R.I.P. Pandora

OK, Pandora customizable internet radio is not dead yet, but it does not look good.

I was very happy when I found it last year, because it quick order it introduced me to more than one cool band I'd never heard about before, which I then went and bought.

But now it's no longer available outside the US.

And worse, the RIAA is strangling it.

I don't get radio. Music publishers is paying money to have their music played on radio. But this is apparently illegal. But if they do, then radio is clearly great promotion. So how come radio stations have to pay percentages to to RIAA? And what about musicians who are not members of RIAA?

Similarly, having a song in a movie can be a big boost for a band. But most music has become so expensive for movies to use that it's a big problem for movie makers. Friggin' weird. It can even be too expensive to just have a character hum a couple of bars from a well-known song!

Samsung X360 is lighter than Air

Samsung X360 is lighter than Air, ArsTechnica article.
And it has a lot more connectors too.
Of course, then it runs Windows Vista. :-( So it's only the hardware which is not bloated.




Update:
Dell has just released a subnotebook. Quite reasonably priced too, but less interesting to me due to small keyboard.

Del's Beautiful New Wooden Machine

Here's something to do on a rainy afternoon.
I am amazed that this dang video is getting a new comment every twenty seconds on its youtube page!



Oh, and this one below is pretty cool. I actually built something similar one day as a kid, only with rubber balls and made in big sand heap. It had a long, winding track which even had tunnels in.



There are some other fun marble machines, like this one and this one. It strikes me that with some artistic talent added, this might be something.

It seems Pascal is "in the trade":
I got a toy for the kids which is precisely a marble machine, and they love it. I'll send you a photo. The only trick is, you have to think how you connect the hollow tube supports and back-and-forth ramps, if you really want the marbles to have a good trip and go where you intended them. Basically, you could say it's a glorified open-air rattle. Makes the same sound. :-) Given the amount of planning required to build one with three complete intertwined circuits from top to bottom, I take photos of my best ones so I can reproduce them again. And for the children, it's like a miniature Waterland Super Slide! Shrieks of ecstatic laughter when the cascade starts.

DSLR camera review map

Here's a useful feature, somebody made up a DSLR camera review map. It lists all significant web reviews of the DSLR cameras out there.

Google Chrome and Scott McCloud (Updated)

Update: TTL said:
Google has released a couple of quite watchable videos about Chrome.
-------------------------------

Google hired the brilliant Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) to explain their new browser. Good call.

Ivor said:
Just one small point. Shouldn't the comic format have been landscape, then I wouldn't have had to keep scrolling.

Funny you should say that. In one of McCloud's own web comics, this one, about making web comics, he makes the point emphatically that it gets his goat when somebody makes portrait-oriented pages for web pages. :)


Scott McCloud tells me:
We're working on a side-by-side, landscape, screen-fitting version. It was a actually a *printed* comic by design, this is just an online adaptation. Still, should be more readable, I agree! :-)

It may be related to the fact that the comic book was sent out too early by mistake, so perhaps it was scanned and put up in a rush in lieu of a proper web version.

TTL commented:
Nice to see someone applying the software development methodology called Clear Thinking™ to web browsers. I will certainly switch to Chrome as soon as it becomes available.
Now, if you had asked 100 Unix engineers in, say, 1988 whether separate browser sessions should have their own OS processes, they would all have thought it's a rhetorical question, for it is so obvious.
It's good that 20 years later at least one of the big players actually figured this out. Maybe all is not lost and sometime in the future we will start seeing some overall progress in computing again.

New Nikkor

Nikon's new kit lens tested. Seems it's good. I suspected so. It's remarkable the progress which has been made in lenses since the millennium, I suspect it's as much about production methods (like cheap aspherical lenses) as it it about design.

Video primer

Video primer.

"From the perspective of the still photographer looking to explore the world of video and motion for the first time there is a temptation to string together a sequence of still images."

"Note that in terms of bandwidth, 1080i and 720p require almost the same amount of data. With 1080i it is being allocated to spatial resolution, while with 720p is it allocated to temporal resolution."

1938 underwater photography by Bruce Mozert

1938 underwater photography by Bruce Mozert
[Thanks to Bert]

A file sharing virus?

I wonder if there a file sharing virus which creates a file on the fly when somebody searches for it?
I am looking for an MP3 (or CD) version of an LP from around 1980, called "Chinese Highway" by the long-defunct Danish band "Repeat Repeat".
I searched for these terms via Acquisition, they did not exist, except a minute later, they suddenly did. Just one file. And similarly, with other obscure titles, they turned up, just one, after I searched.
... Yes, I just tested with "jerfowlsjerwiojjfowejfo", random nonsense, and bingo, a file turns up, 5.5MB it says it is, and MP3. Bait.

Low light

At the risk of beating a dead horse:
Some people calling the new Nikon D90 and the new Canon 50D mere evolutionary upgrades, read: "boring".
Some are excited about the video capability of the Nikon.
Surprisingly many don't even mention what for me is the most important development: high-ISO capability.

As an owner of a web site publishing girly pictures, I have seen so many otherwise nice shoots ruined by bad noise in the pictures when they were shot indoors. You really don't want excessive noise in skin tones. And I've seen even more sets ruined by badly managed artificial lighting, because that's a whole science in itself.

Maybe two years ago I got a set which was indoors, but yet which had the liveliness of handheld shooting. I thought "how did he do that?", and found out he had used the then-new Canon 5D. It was new to be able to get smooth images at 1000 ISO, which was just what he had done. This was a big step up for this kind of photography.

And the new cameras are amazing because they take this even further. The Canon has not been tested yet, but I'm sure it's tops. The Nikon I've seen, and it's a small camera at just a thousand bucks, which can take quality photos at not 1000 ISO, but 3200 ISO, nearly two stops more.

For photographers who know how to leverage this, it's big.

Help and business

In the wonderful film As Good As It Gets, the Jack Nicholson character ask the heroine, who earlier had been helped by him, for a big favor. He hints she owes him. She says: "are you saying that accepting your help obligates me?" He answers: "is there any other way of looking at it?" She has no answer for that.

But actually I think there is another way of looking at it. A wise friend of mine once said that there's no obligation to pay back help, if there was, it wouldn't be help, it would be business.

"I'll cook dinner if you'll drive me to the airport tomorrow" is a business transaction. "I'll cook dinner, you seem tired" is help.

Jekyll

"My Dark Side likes Mary Poppins. No wonder I was bullied in school."
- Dr. Jackmann, from the TV show Jekyll

Just rented this, and it's nicely done. Powerful performance by James Nesbitt.

Funny by the way how a woman can seem different in different circumstances. I saw Gina Bellman as Jane in Couplings, and she did not seem all that hot, but in Jekyll she is gorgeous.
Same with Tamsin Greig, in Black Books I was nuts about her, in other shows much less so.