Star Wars (Sweded): A Cardboard Hope
Sweding is the process of copying a film by remaking it yourself, as per the wonderful Michel Gondry film Be Kind Rewind. Sweded remakes of films are now starting to crop up on Youtube, such as this version of the original Star Wars. It’s alright to begin with, then just gets better and better.
Blog
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Star Wars Sweded
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The Fall live at the Oxford Academy
Technically speaking, I think that counts as assault. I’ve just been shouted at, beaten with bass, drop-kicked with drums, kerb-stomped with keyboards. It hurt a lot. And sounded great. Beautiful messy enormous noise. Tiring, not tiresome. Mark E Smith wandering about a lot, turning knobs on things in a manner that suggests he knows what he’s doing, but not necessarily convincing. Singing/shouting into two microphones at once, alternate ones, other peoples. Having a go on the keyboard himself if he fancied it, hitting the odd cymbal. No respite. For an hour or so. No muses on the wonders of Oxford, no telling us we were a great crowd, just a second or two to allow them to let any feedback out for a moment, then right on with the next track. No encore. Seemingly. Let people leave, put the lights up, put music on, do everything to convince people they are doing, then come back on for one last ten minute workout of noise Ah. The ringing and static has mainly subsided now, drained, but sated, for now.
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The 2008 Bloggies winners are announced
Is it that time of year again? It is. The results of the 2008 Bloggies have been announced. I follow such things, so I’m quite interested in who has won, but I would suggest this is a great place to look at some blogs you may not know about or have read before. If this is the case, you may also be interested in this article from a few days ago on the Guardian site of the 50 most powerful blogs in the world.
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Is the iPhone becoming a walled garden?
Last week Apple announced its software development kit for the iPhone. The demo and announcement was generally met with enthusiasm, especially with demos of Super Monkey Ball being shown off, interoperability with Microsoft Exchange, and many other examples being shown alongside it to help underline the potential of the platform.
However, with a little hindsight some people are now seeing flaws with the agreements required for the SDK, and the cut that Apple will get from sales. Alexander Wolfe at informationweek.com outlines some of the anger at Apple’s tight control over the SDK. It was expected already that apps would only be available through iTunes. However Apple are also charging $99 for the full documentation for the SDK (a more rudimentary version is available for free), and then 30% of any revenue on applications sold through the iTunes store (however apps can be distributed through it for free if they themselves are free).
This contrasts sharply with the attitude of other mobile platforms. Symbian and Google Android have no such restrictions, and there certainly is no restricted marketplace for Windows Mobile apps. Apple are very much in contrast to the rest of the market on this. There certainly is a lively developer community for Symbian and Windows Mobile, and Android is starting off well. I don’t think it will be a barrier to entry for the bigger developers, but I think it could affect the smaller dev companies or individuals. I’ve seen some fantastic apps on Symbian that might not have existed if the student developer was being charged for the means of getting full access to the OS.
The iPhone as a platform is clearly very well designed with a lot of potential for both creativity and making hard cash, but I do wonder if shunning the true open source software approach may damage its potential for some real cutting edge development.
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Racing Stripes
I finally got my main birthday pressie from Mrsfb today (took a while to sort out what I wanted, and getting hold of it). A proper Scalextric set 🙂 I have properly regressed (or as mrsfb put it, “That’s the start of your mid-life crisis, I presume”). I’m rather happy. Just as I remember it, but a little easier to set up and take apart, and gives you less of an impression it is about to blow up in smoke than the set I had when I was a kid did.
The picture above is of the car my brother in law bought me for said birthday, and is a copy of the car Alonso drove to failure last year. Beautifully modeled, in fact I’m taking care with it as I don’t want to mash it into a bookcase and spoil it. I probably should put the trackside barriers up next time, but then again, I like the frisson of danger of not having them up. Old Skool.
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Yamake from Nokia – make your own games
Interesting announcement from Nokia of Yamake, a user-generated games tool for the soon-to-be-launched-properly N-Gage platform. Basically, they provide the base for the game, the user can upload images and sounds, and alter text to turn them into their own game. Will have a look into this and investigate, could be a fun tool to play with.
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Radiohead Mashup album goes legit.
Nice little story this, Mashup DJ releases his own version of Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows, and gets told to take it down. He talks to their people, and Radiohead in the end approve him releasing it. It’s now available as a free download.
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Nokia N96 Announced
Slightly behind on my RSS feeds, I’ve just found out that Nokia have announced the successor to the N95, the imaginatively named Nokia N96. It looks nice, they’ve recessed the controls a little, given it a darker sleeker look. Headline features are an expandable 16GB memory and a larger screen (2.8 inches over the N95s 2.6). It is a few millimetres longer, but a couple slimmer. It will use the same battery, so there are a few mutterings on the Nokia and Symbian blogs that it won’t particularly improve the battery life.
Overall it looks like a style improvement, but no massive advantage over the N95 other than memory. Of course there could be some tweaks to the spec before release, but there isn’t going to be a touchscreen or anything really exciting.