Photography | Design | Technology | Business
Ben mentioned that he’d heard that Linda Smith had died tonight. I was gutted. Linda was one of the funniest, most entertaining people I’ve ever come across and I shall genuinely miss her on The News Quiz and HIGNFY.
Technorati Tags: 
, lindasmith
Using the Fake ‘Tilt-Shift’ technique from recedinghairline.co.uk
See also, the Flickr Group for these shots.
Technorati Tags: photoshop, tilt-shift
It seems like there’s been a winner in the PSP Hacks competition…
“We have a winner in the swf player coding contest. I just want to officially congratulate 71M from our forums for successfully producing a fully functional SWF player that runs on the PSP.
A few notes concerning the player from 71M:
The player supports Flash 7 action script. Not everything mind you but a good portion of it.
As for limitations, I would say that people will have to bare in mind that the PSP only has 32mb of RAM. 3mb of that is taken up by the program itself, so there isn’t much room left.
Having complex vector shapes is also a bad idea as the shapes are triangulated and produce massive triangle lists.
The bottom line is, try it and see what works and if someone is creating a new animation for the player they need to keep testing it to see if it still works.
Sorry I can’t give anymore information, but there are so many combinations to cover that I wouldn’t be able to list them all. It might be better to let the community find out for themselves what works and what doesn’t. Maybe run another competition to see who comes up with the most innovative game with the player?
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So, starting on the 1st of March, we will have a flash coding contest. Let’s see who can come up with the best flash game for the PSP now that the media is available.
The code is still being cleaned up so we will release the PSPHacks.net SWF player on or about the 28th of Febuary.”
So, how awesome might this be!? Can’t wait to see how it works etc. Also note the last bit – about the new Flash coding contest… Get your PSP Flash on 
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Update: The player is now available for download on the link above. I haven’t managed to get it working yet as my usb ports on my 12″ laptop are playing up (along with the mic port and ethernet port) so I can’t copy it over. PT has managed to though!
So, Joi sent me a copy of World of Warcraft for the US servers last month. I’ve been playing on the EU servers for some time now, but when I tried to install the US version it wouldn’t have it. I considered renaming the folder and putting in a new copy altogether but at over 5gb each I thought I’d look to see if there was a more elegant ‘hack’ first…
Here’s what you do:
1) You have to sign up for your new account (in the EU or US)
2) Open your World of Warcraft folder and look for ‘realmlist.wtf’ (without the apostrophes) – open it up in a text editor
3) You’ll see this -> set realmlist eu.logon.worldofwarcraft.com (or us.logon.world…. if your copy is a US version)
4) Change the ‘eu’ or ‘us’ to the one you want to login to the next time you run the game
5) If you’re on different game servers on the EU and US version (like me – stormrage in EU and Eitrigg in US) you’ll be initially presented with the new character roll screen. Just choose the same server settings that you did originally (so, out of ‘normal’, ‘pvp, etc etc and the same language) and hit ‘Suggest Realm’ – the resulting pop-up screen will suggest your originally chosen realm – click ok and then you’ll have your existing character list load up.
6) Select you char and ‘Enter World’!
When you want to switch back just do the same steps but change back the ‘eu’ or ‘us’ and you’re sorted.
I can’t see how this is against Blizzard’s terms of service but I’m sure they’ll invent a way soon – they tend to be a little bit like that – but if you have a paid-for account on both geographical areas then surely it’s cool? Ah well, we’ll see.
See you in Azeroth!
Technorati Tags: gaming, World of Warcraft, WoW
ISPA, at their annual awards ceremony, have cite the UK’s presidency of the EU as ‘Villain of the Year’ in regard to it’s fixation with enforcing a fairly ridiculous view over the retention of phone and internet data. Basically, the UK has argued that internet service providers and telecoms operators will have to keep details of their subscribers’ communications for up to two years.
The Home Office said this in it’s defence,
“Agreement on retaining communications data places a vital tool against terrorism and serious crime in the hands of law enforcement agencies across Europe,” he (Home Secretary Charles Clarke) told Ispa on 10 January.
“Modern criminality crosses borders and seeks to exploit digital technology. The measure is an important step in delivering the right to citizens across the EU to live in peace and free from the negative impact of terrorism and serious crime.”
I think we’re letting too much of our freedoms be legislated like this. Whilst no-one would say that combating terrorism is not a worthy cause I do think that a lot of people will start shouting when this data is used to pursue other investigations – and you can be fairly certain it will be. ISPA presenting press-attracting awards is one thing, but perhaps they should have lobbied a little bit harder and more publicly prior to this being approved by the European Parliament on Tuesday…
Technorati Tags: technology
I love this box-out on the BBC News site:
The Beeb very rarely get excited about anything and this just tickled me. (might have been my tea come to think of it…)
Technorati Tags: funny
I find myself coming into more and more contact with Microsoft these days, despite being highly critical of various aspects of the Windows platform etc. Thinking about it, this can only mean that Microsoft are beginning to make more contact with the web design/development community themselves. This is fairly interesting considering that Microsoft have been the ‘Skoda’ of our industry since the early days of MS Frontpage…
That said, I’ve always admired Microsoft as a company. I haven’t always admired their products, and I have never admired their attitude to the web browser experience, but ever since I started working in tech I’ve aspired to someday work for them – of course, my aspirations have levelled up over the years and these days I’d settle for Mr Gates’ position or nothing!
Thanks to an old friend, Wayne, I had cause to go along to the MS campus in the UK last summer and I wasn’t disappointed. It seemed like a fab place to work – as long as you could get past the fact that it was in Reading of course. Still, it made me consider going back to work for someone else for the first time in *years*.
Anyway, the reason for this post, is that I’m off to Mix ’06 in March thanks, in a big way, to Lynda Weinman. I’m very much looking forward to it to be honest and I’m very interested to see how much they want to engage the wider community with their new web design/development product range, Expression. Lynda has been a good friend for many years now and two opportunities to hang out in a month will be fun 
If you’re gonna be there then feel free to give me a shout (I’ll be staying at the Venetian for the duration).
Technorati Tags: mix06, conference, travel
Joi has been interviewed about World of Warcraft – it’s an interesting read if you’re into online gaming in any way. He says he started play WoW as an experiment in social networking… Hmmm
As for my habit, well, I now play on both the European and US servers… I’m guildmaster of ‘Think Different’ in Stormrage EU and a ‘veteran’ of ‘We Know’ on Eitrig US. If you play on either of these then give me a shout in-game
Technorati Tags: gaming, World of Warcraft, WoW
These are some amazing images of China. There is no credit on the main page though – if I wasn’t sat in Starbucks right now I’d check the linked page too though ‘cos they really should be credited properly – especially as they’re so good…
Technorati Tags: China, photography
Note: This got on the front page of Digg the other day and the traffic took my site down without mercy. The link has been offline for a few days to let it all die down…
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I saw a webpage a longtime ago that had some great pictures of office pranks but everytime I went to go back the site had busted it’s bandwidth and the pics weren’t available. After much hunting I’ve managed to put together a few of them for your enjoyment
The moral of this post? Don’t take sick days. Don’t go on vacation. Eat in your cube. Trust no-one.
If anyone knows who’s photo’s these are then please pass on their details to me, or leave a comment so that I can credit them properly (there’s a faint watermark on some of them but all I can make out is ‘Pocket’).
Update: noneloud points out that the original images are to be found on Pocket Lint – thanks!
Technorati Tags: funny