This video was really a surprise at how much I didn’t know about the system. The enlargement of thumbnails was shocking at how simple it was and how hidden it was to me.
Tech
It’s 2021! Happy New Year!
2020s, WebThank feck for a new start!
Just got the blog moved over to another host. It’s something that I do every 3 years or so. Something happens at a web host that means that a move becomes necessary. This time, the renewal fees were costing 1 year what I got for 3 years before. I can see why this works with admins who don’t have so much experience with databases and PHP. And this was a pain going through problems in the database migration and working out server permissions. But this is the final test to make sure that it is working.
Happy new year and I wish you the best for 2021!
The Mother of All Demos – In 1968, a demo showed video-conferencing, hypertext, the mouse and online collaboration.
1960s, Tech, Thought Provoking, Video, WebThis is an incredible video showing what was being developed in 1968. It just took over 20 years for mice to be considered normal on a computer. Video-conferencing much longer.
Dear @youtube, please provide an option to remove the pause overlay.
2020s, Music, Video, WebI’m a huge fan of YouTube and have learnt a lot from many of the tutorial videos on there from photography to cooking. Today, I have been trying to recreate a video reconstructing the song Feel Good Inc. by Gorillaz from Point Blank Music school.
At some points in the video, I want to pause it to see the pattern in Ableton that is being shown and recreate it in BeatMaker 3 on the iPad. However, each time I pause a YouTube video, this overlay comes up when I want to see the full screen.
It would be great to have an option to turn off the overlay, especially when I paying for the premium package.
By the way, here is a link to the video in question. Highly recommended if you like to see behind the scenes of a work.
Control Your Content by having your own platform
Development, Tech, Thought Provoking, WebJust saw this from twitter : Matthias Ott – Into The Personal Website-verse
Such a thought-provoking article that reminds me that I need to publish more of the work that I on here rather than on Instagram or Twitter or Flickr. I think of businesses that run their pages from Facebook or Instagram and wonder how they are giving control over their audience to another platform. Break their rules and years of content could disappear. Remember “musicblogocide 2010”?
One day, Twitter and other publishing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Medium will indeed die, like so many sites before them. And every time this happens, we lose most of the content we created and with it a fair amount of our collective cultural history.
Data loss isn’t our only problem, though. If you decide to publish your work on a platform like Medium, you’re giving away control over it. What if Medium suddenly decided to extend the already existing paywall to all articles? There’s not much you could do about it. Simply because you don’t own your content anymore.
Go there and read the whole article as he articulates it much better than I can.
If you’re a beginnner and prepared to rollup your sleeves a little, get a domain on NameCheap for less than €10 and hosting with WordPress on SiteGround for €4 per month. It’s not that hard to do and allows an easy way to get your content on your own platform.
Camera Memory Card Failure Lessons
Photography, Tech, Thought ProvokingThis was interesting to read about losing a week’s worth of photos from a memory card failure. I have had my own woes with memory cards and USB drives failing without backups being done. The costs are quite prohibitive for restoring hardware failures as indicated in the piece. The main lessons are getting many cards (reading negative reviews to judge failure rate), backup often and use a camera with dual card slots.
Some negative customer reviews are frivolous because they are rooted in user error, or because they concern themselves with delivery rather than the product’s quality or performance. However, negative reviews are generally more significant than positive reviews.
If you think that one shouldn’t focus on the negative while the vast majority of reviews are positive, consider that on Amazon, the average rating for a product is 4.4 (out of 5) as found here by analyzing 7 million reviews. Even a product with an average 4.0 rating (4-star) is below average. The large majority of products are rated above 4.0, so the difference between a great product and a subpar product is less than 1 (star) on average. On the other hand, we’ve just seen that the number of 1-star reviews for different cards varies by a factor of four.
Read the whole article.
Tech in a Madrid Café in 2003
2000s, Madrid, Mobile, Photography, Spain, Tech, Travel
Madrid Café 2003
This is what I used for on-the-go tech in 2003 sitting in a café in Madrid. A Psion 5mx and a brick Nokia mobile phone The Psion had a great form factor that had a keyboard that was just big enough for touch-typing and small enough to fit into a jacket pocket. It also had the wonderful benefit of being distraction-free.
Not forgetting the camera, a Canon Powershot S30. A remarkably pocketable device for the time.
Brexit – The options in a clickable diagram
2010s, Design, Thought ProvokingNice image options outlining what would happen under various options for Brexit.
This is the most extreme example.
Brexit options
Follow the legend – Graphic ideals for displaying data
2010s, Development, Tech, Thought ProvokingI really enjoyed this post about how to convey information in graphs. Taking a simple Excel and changing it so that it conveys information more clearly.
To accelerate that understanding, upgrade your line graphs to be efficient and truthful. Some broadly applicable principles should guide you to the right neighborhood.
http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2017/11/13/remove-the-legend
Read the whole article for more. Perhaps Microsoft can upgrade this graphic capability for charts in the future in Excel.
Mongolia about to use the most advanced location system in the world for its postal system.
2010s, Mobile, Tech, Thought ProvokingMongolia will become a global pioneer next month, when its national post office starts referring to locations by a series of three-word phrases instead of house numbers and street names.
The new system is devised by a British startup called What3Words, which has assigned a three-word phrase to every point on the globe. The system is designed to solve the an often-ignored problem of 75% of the earth’s population, an estimated 4 billion people, who have no address for mailing purposes, making it difficult to open a bank account, get a delivery, or be reached in an emergency. In What3Words’ system, the idea is that a series of words is easier to remember than the strings of number that make up GPS coordinates. Each unique phrase corresponds to a specific 9-square-meter spot on the map.