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forenoon filings

shiny, oh so shiny

various odds and ends

Tuesday, November 29, 2005
- The Google Reader has taken over from Safari as my RSS aggregator of choice. I particularly the starring bookmarking system - however it is not very IE friendly (it often grinds to a halt with Stack Overflows) so there is coding enhancements that are required to get this out of beta.

- The Wireless Router of choice among the Linux tinkering classes seems to have emerged as the Linksys WRT54G - which has been helped along its way by Linksys idea of reelasing its firmware to the open-source community. If you take the advice of the wi-fi planet, you can transform this ordinary looking router into one that is quite comparable to a very high end hardware router (Looking around they do get around and put in the strangest of places).

- If you are fan of Risk, then you can see here that there is a version that has been implemented on the Google Maps API.

- One of the first digital cameras with in-built Wi-Fi - which is one further step in the long term elimination of wires.

- If you have the time (or just like dicing with potential software desibalement) then you can try and customise the menu displays on your new nano. It worked on the 3G models a few years ago - so no reason why thi scan't be duplicated here.

- These 3rd party iPod remotes get more and more wild in their ambinition - however I'm not sure how well this one would work.

- Just when you thought mobile phone ringtones couldn't get more annoying (or cool - depending on your point of view) - it appears that the power of customisation will soon be hitting in-car navigation systems with navtones. Wanderlust Media have signed up Mr T, Dennis Hopper and Burt Reynolds - to provide their renditions of your directions. So turn right - fool!

turning the psp into a wireless itunes remote

Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The varied use of the PSP continues to grow week by week it seems. CoverBuddy is an application that has in the past allowed you to interface and control your iTunes library through your web browser.

After installation on the host machine, you can easily step through the configuration and go through the library indexing that imports your album art and information. This is the longest phase (as always - this depends on the size of your library).

After this it is all easy – firing up a web browser on the relevant IP address (which CoverBuddy will extract and display for you) and port (the default is 9994), will bring up a pictorial view of your music library. Navigating this is quite straight forward and the playback controls are all simple to activate.

What has changed with the latest version (v1.3), is the fact that it is now fully compatible with the PSP’s in-built web browser – so on connecting you are prompted whether to start up an optimised smaller screen version.

In practice, what this means is your PSP is turned into a wireless remote control that can be used anywhere within you wireless network’s range. While there have been similar solutions from dedicated home automation systems, the biggest difference here is that CoverBuddy is a fraction of the cost!

(It is worth adding, that CoverBuddy is Mac only!)

possible ds reworking on the cards

Friday, November 18, 2005

Nintendo is a company that is always fond of re-tweaking its portable hardware line-up, so it should come as no surprise that a DS redesign could be on its way very soon.

It has been a triumph for gameplay and innovation over technology for technology's sake, to observe how the DS has far outstripped the PSP in popularity (especially in Asia) and even from 3rd party developers too.

What cannot so easily be hidden is the rather disappointing exterior design of the handheld's current iteration (which was a rapid rethink of the E3 2004 version - let's be fair!) However Nintendo's executive vice president of sales and marketing has suggested that a retooling has been planned for some time.

Speculation and varying concepts have been starting to be exchanged, such as these wildly varying concepts from Joystiq.

trainer talk

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Trainers. If you have developed an interest in their general design and stylings - you may have begun to look a little bit further afield than the standard retail offerings. On doing so you will discover a huge and thriving world of deadstocks, preview stylings and custom designs.

But it may not be immediately obvious where to track down sources for rare, and limited edition trainers.

So where can you find out more?

Best Shops (London):

In no particular order:

Slammin' Kicks, 37 Beak Street, W1F 9RZ: Based in . Specialises in very rare and limited trainers - mainly Nikes and Adidas. The staff are all very knowledgeable and incredibly passionate about trainers. They could teach you a thing or two!

My Trainers, 9 Shorts Garden, WC2H 9AZ: Based in Covent Garden. Specialises in older and deadstock trainers. Loads of Nike and loads of big sizes - so they get my vote! They also stock a large range of apparel and accessories.

Foot Patrol, 16a St Anne's Court, W1F 0BG: Report following shortly...

Size?, 33-34 Carnaby Street, W1F 7DW: Report following shortly...

I have a few more to check out, so if they make the grade I'll add details...


Best News and Discussion Sites:

Loads of trainers website out there, but for me the pick would have to include:

5th Dimension: Vibrant discussion board, about the latet news and new styles soon to come out.

Hypebeast: Regular updates, and an international focus too. Lots of news on upcoming colourways, stylings and designer collaborations.

Cool Hunting: Lots of news from a design point of view. Focuses a lot on special designer customisations and collaborations.

Daily Snkr: French site that showcases lots of Nikes. Lots.

