bunker an infrequent blog

A zinger this morning from Gaping Void:

There can be no technological solution without a cultural solution. Cultural solutions are more valuable and profitable than technological solutions. This got me thinking to a recent conversation I had with the Chief Marketing Officer of probably the most respected and “creative” ad agency on the planet. He told me:

Our best ideas no longer come from the copywriters. They’re coming from the techies.

Which is an interesting point of view considering I saw this yesterday over at O’Reilly neatly summed up as “Are designers the new heroes of the computer industry?” [via del.icio.us/blackbeltjones]

Maybe it’s just that we’re all techies now?

Elgato EyeHome – This is a pretty interesting device for watching downloaded media on your TV. Supports MPEG 1,2,4 DivX and plenty of audio formats which seems more than enough to be useful, all connected to your home network.

It’s funny because I’m mostly doing things the other way round, streaming shows from my tivo and watching them in VLC on the second screen on my mac, while working or surfing or whatever. It would be nice to have the choice though.

Add the PSP (September? 180 quid? Just get one from Hong Kong kids!!) into the mix for portable access to my media and this would just about complete my “the future, now” home media set up. Now how am going to manage all this media, as well as the existing broadcast stream and the self-generated content of my social sphere too? How will I discover new things?

How exactly do I stay attached to the social fabric mass media creates, without actually having to be slave to the broadcast stream?

Well for that we need an Uber-EPG…

Technorati Tags: mac, tech

Well, now we’re starting to notice some of the smaller things about this release things become clearer. There isn’t much *POW* as the release of Panther that’s for sure – everything is about polishing surfaces and sharpening the edges up here.

Little things like the very small subtle noises in the finder – when a copy completes for example there is a light ‘ting’ – you might not notice straight away but are welcome. I’m not completely sure, but the anti-aliasing looks cleaner and sharper.

The Preview app now allows annotations with sticky-style text boxes or red marker style ovals. Very useful as Adobe Acrobat Reader takes the best part of a week to launch these days, and that’s before they integrate Flash.

Technorati Tags: mac, tiger, tech

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So Mail worked second time round with an import of *just* my 2005 inbox sitting there quite happily. Will try adding more later. The new interface is slick, and the general feel of the app seems just more … grown up I guess, from last time I tried switching from Entourage.

Dashboard is as expected really. The weather is very nicely displayed along with a 6 day forecast, which i used to pay for using weatherpop. The other services are (as sherlock before it) pretty US centric so don’t work. It looks like we are going to have to rely on a strong UK coding community to make it as useful for us.

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Again, notes for myself in case I have to come back later (oh, my lack of memory!) as well as potentially useful for anyone else along the way.

Apart from having to jump through a couple of hoops entirely of my own making, install was a breeze, onto the second 250GB drive in the G5. Complete clean install, with no user data being ported across. Reason? I’ve been working on this G5 for a year now it’s just become all a bit messy. Plus with the office getting set up, I want to introduce a bit more structure to our projects, and lay down an associated digital filing system.

First job was getting mail across from entourage. I’ve been looking forward switching to apple mail, but first import time round proved wildly unsuccessful – a bunch of empty folders. That’s no good, we’ll try that again later. Next up, get some sync’d data from .Mac down – address book, safari bookmarks and iCal. This works like a dream, although the iSync app is no longer – it’s all done through the .Mac preference pane. Haven’t tried adding my phone or iPod in yet.

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I realised I should make some notes about the new Bunker site design, partly because someone else might find it useful or interesting and also for myself if I have to come back in three months to fix something. That is, of course, assuming I ever finish it properly this time round.

First attempts at creating this 3 column layout failed dismally again until I found this resource which will generate clean working CSS layouts for you. Useful If like me you don’t have the patience anymore with the funked up CSS rendering cross browser issues that have persisted to make tables still the quickest way to get a site knocked up and reliably know it will look ok in all desktop browsers. It still needed some hacking to fit my banner into it properly, and that will be de-tabled and de-javascripted at some point.

Ok, onto the exciting stuff.

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It’s taken more like 20 years, but I think we are nearly there. No, not the talking artificial human Max Headroom, but the cheap and cheerful Bigtime TV.

We now (nearly) have the technology to distribute…. erm, crap TV bypassing the existing broadcast networks, hurrah! It all started with audio using (alright, first with audioblogs) Podcasting, but we much prefer video as a medium.

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Alright, got completely distracted today. Started out looking into making a videocast thing, ended up looking up RSS-enclosure automation and then got around to upgrading (and paying for, ahem, finally) to Movable Type 3.

So having done backups of the blogs hosted here, I decided to hose them and start from scratch. Did a bit of design and got this far with the coding. Not bad for one day I reckon.

Stuff to do: Extras column to include dynamic linking to my Delicious Library, Do a “what’s on the TiVo” which i need a little help* with (grab txt feed off tivo on the local network, FTP upload to server, repeat hourly), tape in a similar widget for the old iTunes playing, grab a Flickr stream I suppose while I’m at it…

* Worked out how to use curl, ftp -u and cron didn’t I. Clever me.

Today I will mostly be getting back up to speed with podcasting, RSS, enclosures and most importantly building a video blog/vodcast/new name thing – has anyone come up with a snappy name yet?

Server may be down as I flip over to movabletype 3 (maybe).