Flow

Cotton jersey dresses. ‘Cause you want your outfit to say “I’m pregnant” from the front and “Impregnate me” from the back.–AinsleyofAttack

From No Regrets.

• There’s No Such Word As Firstly
  Weblog by Catherine Weir, one of the best graduates of Dundee’s Time Based Art programme this year.
• The Fall of Gallerist Larry Salander — New York Magazine
  "Why is an El Greco worth less than a Koons? Gallerist Larry Salander called it a moral travesty, and decided, catastrophically, to do something about it."
• The Symbols on My Flag (And What They Mean): newyorker.com
• Typotheque: Eric Gill got it wrong; a re-evaluation of Gill Sans by Ben Archer
• k-punk: The Place I Made The Purchase No Longer Exists
• MSI Wind review: Te enamorarás! Yes, it’s an Eee-killer - Boing Boing Gadgets
  Not it’s not: at 10", it’s much too big. Though I wouldn’t mind if the Eee could claim 7hrs battery life.
• Artes Mundi - Home Page
  Off to Cardiff to see the show soon.
• Shirley Clarke: A retrospective - News - Edinburgh International Film Festival
  Really looking forward to this bit of the EIFF. (Note to EIFF web designers: make your video embeddable. What is this, 2005?)
• Spillers Records, Cardiff - The Oldest Record Shop In The World.
  Will have to pop in here when I’m in Cardiff next week.
• www.studio355.com
  Cheryl Field’s website - she makes kinetic sculpture.
• FlexTD
  A utility that lets you enter iCal todos via a window that pops up when you hit a hotkey. Free.
• J. G. Ballard - A Collector’s Guide
• Ambit Magazine
• Ironic Sans: Eyeglasses and the pushing up thereof
  I use Method #3.
• Eye of the Goof: The Psychotronic Guide to Archive.org
  Cult cinema on Archive.org
• Amazon Kindle Review
• Favrd. Trickle-down egonomics for the twitter attention sp…
• Literature and Latte - Scrivener
  Fancy word processor thing. I have no need for 99% of its features, but I’m still tempted, because you can set a target word count.
• Firefox web browser | International versions: Get Firefox in your language
  Crikey Moses, Firefox 3 RC1 is ace on the Eee PC.
• Remember everything. | Evernote Corporation
  This would seem to be a bloody remarkable application. The facility for text searching images is particularly cool (business cards/wine labels/handwritten notes snapped with a webcam all worked well for me). At last, computers can fix my fried memory!

I made two new websites! jackmottram.com is a fancy modern homepage which lets you see what I’m up to all over the web, and Work collects stuff I’ve written in the newspapers and magazines.

• Kid Drawings Made Realistic - The Monster Engine (GALLERY)
• Yeondoo Jung - Wonderland
  Children’s drawings photographed in the real world.
• Macworld | Create good queries in Spotlight
  See especially the keyword search feature.
• app4mac - RapidoWrite
  I already use TextExpander (a lot), but this looks worth a try.
• tseetseetsu.org
  Graeme Plunkett’s weblog - he’s showing an ace (if possibly offensive to animal-lickers) piece at the Dundee degree show, involving a bird, some sensors, custom software and recorded birdsong.
• Google Doctype - Google Code
  "Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more."
• Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Things You Forgot Your Mac Can Do
  Alternate title: "Top 10 Standard Features You Use All The Time (Except #10 and #9 Which Are Useless Gimmicks But Which We Had To Add Because No One Does Top 8s)"
• Google Friend Connect
  Add social features to a website, no programming required - eg. sign in to a site with your Facebook id, find your Facebook friends who use the non-Facebook site. Are there any OpenID-powered social networky sites that could plug into this?
• claimID weblog - Manage your online identity. » Archive » New Feature: OpenID-based contacts
  Yes, there are. Don’t think anyone uses this one, mind you.

Strangely moving.