Niketalk: A vibrant forum for seeing new and upcoming designs and fresh new releases. Could do with a more soothing colour scheme !

Sneakerfreaker: Online portal of the magazine of the same name, this showcases lots of industry insider events and openings.

Sneakergame: Run by one half of the Weeklydrop podcasting team, this site features an insane amount of one-offs and customisations.


Companies:

So the companies of choice for me can be revealed as:

NikeID: The undisputed champ. A pioneering site that really seems to be getting into it's stride - however the design options could do with more colour options. That is unless you happen to be invited to a NikeID store.

Adidas Originals: After an uncertain few years, Adidas have re-discovered the strength of their own long heritage and history. Their line up has been recently been re-aligned, to greater emphasise their classic styles - with stong colour playing a prominent part of their originals line. Current pick still has be their 35th Anniversary Superstars.

Puma:I must admit to holding a slight bias, being a UK12, and Puma has always been a company that never really made many larger shoes. Generally their trainers are ideal for those of narrow smaller foot size. So even though they don't go to my size, I can still appreciate sleek lines of the Speedcat.


Many thanks to fellow Flickrite jzkpr for some of the above links and info (who himself runs his own trainer site Dropform - and makes up half of the Weeklydrop podcasting team.

the sony drm infection spreads

Wednesday, November 16, 2005
A rather alarming statistic in relation to the continuing Sony DRM crisis surfaces.

It has been estimated that approximately half a million networks (including military and government sites) may have been infected by the copy-restriction software that was secretly bundled on a number of Sony BMG's recent audio CDs.

This figure was arrived at by independent security analyst Dan Kaminsky who traced evidence of DNS cache use.

Once a Sony rootkitted CD is used on a client PC on a network, the corresponding DNS server is prompted to make a request to a number of addresses: connected.sonymusic.com, updates.xcp-aurora.com and license.suncom2.com.

If a machine from that DNS server’s network has looked up either of these addresses, then it would point to the fact that any one or more of its clients has already been infected.

As Wired has summed up:

The damage spans 165 countries, with the top five countries being Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, the United States and Japan, which, with more than 217,000 DNS servers reporting knowledge of Sony-related addresses, takes the top spot. Kaminsky doesn't speculate on how many machines may actually be compromised.

... "My approach is entirely statistical -- the only people who know are the people who put together the software themselves. The problem is they don't have to tell us the truth."


Incidentally, as this situation has been lingering on for a number of weeks, Boing Boing has helpfully produced a timeline of events that collects the news as it has been happening.

photo splitting on your ipod


One feature of newer iPods (since the 4th generation) that has genuinely enhanced its usefulness is its photo viewing capabilities. However due to its diminutive screen size and rather square aspect ratio, it is not always ideally suited to viewing detailed photos to a great level of detail.

By using Splitting Image you can take any one of more of your photos and divide it up into smaller photo tiles. Each of these tiles can then be viewed as a separate photo with its own associated zoom. And pulling back to the album view would bring the collected tiles up as a composite of the original photo.

gba micro concept faceplates

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

An interesting selection of GBA Micro concept faceplates have been mocked up in Photoshop.

the drm mess gets messier

Thursday, November 10, 2005

The Sony BMG DRM situation just continues to get more and more messy.

To recap, a number of recent music CDs published by Sony BMG contained anti-copy software that was installed secretly on your Windows system – even if you just happened to be playing them. However it turned out that this software could protentially be hijacked by virus writers to behave like malware. Attempts to reveal or even remove the said software continue to prove nigh impossible, and after much protest, Sony reluctantly released details of how to break into this rootkit – in a bid to allow anti-virus companies to ensure that the security holes it opened will not be exploited in the near future.

The bigger issue at hand is what a record company has rights over when it sells you a product. The debate on one hand is that if you buy a CD (or any other published artistic work) surely you must have the right to use and distribute it for personal use within the confines of your own home? – Should a publisher be able to install to control how much or how little you are able to do this? On the other hand the publisher would argue that such tools protect their works from unauthorised copying and piracy.

But sometimes these measures are implemented too tightly – how many people have been shocked to find out that a recent CD purchase (let's not forget - that is has been legitimately bought) won’t play on a PC and so can't be copied or converted for use on their own MP3 player. As digital music has now hit the mass market, you can imagine the bemusement that many moderately technical users will face when they buy a CD, fire up their media-library software (e.g. iTunes) and wait and wait – and wonder why their CD ‘won’t work’. Cue many frustrated calls to the PC shop or their software vendor - who would themsleves observe the situation in an equally bemused fashion.

To take the opposing publisher’s line, this would have been quite a different isue if we were never told about this, but careful examination of their accompanying EULAs shows that they did – along with other surprising clauses as well (but everyone always reads these thoroughly of course! - summarised or complete. It just makes you wonder what other wildly restrictive EULAs we have clicked through in our hurry to install software is sitting on our systems.

