I get all excited about things like the BBC’s new iPlayer because it’s a vision of the future, perhaps not in it’s current form but it’s a push in the right direction none the less.
A lot has been said against the BBC because of the current limitations of the system (these being Windows XP only and only then with IE and Windows Media Player). There were criticisms from the Vista camp, criticisms from the mac camp and a few (I imagine) from the linux camp. But let me make this point, why are we getting on the back of a public organisation who have produced a first version of a product which can only be used by the vast majority of the population. There are far more users of XP than Vista, there are far more users of Windows machines than macs. Apparently there will be versions for all and I’m prepared to trust them on that.
That said, my only gripe (other than the slightly long winded install procedure) was that XP is supported but not Vista, despite the assumption that they would be very similar. The same was said for Channel 4’s 4OD service which is supposedly XP only, but a bit of research will show that it will happily run on vista if you tweak the installer. I’m happy to report that the iPlayer also works (as far as I can tell) flawlessly on vista after following a set of instructions which contains only 1 point. You’ll have to go figure out that point yourself.
As for the service, yes the number of programs is slightly limited, yes there will be teething problems and yes the quality isn’t what you get from tv episodes downloaded from other less official sources (or so I’m lead to believe), but last night’s episode of ‘Would I Lie to You?’ weighed in at 140mb for half an hour, took a little over an hour to download on my basic broadband connection and looked fine on my 26″ Samsung telly (although it’s max resolution is 1360×768).
Take it for what it really is (your safety net for forgetting to set the vcr) and you’ll find it’s a perfectly usable tool which can only get better.
project2 (not it’s final name) is an experimental itunes visualiser/frontend crossed with an idea for a dynamic piece of art. Currently it is a work in progress to see what can be achieved but I thought I’d share the fun with the world.
Like Covered, project2 is written in Java, so you’ll need that. You’ll also need to be running a recent version of Windows and a recent version of iTunes. As for instructions: download, unzip, run ‘project2.exe’ and enjoy.
project2 is largely untested and being a preview release will break occaisionally and will probably take iTunes with it, that’s just a risk you’re going to have to live with.
Get it here: Download project2 preview release #1
I feel quite chuffed about this one, seeing that I flagged Cherry Ghost’s ‘Mathematics’ nearly a year ago. Finally we have a full album of similarly brilliant tracks in an acoustic (and non-acoustic) style with the odd influence of folk or country. Calling it the north’s version of Aqualung is a bit of a generalisation, but true none the less. It’s what I call a Sunday morning record, and one that needs to be played with a bit of volume at that.
I’m sorry to say it, Covered is dead. When it got to the point where to create animations that had any ounce of quality to them would exhaust any energy I had left for the project and even then it wouldn’t feel anywhere near as good as the original, I decided to drop it.
But fear not, in Dr Who style it’s slowly regenerating into something similar, yet something totally different. It’s looking good but it’s not ready for the eyes of the world just yet. It doesn’t even have a name.
Funniest single line I’ve read all week:
UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.”
That’s it, you can all go back to the serious stuff now…
It turns out people are using JOGL, one of the main ingredients in Covered to do other cool things too. Such as the picture above, which may not look much to start with being only a screen shot but is in fact part of a study into mapping and augmented reality. I rather like it simply as a piece of animated artwork. You need to run the thing (requires Java) to know what I mean.
The truth be told, I didn’t really notice that the pub was all that different last night at the quiz, despite it being the first night of the new smoke free regime. We still turned up and despite reduced numbers came 3rd Joint 2nd showing up not only the students who’ve returned from uni to try and steal our seats but also most of the older teams who clearly didn’t know such gems as the name for a baby eel (that would be an elver) and that a white flag signals a clean throw in a javelin competition. What’s more is that we’ve now won something for each of the last three weeks.
I did however notice the difference this morning, when I didn’t have to wash out the smell of cigarette smoke from my hair while still half asleep, my usual way of telling that it’s a Monday.
So how am I going to know it’s Monday now?
