The Photography Pages » off topic

Mapping Shipping in Real Time

TPP — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:18:48 +0000

This absolutely incredible open source data mashup shows shipping all over the world, and is updated in real time. You can see the name and lots of data on any ship you can see on the horizon, anywhere in the world, provided from maps, databases of shipping, and information sent in by contributor volunteers. Click through and have a shufty around. Utterly amazing.Similar Posts:

Help to Avoid or Minimise SAD

TPP — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:00:23 +0000

1. Get outside, much more than you usually would. Walk to work, or part of the way, get out at lunchtimes. Mornings are especially good for light quality, before any rush hour traffic gets started in earnest. Try a longer walk before noon at weekends, and do it regularly through the winter, near water if you can.

2. Go high: hills, tower blocks, any tall buildings, and focus the eyes on the far horizon. Tynemouth clifftop is very stimulating, you can see down river and far out to sea, south to Souter and north to the bays of Northumberland. Try the cliffs and denes of East Durham, Dunstanburgh, Bamburgh too. If you’re in a big city, take the lift to the top of any tall building: try Cale Cross, the Oxo Tower restaurant, or the mighty Rotunda.

3. The light reflected from water: sea, lakes, rivers, a canal, city fountains: make detours in your commute to enjoy any running water, the Thames, the Tyne, the beach.

4. Change your domestic environment. Sleep with the curtains open, rise an hour earlier (or later) to enjoy the morning light and sit at a window to breakfast. Try those special light bulbs and lamps and use them for reading or as a room light while listening to music in the evenings. Remove the dust on any reflective surfaces to make the most of them. Dusting regularly indoors will help to enhance your living space and mood in any case. Move your mirrors to catch the light and keep them sparkling. Use reflectors – large sheets of white cardboard or silver studio reflectors – near where you sit to reflect light back into your face.

5. If you’re doing house improvements, consider places where you could install extra windows or skylights. Do you really need frosting in your bathroom windows? Builders will automatically assume you do, when the views of your garden or a pretty back yard will enhance your morning ritual. Paint window-facing walls or fences white. Paint a few internal walls white too, especially those where you sit or sleep.

6. Use colour in your clothing: it’s tempting in winter to wear dark blacks and autumn shades. Experiment with wearing white and/or bright pale colours, even a pale scarf against the face. Hang white curtains and white lace or fine net at the windows instead of heavy drapes.

7. There’s a self help group and some great advice on the Mind website.

And if you’ve tried anything we haven’t mentioned, please do tell us in the comments.Similar Posts:

Malicious Hack

TPP — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 10:35:39 +0000

If you haven’t yet heard, there is a rapidly spreading hack of WordPress.org installations running deeply into our databases, and hard to fix. If you haven’t upgraded to version 2.8.4 yet, do so right now, before you finish reading this.

There’s something rather romantic, heroic about a poacher. The idea that all that rolling land, all our rivers, are owned by someone, and usually by someone so disgustingly rich they eat and drink the kinds of foods never seen by their tenant farmers or any local villager, is pretty abhorrent, really. But when the poacher attempts to steal your minute little hard-won corner of the internet, it’s quite a different story.

The current issue involves a rogue admin which creeps in via some faulty code and sets up an invisible super-user account. Here’s the git wot got in here overnight:

If your pretty date/name permalinks have been changed at all, or you have any funny or unfamiliar code in them, check your subscriber list. ‘JesusWesson63′ there was an invisible admin. If you have an invisible admin, the count on your admin user page will be one more than the names of your own familiar real life admin people listed. Page through to your most recent subscriber, and add (or subtract) one number to the ID in the url, until you find something resembling the page above, and search for the name in your subscriber list, then delete the thing.

There’s more here and there will no doubt be plenty coming on WordPress itself and further advice appearing online as this thing progresses in the course of the next few hours.

Please let everyone know. Tweet them, and mail or text all your WordPress-using friends, especially if you think they only drop in on the internet at work during the week.

Many, many thanks to my uber-geek knitting collaborator Lisa @risager for her support and help this morning. I’m off to put on my combats and away to try and catch a trout.

Update:
There’s been an announcement from Matt Mullenweg at WP. It’s more detail on how this happened, and urges us to upgrade. Please pass on, and/or the url to this blog post and make sure all your friends know to upgrade to 2.8.4, and maybe offer help if you can.

Update #2
This morning I noticed a drop of about a 3rd in the count from Feedburner of people who read this blog via RSS. On checking the url in the plugin settings, it had been changed. Do check all your settings via the various menus before you assume all is well again, and good luck. Similar Posts:

Richard Dawkins Reads His Hatemail

TPP — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:33:11 +0000

http://youtu.be/-ZuowNcuGsc

Never a Dawkins fan, his absolutism has always seemed too dogmatic for my more agnostic view of life as we know it, but I do admire his style. Who hasn’t had hatemail? Some of mine has been an absolute hoot. The stuff from Lawrence Windrush’s ~~fanboys~~ adoring fan was pretty much like this.