Mot posted a photo:

A slightly different version, closer to my preferred 'looks like a fucking till receipt' (© Hannah) style.

naked oyster & chemicals
Originally uploaded by chriswoebken

• Heresy Corner: Blasphemy: the last rites
  "Few people seem to have noticed, but the law of blasphemy was repealed yesterday…"
• Jonathan Glancey on the influence 50s comicstrip Dan Dare has had on modern architecture
• Instant Rimshot
• "Mark As Unread" Doesn’t Work For Me Anymore | Ask Metafilter
  Email tips.
• Life Without Buildings: Art From Disaster: an architecture blog
  "…New Orleans homes still bear the spray-paint markings used by rescue workers… some residents have installed a metal sculpture permanently memorializing these new urban hieroglyphics."
• tms [fernLightning]
  "Allows basic cvs style operations on Time Machine volumes." Great for quickly checking what Time Machine has been up to.
• Goodreads | get book recommendations from people you know
  I just signed up to this very pretty and slick site to keep track of what I’m reading/want to read. Not sure I’ll use the social aspects, but if anyone’s already using it, let me know.
• MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community
  I’m well impressed with the current version of Moveable Type. (I used it for many years before switching to Wordpress, and it used to be a total nightmare.)
• Nisus Thesaurus
  I’m just hoping this app will give me another word for show/exhibition/exhibit/installation.
• Creating an image in our likeness - The Herald
  My review of the Elipssis show at DCA.
• The World of Fashion: Pixel Perfect: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
  Fascinating profile of Pascal Dangin, who retouches photos for advertising and fashion editorial.
• One week of the Guardian: Monday // Designing The News
  "…a series that takes the news from one week of the Guardian newspaper, and visually represents it as a series of static visualisations."
• Information Architects » Blog Archive » Web Design is 95% Typography
• John Resig - Processing.js
  Wowsers.
• PowerBook Guy
  Ooh, you can get a lovely old Powerbook for about £150.

Goodreads is a website that lets you track what you’re reading and share reviews with others.

Mot posted a photo:

Redesigning the old homepage as a sort of aggregator of what I'm up to online. (It won't look anything like this when done, mind you.)

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

Impressive wear.

Mot posted a photo:

One girl, one plate. Sorry.

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

From the Human/Nature show at Patriothall Gallery.

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

By Christine Hilditch, not sure of the proper title. The white ball inside the bowl spins at the same rate as the record on the turntable. Magnets, apparently.

From the Human/Nature show at Patriothall Gallery.

Mot posted a photo:

Strange effect: the projection wasn’t visibly coloured like this. Silly Epson.

From the Human/Nature show at Patriothall Gallery - can't remember the title or the artist's name.

Mot posted a photo:

May have been taken by Guy or Len or Al or Han.

To get a grave accent on a Mac running OS X, press Option + `, then the letter you want to accentify. I’m hoping that by writing this here I’ll finally wodge the technique into my brain.

Saturday Night! by brian cors.

Yeah, I know this is being posted everywhere. But it is a great photograph.

• no2self.net » Blog Archive » compact family home
  Rob compares two compact home solutions that come complete with interior fixtures fittings.
• Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard » The Car that Ate Bournville
• ART TORRENTS
• YouTube - WAYS OF SEEING (first episode) 1/4
  All four parts of John Berger’s series are up on YouTube.
• Román Cortés » Homer CSS
  Unbelievable.
• Verbarius
  "Verbarius is the first clock in the world that tells time the way people do." And I really, really want one. (And I’d probably set it to German or French, like a big ponce.)
• Tweet Book
  More fiction on Twitter, this time collaborative. Doesn’t seem to be going very well.
• twittories » home
  Collaborative fiction written through Twitter. Not bad.
• twitterfic - Twitter Fiction
  140 character microfictions.
• Twitter / junkdnafiction
  More microfiction on Twitter. This time quite bonkers!
• Google Docs Offline
  FAO: Mr. Bob.

