Andy Allcorn's place of residence on the intarwebs.
Long ago I made a widget for Clutch, the Transmission web interface – and it never made it past early testing. Now Clutch is part of Transmission, and I’ve been updating the widget to work with the latest Transmission builds.
If you’d like to help me test this, and have some input into the final design, email hawkman@ this domain. 
Comments are now working again. Don’t know what went wrong there.
Seeing as the WordPress Quoter plugin is now abandonware, I had to fix its bugs myself. No more uncited quotes gaining mysterious attributions, and no more automatic quoting of the last comment in the reply form.
If it’s useful to you too, you can find the fixed version here. Comments, observations etc. welcome, to hawkman@ this domain.
If you’d like to beta test a new version of BBC Radio Widget – that sort-of-kind-of fixes the audio drop issues with RealPlayer 11, amongst other things – please get in touch. I’d particularly like to hear from people who are still running Safari 3, or RealPlayer 10; but any and all testers are welcome. Drop me an email, hawkman@ this domain, or leave a comment.
Update: Thanks to all of you who helped me test this widget. We caught an order of magnitude more bugs than I’d have found alone — as evidenced by the 7 betas it took. Cheers.
How do you check Google Reader? Maybe you just load the page in your browser, or have a separate application, or an item in your menubar?
Say hello to gRead, a Google Reader widget for Dashboard which automatically checks your account for new items and links you straight to them from Dashboard. If you’ve got Growl installed, it’ll check while Dashboard is hidden and send you notifications about new items! You can even choose between a badge and colour coding to let you know about new content. Thanks go to Sam for the idea, critique and some artwork for gRead.
Surely this is the most convenient way to check Google Reader yet?! And best of all, it’s completely free. Check it out now and let me know what you think.
It’s been a while since I last looked into cameras – about 4 years to be exact – and my word, have things changed. I’m the slightly ashamed owner of a 4MP Casio model from, well, about 4 years ago; it was a lovely compact little camera at the time but it looks like a dinosaur now. It’s got some noise problems in dark areas, and it’s not massively sharp on a per-pixel level, but it’s served me well.
So, when looking for a cheap(ish) camera for my parents, I browsed for some recommendations. The reviews at cameras.co.uk proved a great starting point; they’re relatively brief, and don’t just pick holes in the camera’s performance but praise its good points too. It was fantastically easy to compare cameras, and when I’d selected a few I could get more detailed information elsewhere (places like dpreview.com, for instance). Eventually, I narrowed it down to a couple of Nikon models and a couple of Panasonics, based primarily on overall image quality and ease of use. It seems in the £100-120 bracket these guys have the best kit at the moment. When the DMC-FX12 was put on special offer for the weekend I was going to buy, I decided it was divine guidance and promptly bought.
Overall it’s a great camera, compact and easy to use, and takes good pictures. The zoom is clear, saturated and sharp, and my word is the optical image stabilisation good. The Leica lens gives clear focus and very little distortion. It takes slightly soft photos by default, but it’s very easy to sharpen them in iPhoto ’08 – and I love the 3:2 shooting mode. It’s let down by poor shooting in low light (hey – show me the compact camera that copes well in low light, ok?) and by the noise reduction engine, which tends to blur photos a bit, particularly in – you guessed it – low light. For £100, though, I really rate it.
A couple of weeks later I found myself looking at expensive kit with Tom. Well, expensive kit for a student, anyway. The Nikon D40 was a major runner (what a great camera – it’s got a low-end DSLR price tag but is frankly a complete steal, and fuck the extra megapixels of the pricey D40x, you don’t need them); its only real competitor was another Panasonic, the TZ3, which is a high-end compact. Now, on picture quality the SLR is going to win every time. But, size was a contributing factor – it was to be a travel camera, and frankly you’ll take more pictures with a camera in your pocket than one in your rucksack.
How does a compact compete with an SLR? Well… this one actually puts up a fight, helped largely by its 10x optical zoom. Yes, that’s right, 10x – and unlike similar compacts, this baby can actually handle it. The photos at full zoom are as good as the wide-angle lens, and the image stabilisation means even freehand pictures are usable (though naturally you really need a tripod). Guess what, though – it sucks in low light. Not as badly as the FX12, but pretty hard nonetheless. Note to Venus III engine: you’re a bit over-zealous.
