Tuesday, September 30, 2003
After the excitement of collecting my new Canon EOS 300D on saturday and a couple of days of serious manual reading I feel quite comfortable with my new 6 megapixel monster. In my opinion it is easier to use than the EOS 10D the bigger brother of the 300 but the build is obviously compromised and it feels slightly cheaper. Anyway I found this fantastic resource which has tutorials for people like me new to the camera and it's professional functionality!And yes I have noticed Photoshop CS is out but I missed the boat and thought better of blogging about it...
Jon 5:27 PM Permalink
[ via BBC ]
"The computers track movement, the speed of movement defines the intensity of the brush stroke and the acceleration defines the saturation of the colour"
It's a new way of creating three dimensional painting for digital artists," he told the BBC programme Go Digital.
"It's also useful for contemporary dancers. They like to improvise and can watch the visual feedback they create when dancing instead of dancing with pre-recorded videos."
The system can also be programmed to produce sounds, again just by tracking the body's movements.
"Height defines the frequency of the sound produced. As you wave your hands up in the air the pitch gets higher, as you crouch down on the floor you hear a low frequency thud," said Professor Ip.
"The result is a 3D sound generated by a four-speaker system."
No doubt I will see this incorporated into the latest arcade games on George Street before long!
Jon 5:23 PM Permalink
Thursday, September 25, 2003
I posted an article on Tuesday on Flash Mobs, well today I found this site relating to David Blaine's seemingly pointless stunt in London. For those of you who don't know he has encased himself in a perspex box and trying to go 44 days without food. Well there is a Flash Mob planned for Monday 13th October at precisely 7.44pm. Instructions so far, you will need to bring a food item – the more delicious and smellier – the better!Jon 1:39 PM Permalink
First of all thanks to everybody who gave up a few minutes of their day to help me find a new host for Freaksauce (Jesse Warden, Ryan Matsikas, Scott Barnes and Mark Stanton to name but a few). I've got an idea who I think I'll plump with once I have some more info from them.
Next up I have been experiencing problems with my site loading very slowly which I think is due to the sitemeter, I am going to remove it for the time being as I'm sure I'll get web stats from my new ISP when I sort that out.
Jon 11:43 AM Permalink
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Internet banking has become a dominant part of my life over the past few years, I actually have 3 seperate internet banking accounts with 3 different banks in the UK and Australia. I take it for granted that this information is safe and my connection is secure but after reading this article from the BBC I'm not so sure. Two fake banking sites were set up, one protected with a basic firewall the other totally unprotected, as they say the results were astounding.'Over the eight weeks that the sites were left online, the unprotected website was attacked a total of 19,128 times, roughly once every four minutes.
The protected website fared better but was attacked 1,672 times, almost once every hour.
More than a third of the attacks on the protected website were so severe that they crashed the site and could have resulted in the loss of data.'
[ via James ]
Jon 4:41 PM Permalink
Can anyone help me, my domain expires soon and words cannot express how utterly dissapointed I am with EasySpace, I rushed into buying the domain and totally regret paying for such an appaling service. If anyone has any good suggestions for a cheap host with about 20Mb web space and if poss, mySQL, CFMX or PHP support please could you leave your suggestions by clicking the comments link below.
Jon 10:56 AM Permalink
I blogged a little while ago about the new flashmob craze hitting major cities of the world, see flashmob.co.uk or cheesebikini for details. Well I was gutted to read that the first flashmob took place in Sydney last week and I missed it!!
Apparently about 100 people all turned up at Central Station, Sydney and proceeded to act like Stock Market traders in front of the train timetable screens for 5 minutes. I really wish I hadn't missed that one, but alas I was at work...
I have just found, SydMob to keep up to date!
Jon 10:11 AM Permalink
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
I was just reading the article over at MacroFun about Aussie hype and I thought I'd share something with anyone interested about Australia.I am from England but have been living, travelling and working in Australia for 15 months now. Last December I went off on a little 3 week summer excursion to watch the solar eclipse in the outback and kept a diary of the events on my personal blog, these are my personal views but some may find it interesting. Click here and start at the bottom of the page.
