciting but it’s better than the worst-case scenario of losing things like your contacts, emails, personal documents and so on. I speak from personal experience and assure you, it’s not a lesson you want to learn the hard way.

I like to have my PC environment set up in a certain way with certain settings and preferred applications. Doing a full system restore and manually reconfiguring and installing everything would take a day or more.

Imaging saves me a huge amount of hassle.

What is imaging? Well it’s rather like taking a snapshot of your data or system. The main difference comes not in how the data is backed up but how it is restored.

Imagine your system and data is a sheet of paper filled with words. You can write each word individually, one after the other. Maybe correcting a mistake here, crossing out a word there. Eventually your page has all the words on it that you intended. Re-writing the page if it were blanked would take much the same time as you’d have to repeat the entire process again.

Now, imagine that you’ve a page-sized rubber stamp. All the words have been set on the rubber stamp. You’ve been careful to set the stamp up just how you want it and not have any errors in the words or layout. It’s probably taken a little longer to prepare the rubber stamp than it would have done to write all the words on the page individually as described in the paragraph above.

However, when it comes to actually putting those words onto the page, you just push the rubber stamp onto the page and in one brief operation all your words and layout are printed back onto the page. If the page was blanked then putting all those words back onto it would be a simple task of using that carefully prepared rubber stamp again.

And that’s how I’d describe the difference between restoring data / reinstalling a system one part at a time or recovering an entire system from an image backup.

There are a few different types of software that’ll manage this process for you but I think Acronis True Image is the one to go for. I happen to think it’s very user-friendly and feature-rich. If anything, it has more features than I’d want to use in a domestic environment.

As much as I love the software, it’s the principle of imaging that’s the real beauty. If you’re prepared to spend a bit of time setting up your system well, removing junk you don’t need and getting everything fully featured but not bloated and then make your perfect image then your computer is almost bullet proof!

Why spend thirty minutes doing a virus scan that may or may not solve the odd issue that recently appeared on your system when you can do a complete clean-and-restore in under five minutes and eliminate the problem for good? Why let your PC get more and more bogged down as you use it with all the temporary data and indexes that build up when you can flush all the rubbish out and restore to a lean but fully featured system that runs nice and quickly in the same time as it would take you to make and drink a cup of coffee?

Imaging isn’t a total solution for backups. You still want to back up current data like your emails and documents in a state where restoring them won’t send you back in time. But if you’re willing to invest time in preparing a good backup image then you can feel confident knowing that, whatever happens, you can get your system, complete with all your settings, back in a flash.

Irony watch!

Hmm.

Don’t confuse hard work with good game making. Everyone works hard. That’s what it means to be a professional.

This comes from a site that confuses quantity of output with quality. My refusal to link to them should tell you who they are. Failing that, just Google the phrase.

I don’t entirely agree with the sentiment that working hard equates to being professional – irrespective of who makes that claim.

And whilst not ironic, this post seems like a great moment to put a big question mark over the prospect of Jade Goody: The Musical.

I want one of these

Where’s the cassette deck?

Source and pictures

Firefox and friends

As an Internet browsing magpie I really found myself benefiting from tabbed browsing and would consider a browser without such a function as unwieldy as a mouse without a mouse wheel. My first exposure to this was Netcaptor, a few years later I was recommended some browser in early beta stages called Firefox.

I’ve not looked back since and now find that Firefox’s plugins to be equally impossible to live without. The benefit of moulding browser features to suit me has become very important. Internet Explorer had plugins and extensions for some time but a lot of these manifested themselves as clumsy toolbars or, worse, malware and viruses. I’m keen to explore Google’s Chrome browser but know that until I can browse using familiar tools I simply won’t want to spend much time with it.

So, Firefox and its assortment of plugins it is then, a few of which I’ll mention here.

Two extensions to Firefox are, for me, absolutely must haves. The first is the accompaniment to the AI Roboform application. Roboform is a password manager. It integrates very neatly with some browsers and quickly found itself to be a godsend for someone like me who fills in numerous web-forms or has a multitude of logins. It’s very easy to use and pretty much completely replaced my Bookmarks function as, with a single click, it’s possible to go to a site, log in and start browsing. It supports multiple users and allows for hot-swapping of users so you don’t even need to leave the current web-page to re-fill a form using completely different details. The current lack of support for Google Chrome is a shame and I’d be interested to find an alternative for use in Chrome if it was as well realised and easy to use as Roboform is. Firefox addon can be found here.

Adblock Plus was one of the first plugins I installed and has improved my browsing experience immeasurably. As you might expect, the plugin prevents adverts from being loading into the pages that you browse. Although its built-in blacklist is comprehensive it’s possible to add any content or server to it that you wish. Sometimes when sites are running a timed promotion the entire site may get re-branded for the period of the promotion, if you don’t like it you can simply block those specific images whilst keeping access to the site open. Adblock will also block Flash-based adverts too. I’ve got so accustomed to an Internet with hardly any adverts I tend to get a bit of a shock when I use another browser without ad-blocking in it. It’s like night and day.

Ad blocking is available to all without the need of a plugin. If you’re feeling a little adventurous why not try modifying your hosts file or even replacing it with a pre-made one like this one.

To finish off this topic (for now) I’ll mention Foxmarks. A little over a year ago I got a second computer and set up a wireless network. I wanted some settings to be unified over the two machines whilst keeping others unique to each. Bookmarks fell in to the former area. I guess I could have manually copy and pasted things but I decided to see if an out-of-the-box solution existed. Foxmarks was it. Foxmarks is an online bookmarks manager. You go to their site, create an account and upload your bookmarks to them. This means that you can access your bookmarks in any browser you wish so long as you’re online. The Firefox addon provides you with a way of synchronising your system with the stored bookmarks. What’s nice is that you can keep bookmarking the way you normally do – by using your browser menus and buttons – but Foxmarks will monitor changes and upload / download them to keep your browser in synch. Installing this on the two machines means that my bookmarks are unified across machines. Simple, elegant. I really like this as it’s a totally transparent solution to a little usability issue I was facing and met my needs perfectly.

Foxmarks looks to be evolving into something more than a bookmark manager but I’ve yet to investigate it properly.

Do you have any cant-live-without browser extensions or neat solutions to specific scenarios?

Ceiling cat is watching you blog

Of the two types of person to be, I’m a cat person. They’re fascinating, beautiful creatures. Now, I’m not alone in being fond of cats and, where there’s a demographic, there’s someone prepared to market something silly to them.

Every now and again, something pops up that suggests a less mercenary take on the fascination and today the incessantly brilliant Lifehacker showcases an alternative to a cat climbing tree. I’ll show you the image from the article and let you decide if you want to follow it up:

I think any cat-owner can appreciate just how much their cat enjoys a palatial view. I recall reading a book many years ago that made an aside on a piece of cat-behaviour and termed it Cat Chess. The definition being that each cat in the neighbourhood plays this game where the objective is to reach a vantage point where it can see all the other cats in the area whilst remaining hidden from view. It’s funny because it’s true.

If you’re in the mood for further proof of the superior wit of cat owners to dog owners then allow me to present to you the Infinite Cat Project.

On the off-chance that such a thing as reincarnation exists I’ve already determined that my preferred form would be a cat owned by a  rich, old, jewish widow. Life surely can’t get better than that.

What’s it all about, Alfie?

Wouldn’t you know it, dad-at-13 tearaway’s girlfriend is more of a nasty piece of white trash than first appearances would suggest.

Frankly, I wouldn’t touch her with yours.