“So, Flickr extends it’s programme to give Pro accounts away to charities. Forgive me for being a cynic, how are charities really going to benefit from unlimited Flickr space? I’m fairly cynical about charities at the best of times, but the idea seems a bit hollow.”

Geez, Alexia, cut them a break. When all you have is lemons, you gotta make what you can make (lemonade requires sugar too). I don’t know of any charities that would say no to unlimited image storage space considering that they have to pay for all sorts of hosting anyway and images take up a lot of that space especially now we all have 12 Mp cameras. Charities survive on PR.

Damien writes:

“Ingenuity, it seems, thrives in environment where there’s scarcity.”

I’m somewhat speechless at the obviousness.

That said - it reminds me of a story told by an IT guy who was from South Africa. During the Apartheid years he had a lot of work because every civilised country had sanctions against South Africa for their oppressive regime. His job was to maintain computers. As software needs increased (downloaded over a 300 baud modem), he couldn’t get hardware to ship across to him so they invented all sorts of ingenious hacks to get things working including RAM bank splitters allowing you to double- and triple-load RAM banks to increase the memory capacity of the machines.

One for the news-junkies as well. The Associated Press has created an iPhone-compliant version of their site at http://apnews.com. It’s a bit US-centric but then what isn’t these days? Loads well under EDGE and plays well with kids and pets. What more could you want?

“You can see Jordan’s portfolio at his site. I’m quite pleased with the results and highly recommend his work. This is not a paid endorsement. I just like to see good work rewarded, so send him your business. You won’t be disappointed.”

Jordan can be found on teh Internets at OneToadDesign.

• support for the camera
• support for conversations
• support for locations!

Looking forward to June!

It’s a good game. You should try it.

Today I had lunch at Kainan Cafe, at the end of Royal Avenue. They have a blog as well which impresses me no end.

What you can see there is Pork bellies with Black Pudding, Sour Soup (Yum!) and Pork Brisket. The Pork bellies were a little sweet for me but still very tasty. The brisket had some bones but was delicious. All very reasonably priced as well.

It was intimate, comfy, no-frills and very friendly. Me like.

“…four guys, a car full of props and gear, and a boatload of post-production time, can recreate the Normandy Invasion of WWII. All it takes is a lot of creativity, patience, and running. Lots of running, climbing, and, well, falling down.

Mike Cane on modern film-making:

“I bring up Danger Man for an important reason.
Why isn’t something like this being done on the Net?
Why are people taking all that wonderful, affordable digital production technology and producing absolute shit with it?
There were some sets in Danger Man that couldn’t have been more than ten feet deep and comprised of only two walls.”

“A row about who should pay for extra network costs incurred by the iPlayer has broken out between internet service providers (ISPs) and the BBC.

ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope.”

So, Mr Whiny ISP guy, why not upgrade your network with the cash you’ve been raking in?

The theory is: now we can catch up on Easties if we’ve missed it, the ISPs networks are starting to experience some strain. But, I hear you say, I have a 6 Mbit download from my ISP and the BBC iPlayer only takes up a fraction of that. And yes, that’s true, but the ISPs have been dishonest with us, taking the same backbone and selling it hundreds of times over to us.

For example, an ISP might buy a 100 Mbit link from a backbone vendor and then sell that to a hundred people, offering them speeds ranging from 512 Kbit to 6 Mbit. They oversell the bandwidth they have because they know that not everyone is going to use it.

They’ve benefited from the fact that most of us only send the occasional email and browse the web (and even then only during the daylight hours) a little while taking in subscription fees. They’ve come down hard on people who abuse the network because their advertised “Unlimited” accounts actually have hard limits.

This time I’m siding with the BBC. The ISPs need to suck it in. I’m paying for my 6 Mbit and I demand the right to download whatever legal content I want. This is a cynical attempt by ISPs to get the BBC to foot the bill for their lack of vision and their dishonesty to customers. They already have mechanisms to prevent abuse of their networks via capped limits and small-print fair use policies.

We the consumer are paying for these bandwidth speeds and, presumably, the ability to use them. We can expect that many poorly-run ISPs will quickly raise their prices in order to pay for the backhaul network upgrade.

This comes mere hours after I was pleased to hear that the BBC and Nintendo had inked a deal where iPlayer would be available for the Wii.

Oh noes!
I need more free time!

“I started working with the audio toolbox on the iPhone today. This morning, I added sounds to the little dice rolling application I’ve been writing. I recorded a total of fifteen sounds, five of a single die being rolled, five of two dice being rolled, and five of four dice being rolled. I let my kids roll the dice while I recorded the sounds, which they thought was cool, although they can’t understand why I can’t put the program on my iPhone.”

I’ve never really used computers in my gaming. Recently it was useful because Google Maps helped us visualise the countryside in Arizona where we were travelling through.

Jeff LaMarche is developing an iPhone Dice Roller for us gaming geeks and I, for one, think it just the tip of the iceberg for the iPhone/iPod touch-carrying gamer geek. Okay, Jeff, get this app out and we’ll see what we can do about Apple giving us a Certificate to install. I’d like to see “dice sets” myself. I will need all sorts of dice for Runequest, only d10s (but a lot of them) for Godlike and everything in between. Get to work (because it looks gorgeous). In planning to play Godlike, we’re going to be using a lot more than one pair of d10s which means that the possibility of using a DiceRoller application has great interest to me. I don’t know if Jeff LaMarche will develop it but it’s inspired me that I’ll need it. Do I need it to just roll a number of d10 or do we need to provide matches? What about dynamic rolls? That would rock My battery will need to be replaced however - to help make sure it lasts a game session and also gets my email. I’ll get in touch with my local AASP and get that sorted.

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

It’s certainly along the lines of fundable.org and other “micropatronage” ideas. I think that RPG designers wouldn’t have a problem with it and I guess that bands like Radiohead (with ‘Pay What You Want’ or NIN’s tiered pricing also smack of the same concepts. My time is precious to me and I’d really love to be doing what I love rather than what pays but the simple needs of mortgage, food on the table and the other necessities of life get in the way.

You would think, however that with 6 billion-odd people on the planet that there’d be a lot more wiggle room for independent creatives and potentially it could be a nail in the coffin for middle men like Publishers and…well…the entire music industry.

That’s got to be worth it, even just screwing over Music Execs? (Let’s face it, fewer things would give more satisfaction to more people for so little.)

[UPDATE: John Scalzi says it’s harder than it looks and that’s probably true. This isn’t ‘find 1000 people and scam a days pay out of them’ as much as it is, ‘work hard and reap rewards’]