Jon 9:56 AM Permalink
Monday, September 22, 2003
As far as I am aware this is officially the first job posted on the newly created Actionscript.org employment section! Lets hope this freelance network is the start of something big.Jon 10:01 AM Permalink
Finally I have decided to trade in my trusty compact camera for a digital, I was all set to buy the new Fuji s5000 until Canon announced the release of the EOS 300D.
After grilling a few salesmen on saturday I finally got the answer I was looking for, the Fuji, although a 6 Megapixel camera is actually only effectively a 3.2 Megapixel camera but using some new technology called Super CCD HR it actually records double the effective resolution?!?! I don't really understand and I haven't got time to even research this but what it all boiled down to was that the Canon was a far superior camera and could easily print out A3 size, so I pre-ordered one as they have not been released yet here in Australia. This should be a good camera to learn about photography on as I don't waste any film experimenting and I can try and blag canon lenses off friends for the weekend!
Jon 9:30 AM Permalink
Friday, September 19, 2003
It's friday so I thought I'd post something funny courtesy of Camp Chaos. Enjoy!Jon 10:05 AM Permalink
Thursday, September 18, 2003
[ via Gizmodo ]It seems Samsung and Napster are teaming up to give Apple a run for their money . Gizmodo says "we're guessing that Samsung will try to integrate their new player into Napster the same way that Apple integrated the iPod into iTunes."
Napster...I remember them...
Jon 3:18 PM Permalink
[ via FlashGuru ]
Actionscript.org's employment section is now live. The service for Flashers and employers is completely free and will hopefully become a very useful resource.
"The freelancers amongst us can now sign up and have ourselves listed
in a searchable database of Flash talent, complete with relevant daily or weekly emails containing new positions sent directly to your inbox. On the other hand, employers can also register and post job vacancies which are then searchable by us, the prospective candidates" - Guy Watson
Jon 12:09 PM Permalink
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
After reading about FlashTrix at OnRelease I thought I'd check it out and found this link to Billy Bussey who seems to have really gone to town with his high bandwidth version of his site, I think it works well as a portfolio site although it is obviously unfinished.Jon 1:56 PM Permalink
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
I've just received an email from Evan Williams, co-founder of Pyra/Blogger explaining how things are going to change now that they are a part of Google. It seems that the Pro version will soon cease to exist and the features rolled into the regular free version. To say thanks to people like me who paid for the pro subscription in order to help fund the expansion and development of the Blogger software they are rewarding us with a free Blogger Hoodie!Jon 2:40 PM Permalink
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Finally after a few months of incredibly hard graft Fresh magazine has hit the shelves in Australia. My girlfriend Kate is the Art Director and was responsible for the complete overall design of the new weekly mag. It has eaten up all her evenings and weekends for a couple of months now and it's still hectic but apparently 50% of the weeks stock sold on the first day so I'm very proud of her, she obviously hit the mark!See their site at http://www.freshmagazine.com.au
Jon 3:40 PM Permalink
Friday, September 05, 2003
With all the MX 2004 posts flying around I thought I'd be a bit different, having spoken to my mate Ste this morning back home and my mother last night I've been thoroughly brought up to date with the opening of the new Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham!! When I left they had finally destroyed the old Bullring leaving a giant crater in its place, since being here in Australia they have built a new shiny non-60's monster and have even got a nice new website to match check out Bullring.co.ukFor those of you reading this in any other place than England, it's a big thing...honest!
Jon 2:32 PM Permalink
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
My brother pointed out in his weblog that MIT have started publishing its course material online. I had a look and although there isn't a lot there yet there is a course called 'Common Sense Reasoning for Interactive Applications'"This course will explore the state of the art in common sense knowledge, and class projects will design and build interfaces that can exploit this knowledge to make more usable and helpful interfaces."
Jon 10:25 AM Permalink