Experience, design & technology.

Archive for January, 2012

Panasonic Lumix GF-ummm..

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Posted on January 9th, 2012

Very shortly I’ll be looking to splash out on a panasonic lumix GF1 or GF2. I’ve read great reviews on both, although the GF1 is discontinued and can only be bought second hand. I can’t decide which to go with, it’s certainly a matter of cost and availability. I’m keen to hear if there are any love/horror stories out there, your thoughts would of course be much appreciated! My main criteria are: great shots in low light, snug and relatively compact and a good fixed-focus lens (the 20mm f1.7 is very attractive). I’m taking this bad boy travelling with me this year – I’ve been umming and ahhing about this for the last few days.. Any advice?

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Plotto

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Posted on January 9th, 2012

Have you heard of Plotto? Neither had I, up until this morning. It’s a text from 1894 by Georges Polti, which creates a structural system for creating story plots. It’s quite extraordinary, taking 36 basic plots through a staggering 1462 plot permutations. Below is one example. Plotto is being reissued by Tin House. Fun for the whole family (if your family is full of aspiring authors, or plot geeks). Via brain pickings

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The future of youtube

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Posted on January 9th, 2012

The New Yorker has seen the future of youtube, and it’s not what you thought it would look like.   Google is shifting gears quite rapidly, moving the focus away from user generated content to studio-produced shows & movies – even channels created solely for youtube itself. It’s a revenue driven set of decisions seeking to wrest some of the profits from the incumbent tv channels.  The claim is that tv audiences watch up to several hours of tv a night, where YouTube audiences watch only a matter of minutes, and that can be changed by adding a number of things; higher relevance for linked material (by algorithms), channel content such as shows or movies, and content created exclusively for YouTube.  It would seem…

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Warning: Upcoming Churn

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Posted on January 6th, 2012

I’ve hosted jasonmcdermott.net on MyDomain.com for the last 4 years, and I’ve been fairly happy with their service. It was a breeze to set up the jasonmcdermott.net gmail hosted account, and their web hosting seemed quite nice and simple to use (aside from a few stumbles starting up wikis and wordpress the wrong way..). Very recently I started using justhost.com to host a few other websites (on wordpress) and was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was. No longer did I need to configure databases, the server-side install was a breeze and the automatic tools made life much easier. It all seemed so much nicer than my cludgy install over here and I started thinking of greener grasses elsewhere. This past week I took…

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Cameras on the verge

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Posted on January 6th, 2012

Anything you could ever want to know about the basics of camera use, over at the verge. Here’s a small snippet to give you a taste: SENSOR SIZE If there’s one rule to follow in photography, it’s that cameras with larger sensors take better photos. That’s a generalization, of course, but it’s based on a very basic empirical truth: the bigger the photosensitive surface area, the more light is taken in at a time. Practical evidence for this is abundant, from the Nikon 1 series that disappointed everyone with its undersized CX sensor, to the Nokia N8, which remains the smartphone camera champion today thanks to its class-leading 1/1.83-inch sensor. Full-frame cameras derive their name from the size of their sensors, which match the…

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Just shameful, Paypal

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Posted on January 6th, 2012

One shameful story over at Regretsy, about a transaction gone wrong via paypal. I sold an old French violin to a buyer in Canada, and the buyer disputed the label. This is not uncommon. In the violin market, labels often mean little and there is often disagreement over them. Some of the most expensive violins in the world have disputed labels, but they are works of art nonetheless. Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violin in order to get his money back. They somehow deemed the violin as “counterfeit” even though there is no such thing in the violin world. Astonishing. Via Kottke (via ftrain).  

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Stay curious

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Posted on January 5th, 2012

If you’re a designer (heck even if you’re not a designer), stop everything and read this article by Mike Monteiro, over at net magazine. It’s what Jason Santa Maria describes as a rallying call for designers to take wake up and take 2012 by storm. It does have the sheen of a new years resolution list, but honestly it does ring true for me outside of holiday reality distortion time. Take a look for yourself 6. Stay curious Don’t be the designer who gets proficient and then stops. It’s easy to make a steady living doing that one thing you’re really good at. Until something comes along and obliterates it. Aim higher. Remember those guys who were really good at Debabelizer? (Ask your parents.)…

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