So, they are in their EULA rights to do this, but it’s the overbearing and dismissive attitude that has managed to get people’s heckles up. It goes without saying that litigation of some sort of description is likely to follow.

homebrew adverts

Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Over the last few months, a number of people were alerted to the efforts of George Masters who crafted an incredible looking ipod advert – which he developed independently.

Now it is the turn of Sony – the MakeVisual design studio have produced their own concept of Sony's product portfolio.

Both advert are fine examples of animation – it would be interesting to see if any of these examples are developed further.

flock hands-on test


There was a brief mention of Flock on these pages a few weeks ago, but after a fortnight of using it - we can now give a fairer assesment of it.

You may be a contented user of IE or Firefox and are wondering why so many people have been talking and getting excited about this product. Even though it's based on the same code-base as Firefox it does differ greatly in many ways.

Flock is a new browser (that's still undergoing preview testing) which has been designed with a number of asset sharing tools that have integrated into the browser. (the developers have dubbed this social browsing); What this means is that tools for sharing your photos and bookmarks are integrated into the browser from the outset, and publishing to your blog has been reduced to a one-click action. Although the supported services are quite limited at the moment, the developers do promise to expand on this.

On firing up the browser for the first time you are prompted for your credentials for online sharing services such as Flickr, del.icio.us etc. These can be skipped over if desired and you can use the browser in the normal way - but if you do not have accounts with these services you may fail to see what is so great about Flock.

So how do the sharing tools stack up?

Bookmark Sharing: Flock makes this really easy, by compressing your del.icio.us publishing actions to the star button (this can optionally be set to prompt for tag information also). A great addition - as this is usually a slow process. Of the three flagship sharing features - this is the most stable and advanced at this date.

Photos: So far this feature seems to have most promise, although it seemed that not all aspects are fully functional. Once you have supplied your user id, you can navigate your photo bar across the top menu bar - with the option of publishing straight from the browser (The current build only seems to allow viewing so I imagine this is still a work in progress).

Blogging: This feature appeared to be a bit too temperamental to give a fair round up, but on entering the URL, user and password, the appropriate API is setup to enable you to one click publish to your blog. A clever feature is the ability to select text and from the contextual menu to select to 'blog this' - well thought and time saving! But for extended use, is soon becomes apparent that this tool is still in early stages of development - so use with care (I almost lost a few posts in the process of testing this...!)

Overall: For a pre-release build, this is a promising product, and when a fully stable release is ready - this shall be re-visited.

(build tested v0.4.9)

flickr shot of the month #1: october 2005

Thursday, November 03, 2005

This month will see the beginning of the Flickr Shot of the Month – a single photo that has caught my eye in the past 30 days.

This month’s shot has been taken by froodmat.

Three things that strike me about this photo:

- This photo tells an interesting story - the pose adopted by the student is wonderfully captured.
- The amount of objects behind add visual interest, drawing the eye this way and that.
- Finally, the lighting in this image gives this an almost oil painting sheen.

fortnightly round-up

Been a bit of a slack few weeks, but to catch up – here are some notable articles (in no particular order):

DRM: Quite a storm has been raised by Sony BMG’s use of DRM on some of their audio CDS, but with the small problem that they didn’t tell buyers about it. It has even been alleged that playing a DRM protected CD installs a ‘hidden directory with cloaked files’ which cannot be uninstalled. Cue a number of disgruntled articles, and a hasty concession to reveal the contents of the said files.

OS X: v10.4.3 was made available recently and this was installed. Most immediately notable improvements include a faster loading Safari (although Saft was crippled in the process – nothing a quick update didn’t fix). So far all seems to function although there were a number of freeware apps and plug ins that I use that I haven’t managed to test yet. As with most major Tiger updates so far, the .Mac Sync has been thrown into disarray – this time Address Book contacts are fine, but Bookmark syncing got in a real mess and has now been random and erroneous duplicate entries. A full reset awaits.

PSP Media Manager: So Sony has finally provided a software solution for managing and transferring files to PSP. A bit rude that the asking price is $19.95! (How about $0.00?)

Gadgets: An interesting looking device that combines an ID card holder, along with a wireless call managing system and headphones. Only problem with such a product is that it would restrict you to using it on working days only (unless you like wearing your ID card at weekends). But if it means a lighter weight to lug around then it looks promising.

So I signed a petition for releasing Front Row on all Macs (currently it is only available on new iMacs). To be honest it seems most suited to the iMac and mini, but it probably isn’t a strong enough product to release on its own. Judging by the way Apple are keen to promote it as a digital life app, then it would seem ideally suited to being bundled with iLife – let’s see what iLife ‘06 brings...


Top-notch Sony PSP accessories and games