Especially for Mom and Dad:

The film is one of many ‘quota quickies’, B-featurettes shown in cinemas, an unintended side-effect of the Cinematograph Film Act of 1927.

Director Harold Baim seems to have had a real suburballardian fascination for motorways, multi-storey car parks and tower blocks.

Discovered thanks to a wonderful documentary by Laurie Taylor, which just finished. (I’ll upload it tomorrow after it appears on Listen Again.)

Update: The good people at Speechification, an excellent weblog that posts highlights from Radio 4 and other ‘intelligent speech’ stations, have archived the documentary.

• Liliputing: Comprehensive list of low-cost ultraportables
  The E900 looks to be the best of the bunch. Though I do like the Elonex One, on the grounds that it’s a bit bonkers (I can see myself grabbing one off eBay for a few quid in a couple of years).
• EeeUser ASUS Eee PC EeePC Forum / eeecontrol 0.2 ( fan and fsb control )
  GUI for overclocking, fan control on the Eee PC. Bit buggy, apparently, but less faff than the alternatives. (Though I’m not really convinced overclocking is worth doing, unless you’re playing games or otherwise using your Eee in a silly way.)
• DigiCamHistory
  The history of the digital camera, and other kinds of camera too. Dangerous: I came this close to buying a Quicktake 200 after reading it. (Which would’ve required buying an ancient computer too, to get the photos off it.)
• Cheese
  Super-basic photo-managing app. Beta (in the old fashioned sense), so I’m just keeping an eye on it for now.
• YouTube - Multi-Touch Eee PC 900
  Gah, this isn’t helping me resist the temptation to upgrade. (Assuming all these gestures are built into Xandros?)

Thanks to my compulsive tendency to install every vaguely intriguing application I come across, and a bad habit of tweaking stuff without really understanding what I’m doing, my Eee PC went a but wonky recently. So I did the F9 trick, which resets the Eee to its default state—a great feature, that—and worked out what I really need on the thing.

So, here are the steps I took to turn a stock Eee into the perfect machine for writing on the move.

1. Enable Advanced Desktop Mode, because Easy Mode is just silly.
2. Add extra repositories, from which to download applications not provided by Asus.
3. Install SSH server, so you can connect your Eee from other computers: sudo apt-get install openssh-server
4. Install Subversion, to keep all your files in sync: sudo apt-get install subversion (setting up a Subversion repository is left as an exercise for the reader).
5. Install AbiWord, because OpenOffice is too slow on the Eee: sudo apt-get install abiword.
6. Install VLC, for playing telly programmes on the train when you can’t be arsed working: sudo apt-get install vlc
7. Tweak Firefox to make it more Eee-friendly:
   1. Install the MiniFox theme.
   2. Install the Fullerscreen add-on.
   3. Install the Google Browser Sync add-on, to keep your bookmarks, passwords and history synchronised with your main computer (optional, but well handy).
8. Remember to keep all your stuff on a removable SDHC card, not on the Eee’s internal memory card.

That’s it. The whole procedure takes under ten minutes, most of which is spent waiting for the list of repositories to update and the 15MB AbiWord to download.

I’ve been running the Eee like this for ten days now, and haven’t missed any of the gizmos I’d installed over the last few months. More importantly, the Eee is now as fast as crikey, and I haven’t had a single application crash on me yet.

Just in case anyone thinks I’ve lost the will to tinker, I feel moved to point out that I wrote the above while waiting for a Puppy Linux CD to burn.

• Textism: Podswollop
  Most of the podcasts I listen to are actually radio programmes too. Or made by professional broadcasters. (Podcasting is a new mode of distribution, but it’s not a new medium.)
• New: Video Comments On All TechCrunch Blogs
  This is the stupidest idea I’ve seen in a long time.
• Print writing versus web writing « gilest
  I’d add "You probably get paid | You probably don’t’ ;-)
• Documentary Section Announced - News - Edinburgh International Film Festival
  For whatever reason, it’s always the docs I see at the EIFF that stick in my mind. (And I’ll see way more this year - fuck August!)
• radio for back up on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  A Flickr user reports on being harrassed for (perfectly legally) taking a photo of a shop.
• Made in Japan? | TABlog | Tokyo Art Beat
  "This discussion paper proposes that the medium of digital photography inherently displays qualities of Japanese aesthetics." Hmmn. No.
• Twitter / DowningStreet
  The Prime Minister’s Office has a Twitter account - they get it, too: lots of replies to queries by other users.
• LG Optical Drives - Model GSA-E50L
  Works well with the Eee. Shame it’s so ugly.
• Welcome to Usb.brando.com.hk
  Portable USB DVD drive - pitched at the Eee/Air, but also says it’s Windows only (eh?!), unclear whether it’s bus powered or not.
• Birkhill Castle
  Spent the day hanging out here, after a screening of Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. DCA know how to launch a show!
• patrickrhone.com: (Re)Introducing Machine Methods
  Clever idea: Patrick’s business website is designed so that it can also serve as a printable brochure or folded mailout.
• carrierdetect.com » Back Standard Time
  We’ll all be setting our watches to BAST before long. Probably. Photos here.
• Anil Dash: Embedded Journalism
  "I’ve created a javascript embed tag at the bottom of every post on my blog, to let you embed the title, an excerpt of the post, and a list of commenters on the post in your own blog or site." Interesting idea.
• Josh Millard . com » HURF DURF METAFILTER ANALYZER
  Disturbingly exhaustive examination of the phrase HURF DURF BUTTER EATER as used on MetaFilter, by cortex. (The fact that total asshat un owen introduced it to the site kind of takes the shine off.)
• Mobile Computer - Asus Eee PC 900
  The more reviews of the 900 I read, the more I think of flogging my 701 on eBay and upgrading…
• The Fridge Gallery
• YouTube - Isosceles: Kitch Bitch
  Gerard directed this video for Isosceles (which is great fun, though I’m not terribly keen on the song.)

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

• i am near
  Fire Eagle-based service now tells you of nearby megaliths, as well as pubs. What more could you need?!
• A List Apart: Articles: Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards
• Qwitter
  Stop smoking with the aid of Twitter. Yeah, that’ll work.
• Optimus · microformats transformer (version 0.5.1)
  Also a validator.
• Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files
• The marathon is easy. There are no lions | Athletics | guardian.co.uk Sport
  "Six Maasai warriors will run the London Marathon tomorrow to raise money for a well in their village. Isaya, 24, is their chief. This is a diary of his week in London, the first time he has left Tanzania."
• simonsound » The Tone Generation - Around the world in electronic sound

Mot posted a photo:

Mot posted a photo:

Another quick test shot with the new lens. Hot vignetting action.

Mot posted a photo:

Just testing the Voigtlander 15mm/f4.5 Super Wide Heliar. It really is super. Also wide.

You And Yours ran an excellent little item on the recently redeveloped Birkenhead Park today, and I thought I’d preserve it for posterity here.

[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

See also: this previous post, again inspired by an item on You And Yours¹, on Birkenhead Park, complete with lively debate in the comments about its claim to be the first public park in the world.

1. Yeah, I listen to You And Yours quite a lot: proof, if proof be need be, that my Radio 4 addiction is completely out of hand. Just be thankful that I’m not posting excerpts from The Archers (which has been quite exciting lately, what with Owen’s rape trial).↩

Mot posted a photo:

The lowest quality photograph ever taken with an Epson RD-1s?! (Shot with a pinhole bodycap, through the viewfinder of a Kodak Duaflex IV.)

Mot posted a photo:

Er, yeah, rubbish, I know. (Shot with cameraphone through an old Kodak Duaflex viefinder - future efforts will be more interesting, I promise!)