On sale today: Loops: writing music, a new quality magazine of writing about popular music. Featuring Nick Cave, Jon Savage, and Nick Kent, among others. Sadly, no Swells; as he recently passed away.
Amazon UK is offering the first issue at half-price.
Problems accessing your WordPress.com dashboard? WordPress seems to have recently added something to the Dashboard of hosted blogs, making both IE8 and Firefox 3.5 stall half-way through loading the dashboard. The dashboard never loads. A temporary solution is to use IE8’s “Compatability View” (it’s the broken page icon at the end of IE’s top address bar). This removes whatever bit of bloatware was getting in the way, and also has the side-effect of speeding up the loading of the Dashboard and the posting of new posts.
This is becoming a more and more general problem with websites, I find. Some specialserver.mainserver.com process or third-party script is occasionally hanging up the loading of pages, to the extent that the page won’t load.
Photography is Dead… The Debate is the 2009 summer Rhubarb treat. 30th July 2009, 1pm at the Radisson Hotel on Holloway Circus in Birmingham. Cost £15.
“… what exactly is photography evolving into? Is it a propagandist tool used beside words in the media? Or merely a form of digital illustration? What are the hidden agendas? Is our consciousness deceived by the imagery we see before us in our everyday lives? Have technologies opened a world up to non-professionals, that now threaten the industry with sub-standard images and information, or does it simply make photography more democratic? Does technology allow things to be meddled with too easily, or has technology given us more tools to open our minds to an all new types of art and so therefore create new realities? Is copyright now completely undermined? Has playfulness with imagery enhanced or destroyed truths, beliefs and practices? Is seeing, still believing? Has photography lost its soul?”
A new video promoting the new 2,000-image (although the website claims “over 3,000″) Pre-Raphaelite online resource. The Silverlight plugin is required by the website.
It’s out.
Sadly, the Blocksite addon does not work in 3.5, which means the return of the horrible Google Suggest feature (now even worse because it’s started including “Sponsored links in suggestions”). To turn off Google Suggest completely and for good, instead use the Adblock Plus addon, and in its ‘Options/My Adblocking Rules’ simply block the domain:
clients1.google.com
This is the server handling the Google suggestion keywords. Blocking it turns off Google Suggest, with no other ill effects.
A 50-minute TV documentary on the work of Studio Ghibli, from 2004, with an interview with Miyazake and Moebius at the end. While certainly not the definitive documentary on Ghibli (which could probably run to an eight hour DVD set or longer), what it packs into 50 minutes is mostly thoughtful and entertaining.
The latest update on the Japanese nerd class. They seems to have left the bedroom, and given up spending on collectables — instead they’re going on cost-free photography walks and growing radishes. Still not much interest in real girls, though.
Oddly, the story that the British Council plans to cut 500 jobs seems to have had almost no coverage beyond obscure titles such as Personnel Today and Crain’s Manchester Business News…
“the British Council, which promotes the UK overseas, announced that it intended to reduce its staff by between 400-500 jobs — about one-third of the organisation — over the next two years.”
So where does that leave the plan of last July, to scrap the restructuring and double the arts budget? Was it all just smoke and spin?
With the release of the long-awaited Firefox 3.5 tomorrow, I was wondering why web browsers don’t ask (on install) about the sort of items you like to see in search results? Just enough questions to establish a basic ’search profile’ that could then improve search results — or maybe even silently rework my dumb search terms on-the-fly before they even hit the search-engine? I know signing in to Google is supposed to improve results, over time, but it doesn’t seem to work as strongly as I’d like it to.
A new augmented-reality app for mobiles. Having seen Wikitude in October 08, I don’t think that Layar is “the world’s first”, but it certainly looks very polished…
It seems like a step towards Microsoft’s vision for augmented reality for 2019. But, as always, I can’t help thinking that the big break will only come when we no longer have to look at screens and keyboards.
Just published online, in full, a new Cambridge University Press book on the design of search-engine and other search interfaces.
From the latest Standpoint…
“In November 2008, ACE [Arts Council England] was employing more press and communications officers than Sports England, UK Sport, the Museums and Libraries Archive and English Heritage combined.”
Yet it seems that Arts Council England, West Midlands has managed to squeeze out a mere five press releases since April 09.
“Regional publisher Trinity Mirror was today facing claims that it is planning to axe up to eight titles in the Midlands and turn the Birmingham Post into a weekly.
The company has neither confirmed nor denied the claims, which were made in a statement by the National Union of Journalists published on its website this morning.”
Note to self: Windows 7 will be half-price if pre-ordered from Amazon UK during 15th July - 14th Aug. £79.99 seems to be the likely price.
Although I’m also thinking of dual-booting Ubuntu. Much as I dislike the seemingly endless dependencies of Linux apps, there are some rather tasty ones.
Sadly, Europe gets a crippled version of 7, thanks to meddling by the European Commission. Microsoft are apparently being forced to leave out the basic anti-virus that’s always offered at least minimal protection for newbies. Eek! And the dimwits at the European Commission have also apparently forbidden the U.K. sale of a cheaper Vista-upgrade version. We’ll all be expected to do a format and clean install, with the full version or nothing. Which is fine for me, because that’s what I’m planning anyway. But many people won’t be up to the task, even if they could find the time to backup all their data and re-install all their software.
Less choice, more expensive, less secure, more hassle — thanks, EC. I guess the bureaucrats in Brussels will be shipping their upgrade copies in by Air Mail from the U.S., then having a minion install it.
At last. Blurb has introduced a “PDF to book” service, with Adobe InDesign templates.
You’ve probably heard about site rippers (aka harvesters). Now there are search rippers. OutWit Docs is a free Firefox plugin.
A 50-minute podcast documentary about the re-invention of Mongolian folk song, happening in the grasslands of Mongolia. It sounds superb. I’ve ordered the Hanggai album from Amazon (review and NPR profile with full sample tracks).
JURN has just passed the magic 3,000 titles mark. Try a taste using the preview box below. Search for a defined arts and humanities topic that’s likely to be discussed in academic open access ejournals, such as:
intitle:Tempest Miranda gender
JURN: search 3,000 arts & humanities ejournals.
Put it on your own blog posts (although it doesn’t play nicely with free hosted WordPress.com blogs), with this ‘copy & paste’ snippet of code.
Unlike other Google CSEs, JURN uses direct-to-article URLs rather than just importing a big list o’ home-pages. Open access ejournals seem to delight in keeping their actual articles off-site or at a slightly different base URL. Which is why it took four months to build, rather than four minutes importing the DOAJ list (do they even have an exportable list?) which anyway has less than a third of the titles in JURN.
Powered by WordPress