Via Stef who wrote: “Connoisseurs of True™ Internet abuse will note that the stuff Dawkins is reading out is positively friendly in comparison with, say, the kind of comments directed at people who stick corrupted 1gb+ files onto bit torrent sites.”

Update for those who can’t see this after Channel 4 restricted it. New version HERE.Similar Posts:

Ms Moll folds with ease

TPP — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:30:16 +0000

Ms Moll and the source of her tee shirt. Intriguing action there.Similar Posts:

Meanwhile in Central London

TPP — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:29:35 +0000

“We steal their lives, the aspirations and their hopes.” Lots more trickling onto Youtube and others, with the inevitable footage of police smacking people with batons.Similar Posts:

Sentimentally Bush

TPP — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:36:02 +0000

Jonny Void has some coverage if you can’t stomach the Beeb. There are a few of these T Shirts left, collector’s pieces all. Click through the photo for the story and buying links.Similar Posts:

Twitter Town Hall?

TPP — Sat, 31 May 2008 22:18:40 +0000

Seems to be a familiar pattern. A really rockingly useful service is launched in somebody’s kitchen, and after a bit of initial hesitation, all the early adopters jump in and with them, the API gets thoroughly rinsed and spun. For a while, everything is wonderful. Then as the crowd that follows the early majority start plunging in and Scoble, Hawk et al blog and digg and whatever else it is they do, the lovely useful service starts falling over. Databases fail, servers can’t handle the traffic, bandwidths are not wide enough or bandy.

Looks like Twitter is sitting squarely at this point now. The Web2 crowdsourcer of choice for the Birmingham Bloggernuts and the Newcastle BarCampers is being hammered all around the blogland, and ironically enough on its own service, for um, being down a lot.

Probably time for Google to buy them, isn’t it? For gazillions of dollars?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if for once, one of these startups came up with a better business model that allowed them to stay relatively stable without going all anodyne and corporate, and with it, borderline rude and inaccessible? That one or two of the many thousands of these creative devs could get together in a back yard or over the garage and make something work without big fat cheques? WordPress seems to manage it ok.

If you’re still thinking wtf is Twitter for, exactly? Join up, add some people you know irl and find out. And try these: Twhirl, Hashtags, xFruits and the Fb app that links your Tweets to your status update.

Not only but also:

made by Pete

made by Jon

Think we need one for On the Metro? Sam, Alex?Similar Posts:

Surface Unsigned

TPP — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:36:28 +0000

A new bands “competition” that is making entrants buy/sell at least 25 tickets for their own gig at £6 each is trying to get the rather magnificent and award winning Created in Birmingham take down their review, where they quote said terms and conditions. Here they are, courtesy oh just about everyone in Birmingham blogland:

“As you must bring with you at least 25 people to your event you must sell at least 25 tickets for each round you play. If you do not sell 25 tickets you will still be allowed to play however you will NOT progress to the next round no matter how many Surface Ratings you receive.”

After receiving what looks to be a rather ill worded and legally tenuous takedown notice, CiB reproduced the T&C in LOLspeak:

“Oh hai! For to plai at event ur ordiance can haz 25 pipple. U muzt sell 25 tikkits 4 eech gig ur in. If u can not haz cell 25 tikkits u can still haz plai but ur band will NOT go froo 2 necks rawnd no matta haw mannie Sourfice Raiteens U getz. Kthnxbai!”

If there’s nothing wrong with the T&C of the competition, why try to hide them? Or is it that the organisers don’t want the bands to know? Tsk. To quote Danny:

“I would love to see the same structure applied to a regular night were six or so unsigned band played half an hour each and split the door, giving relatively new bands a chance to cut their teeth and punters a regular night to sample a section of the local scene.“

Quite right. How often are young artists, pretty much desperate for exposure, being exploited? Is that what’s actually going on here? Do feel free to blog about this if you’ve an opinion. Links will be um, linked. That’s how it works.
Similar Posts:

LiveBrum is – LIVE!

TPP — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:29:32 +0000

Much effort has recently been applied to what is certainly the best What’s On website around. Live Brum is the brainchild of Josh Hart, co-founder of the mighty Made Media and benevolent host to lots of tiny community-type websites, although he never talks about those.

Apart from a really friendly look and feel, the big, clever usp of LiveBrum is its use of RSS. There are individual feeds for absolutely everything, so you can sign up for just folk, or just gigs at the Drum, or theatre, and if you’ve something to say, a review or just an opinion, you can subscribe to a feed of the comments. For a final stroke of genius, there’s embedding.

It’s brilliant: every city needs one. Congratulations!Similar Posts: