Pages of Photoshop retouching are always a bit scary, even when they’re subtle (not too many where she actually changes their shape; it’s mostly skin-smoothing), but some are scarier than others.
Amazing demo of content-aware image resizing (full paper, cache) with some disturbing implications for the photographer’s art and the historical record, but still. (Via Mefi.)
Ed has posted some interviews guaranteed to catch the attention of a passing Tasmanian cartoonist: Berke Breathed, parts one and two, and Richard Flanagan.
Two Hundred Bad Comics (via MeFi).
Peanuts by Charles Bukowski (via MeFi).
SF writer Charlie Stross explains the present and the future.
Rotation of Earth plunges entire North American continent into darkness.
Zotero, a Firefox extension to help collect, manage and cite research sources (via MeFi).
After 18 months with an iPod I’m finally getting around to using smart playlists: Brilliant Playlists; Creating Smart Playlists in iTunes; Greg Restall’s guide; tips from 43folders; Smart Playlists.com.
Goodbye to the chemical world.
Clay Shirky on the Cult of the Amateur.
Todd Alcott on the Beatles, Bond and more.
The Big Merino takes to the road (via Shauna).
Patrick Gleeson’s Star Wars—one of a handful of albums that defined my childhood. Not all worth a listen today, but try “Droids”.
A vanishingly slim selection of links. At least this way I can pretend I’m still posting something.
Twenty-two panels that always work and sixteen that don’t (via LMG).
Polar bears of Spitsbergen... although not for much longer.
God’s scratchpad: “Note to self—time running only one direction. Need to re-check original rationale on this one. Honestly can’t remember what the story was with that... completely inconvenient. No ‘undo’ function, which just seems like a fundamental feature now.”
There’s still a few days left to listen to James and Barunka’s Radio 2 show. I like it!
This is what I should be doing instead of getting annoyed at not having time to write 2,000-word entries.
Our Edinburgh MSc in E-learning has just had some welcome publicity in a Guardian story on Second Life. It looks even better in print, with screenshots courtesy of yours truly, but either way you get to read some words from me, just in case you haven’t read enough here. (I would have said that I teach in Second Life, though, rather than lecture in it—it’s hard to think of what we do there as lecturing.)
The true story of the legendary Smithsonian Barbie letter.
Paleo-Future (via MeFi).
Productivity blogs. Um...
Wi-Fi is no “health time bomb” (via plasticbag.org).
Environmentalism and work (via MeFi).
Foldschool: DIY cardboard furniture for kids (via Mefi).
The Washington Post Style Invitational asked readers to concoct a work of no more than 75 words using only the words from The Cat in the Hat. My off-the-cuff entry scored an honorable mention.
This enormous thread on car crashes at Making Light is like the proverbial car crash itself: you can’t look away, especially if you were born and raised in a country with compulsory seatbelt laws. I can think of only a few times in my life that I haven’t worn a seatbelt in a car, which always makes me feel uncomfortably exposed. After reading those horror stories, I’m wondering why buses and trains don’t have them too.
The horror story of the week is of course Virginia Tech. Crooked Timber has a thread on how the social web has underpinned reporting of the event. One comment: “Watching the [TV] news meant I was learning things slower and filtered through Stupid.”
State-of-the-art digital photography in 1994 (via MeFi): “The first thing I said to them was, ’How do you change the battery?’ And their comment was, ’What do you mean?’”
Douglas Coupland on blogs and MySpace: “At the moment I think after a certain age—I tag it arbitrarily at 22—everyone's more withdrawn in fear.”
James Lovelock: “Life will become a little more interesting than it was before.”
If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop? I go to hundreds of miles southeast of where I grew up. If I start from where I was born, I go to the mid-Atlantic ridge. Note to self: stop digging hole through Earth in backyard until Project Nautilus is complete.
Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) vs Silent Star Wars (not).
It’s almost heartbreaking (via Boing Boing): “We closed up and moved back into a bedroom at home with my wife and her sister operating the burners, something they hadn’t done in years. They weren’t happy.”
I sense a great disturbance in the Verse, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced... get well soon, OEDILF.
It’s been a while, but I’ve finally put up a new YouTube video. Who are these birds, and just what do they want?
If at first you don’t succeed: a) everybody hates you; b) success just isn’t your thing; c) try, try again.
All the free copies were gone within a day, so I had to settle for the actual novel. (Which I might even read. I was already halfway through one of RLS’s travelogues, and enjoying it.)
I’ve updated my 2005 copy of Mozilla, but can’t quite warm to the Firefox interface (mainly the way you can’t close multiple tabs from the same mouse location). Fortunately the alternative branch of Moz 1.x in the form of SeaMonkey is pretty good, with nice new touches on top of the familiar layout (previews of what lies behind each tab; spell-check in form fields). The only drawback is that every window title is now appended with “SeaMonkey”, making idle browsing feel like a succession of playground taunts. “Speedysnail – SeaMonkey.”
Idiot Toys is a disturbingly funny tech review site. The battery fixation, the Sony and Mac hatred, the English disdain for all things non-English, the male disdain for all thing holders non-male, and specifically this. [Via Charlie Stross.]
For the iPod owner who has everything.
Toonhound, a great resource for lovers of British comics. Mine were Krazy, Cheeky Weekly (brilliant), Starlord, Tornado, and of course 2000 A.D. Then I turned thirteen.
FedEx refuses shipment of made-up stuff. As everyday outrages go, this is pretty outrageous.
The Farley Mowat as a pirate ship in Hobart. I can just about work out which dock it’s tied up to. [Squints at hints of Eastern Shore on the edges.] Follow-up story.
Front ·
Weblog ·
Archives ·
Detail ·
Found ·
Limericks ·
Cartoon Lounge ·
The Stand-Up ·
Pacific Politics
Rory Central ·
In Theory ·
MT Powered ·
©2007 Rory Ewins · Try Edinburgh University’s Masters in E-Learning