Greenflame » Digital Technology

Digital Ethnography resources

stepheng — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 09:55:18 +0000

I’ve been interested in the Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State University for a while now. Coordinated by Michael Wesch, their videos The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today have done the rounds on the internet in the past year or so. But there’s more coming out of the project. Wesch’s presentation on an anthropological introduction to YouTube is interesting (but definitely longer than your typical 3 minute YouTube clip). Also the mediated cultures web site has the videos often in high resolution formats making reading some of the text in them much easier.

See:

Internet down

stepheng — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 23:53:14 +0000

Sigh. The internet connection at home has gone belly-up and ISP is struggling to identify problem. So far it’s been 5 days with no connection. I’m sure it’s good for my soul, though.

Got those non-widescreen blues

stepheng — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 04:55:22 +0000

Our television isn’t too old, only four years old perhaps, but it’s causing a bit of grief for us. Firstly, the tuner seems to have lost the plot with remembering channels and secondly it isn’t widescreen. The first problem can be gotten around with judicious use of the VCR and Sky digital box tuners (though we lose the option of watching a different channel if videoing off Sky), but the second problem was more of an issue because Sky started broadcasting the rugby only in widescreen, which meant that for most of the games recently we haven’t been able to see the on-screen score. (It appears too to be a problem for lots of people, including some of the radio commentators).

Anyway, the quick answer is to fiddle around in the Sky settop box’s advanced settings and set the TV mode to “4:3 Letterbox”. Widescreen shows will get “letterboxed” (i.e. the black bars on top and bottom, smaller picture, but all viewable), while older 4:3 shows will still fill the screen. Not ideal, but until we replace the TV (not in the near future) it’s a workaround.

Will try it for the All Blacks tonight.

More details at: SkyTV Widescreen tips.

Different type of user interface

stepheng — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:09:42 +0000

With all the hype over direct neural interfaces this hi-tech (but also lo-tech) approach looks interesting. See ‘Tongue Drive System’ Controls Wheelchair, Computer | Wired Science from Wired.com.

Techy Windows question

stepheng — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:30:35 +0000

I (foolishly) assumed the home Acer PC was using NTFS for the file system on its hard disk, but have now found after working on some large files that it is FAT32 and I can’t have files larger than 4GB! How bizarre - way, way back before I started theological training etc. we were using NTFS by default on our old Pentium (I) NT 4 boxes at work. Surely if XP works better with NTFS why was this not the default. Apart from being able to boot from floppy to access the hard disk their should be no advantage?

So, I’m looking at converting the drive over to NTFS - as per the Microsoft instructions here.

I have a big batch of blank DVDs for backup, plus the iPod also for backups. So I will get things back if they turn to custard, but I was wondering if anyone had any experiences of the conversion process first-hand? There’s always something to watch out for.

BTW - on the iBook I’m running the journalling file system which I turned on at install. That seems really good, compared to the old file system that 10.1 & 10.2 had.

Neo-Amish Drop Outs

stepheng — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:51:45 +0000

After a flurry of technology posts it seems appropriate to point to this interesting one by Kevin Kelly about people who are or have been heavily involved with technology and are now attempting to reduce it’s invasiveness in their lives. See Kevin Kelly — The Technium — Neo-Amish Drop Outs.

Mobile Flickr for iPhone

stepheng — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:04:47 +0000

While I won’t be owning an iPhone in the near future I was interested to stumble across this Flickr app for it created by my ‘cousin-in-law’ : Mobile Flickr, coming to an iPhone near you — Sneak.

Videos of it working over at Mobile Flickr | Apple iPhone School

Being an old UNIX programmer I love the idea of assembling your own set of small, powerful applications doing one task well rather than monolithic applications that try to do too much and fail at doing everything well. I don’t use Flickr but I like the look of this small app.

Wordle - Cool

stepheng — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:56:53 +0000

Via Hacking Christianity - The Social Principles Word-Cloud I’ve found Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds.

Here’s a word cloud for the presentation/paper I did this week.

(Click on it to get slightly bigger picture)

Building Fonts

stepheng — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:48:44 +0000

When the combination of WYSIWYG graphical user interfaces, scalable fonts, laser printers and desktop publishing software started to make its presence felt at the end of the 1980s it was a time of serious typeface abuse in newsletters, invitations and home-made greetings cards. It seems everyone wanted to go and put as many jarring and clashing typefaces on a page as they could. Some of my friends even when to far as to use things like Fontographer to create their own typeface variants, but then they tended to be over-zealous about things like that (and actually read up on things like kerning etc.) (Of course, all that came in useful when we had a couple of assignments in computer graphics class writing Postscript by hand to generate graphic objects and in order to understand how a Postscript laser printer or Sun’s NeWS GUI worked.)

(Equivalent things to this typeface abuse still happens today in Powerpoint presentations you encounter every now and then, along with the evil that is the blink tag in web pages.)

Anyway, the other day I saw this news article, F is for do-it-yourself fonts - Stuff.co.nz, which pointed over to FontStruct | Build, Share, Download Fonts. This is a web site that allows you to design your own typefaces and share them with the world. Suddenly it’s 1986 all over again.

Related link: At some point I want to see the film, Helvetica, as I’m always intrigued by the effort and history that lurks in the stories about things like typefaces.

Animation technology helps children to walk

stepheng — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:02:22 +0000

The fusion of technology from Weta Digital’s work on animation technologies using human subjects finds an application in helping doctors understand children’s motion with a view to corrective surgery and other therapy. See Wellywood technology helps children to walk - NZ Herald: Technology News