So, great but big, or merely damn good but pocketable? The TZ3 won out for us. £230.
Seeing as I’ve handled two cameras from the same manufacturer is detail recently, it’s a good opportunity for a comparison. How much more camera does £130 buy you? Somewhat surprisingly, it buys you a hell of a lot – at least, in this case. Pictures are clearer (despite being the same resolution), you get a high-quality, massive zoom, and you get a really fast shutter speed. You also get a luxurious LCD screen on which to compose your photos. For once, the price premium is absolutely deserved. This is largely because the TZ3 is a fairly chunky compact; if you spend that much on a mini model you may even lose image quality. Frankly, though, I think I’m off to buy a TZ3. It’s that good..
So, there’s supposed to be a fat new nano coming out, and this is supposedly confirmed by the release of a new case “for new iPod” by some little-known company called Uniea. Riiiiiight.
So, what’s wrong with this picture? Well:
There are so many more things I could say. Now, it’s true that Apple Legal apparently got Engadget to pull the original photo. But that’s hardly unprecedented. And don’t forget, that’s the photo that Engadget themselves suggested was suspicious.
Simply put: whatever comes out on 5th September, even if it is a new fat nano, doesn’t mean all this stuff was true. It’s complete and utter crap. There is not a shred of believable evidence.
And yet… The only people who have publicly rubbished this Are John Gruber and Dan Benjamin on The Talk Show. The overwhelming majority of people seem to be taking this as truth, without even taking such basic steps as checking the supposed manufacturer’s website.
When Apple don’t release the fat nano next week, I hope there are a lot of people who feel ashamed of themselves. And if I’m wrong, and by some chance we get this monstrosity released on the world: it’s coincidence, pure and simple.
This goes out to all the people I associate with regularly who have sloppy habits. You’re my friends, but please – it’s important. Ok?
First up: WEIRD, not wierd, people. This should not be difficult!
Oh, and while we’re at it: pronunciation. There’s no extra “o” in there. So please, never say that word “pronounciation”, because it doesn’t exist. Yes, I know it’s different from the word it’s derived from, and I agree the irony is just… delicious, but it’s horribly annoying.
Another pet peeve at the moment is inappropriate use of less/fewer. Less is for a singular thing, fewer is for a plural – yes, you can have less cheese; but you can’t have less hedgehogs. It even sounds wrong!
I’m not even going to get into there/their/they’re, or itsos (I’m still not sure about that term – yes, its form displays the kinship with “typo” – but it’s not a similar shortening of “itsographical error”, so I can’t help but feel a twinge of distaste), or the Greengrocer’s Apostrophe.
Finally. “Wondering” means you’re thinking, not perambulating. Please stop using it that way in conversations. Phrases such as “I was wondering about” just leave me hanging, expecting an object to pop up any moment…
I’m sure our relationship will be much better when I’m not cringing during our conversations.
So, HandBrake. It’s great, and the devs are very committed and do a great job. But… A couple of possible features have been cast aside recently, because they wouldn’t be cross-platform – in both cases, they’d be Mac-specific.
You see, it turns out OS X is pretty good (!). Through Core Audio, it’d be possible to add some great features into HandBrake, essentially for “free” – using Apple’s much-better-than-faac AAC codec, and volume manipulation. But… they’d only work on OS X. Now, I can see how it’s important to treat all platforms fairly; but when there isn’t an easy way (or perhaps, any way) for the others to implement this, why make everyone suffer? With respect, I’d say that’s short-sighted – especially when it’s technically possible, due to the separate codebases. There’s even an existing patch to make HandBrake use Apple’s AAC; it’s just never going to be applied.
If it’s presented as an ideological argument, that’s a valid point of view that must be respected. But… HandBrake already has platform-specific features. The Mac version uses Growl, and can rip straight from the DVD (for the moment), to name just a couple. So we’re doing it already; why not continue? Surely, if the default experience is identical – the extra functionality is opt-in, not opt-out – then we don’t have a problem?
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