Angus Thinks…

Valve have announced Portal for Mac.

Played it for the first time a couple of weeks ago and have been wondering how best to play it at home.

From April I’ll be able to play it (and lots of other Valve games) on my Mac.

Fun

So another one of these articles, shock horror, some public body has spent thousands of pounds buying hot drinks for their staff.

Clearly, the whole lot of them should be hanged  …

except, if you look at the figures quoted, the outrage breaks down:

From the article,

440 staff and a total bill of 70,000 over 3 years.

Assuming a 48 week working year for everyone for 3 years, this means that the amount spent per week per person is

(70000/(48*3)) = 486 per week

486/440 = 1.11 per person.

Yes, just over 1 pound per person, per week!

Outrage, I say, outrage!

Ignoring for a moment, the fact that visitors apparently got hot drinks too for the money; given the large amounts of money and the vitally important decisions that a group like the GHA makes, making the right decisions is important. If spending a few pounds a week on hot drinks makes a key decision even slightly better, then it’s worth it.

The same is true of biscuits, snacks and even meals. Anything that improves the performance of the organisation at such a low cost is worth doing.

So as far as I’m concerned, this is money well spent.

Happened to be in a major supermarket’s electronics section the other day and was told that the “3″ network offers the best mobile broadband.

Although oddly all of the O2 retail hardware boxes were sold out, plenty of “3″ boxes to be found.

Unfortunately no reasons were offered by the employee as to this blanket statement.

We recommend using 1920×1080, 60Hz(Except for 19/22LU40**, 19LU50**, 19/22/26/32/37/42LH20**, 32/37/42LG21**, 32/37/42LG33**, 19/22/26LG31**, 42/50PQ35**, 42PQ65**), 1360×768, 60Hz(Only 19/22LU40**, 19LU50**, 19/22/26/32/37/42LH20**, 32/37/42LG21**, 32/37/42LG33**, 26LG31**, 50PQ35**), 1024×768, 60Hz(Only 42PQ35**, 42PQ65**) , 1440×900, 60Hz(Only 19LG31**) , 1680×1050, 60Hz(Only 22LG31**)for the PC mode, this should provide the best picture quality.

So which was recommended again?

In fairness, the manual is trying to cover about 20 different models, and it actually does a fairly good job in most ways. Except that there are a few passages like the one above …

Newspapers are in trouble, everyone seems to think this. Most newspapers have seen circulation declines of their paper editions and the web doesn’t pay that well for advertising.

What to do? Lots of obvious ideas like charging monthly fees or having per article charges.

Subscriptions overlook the fact that many people don’t subscribe to newspapers, they buy them each day. Sometimes they buy different ones on different days or go a week without buying one at all.

Per article charges are far too expensive, sometimes as much as 1 cent per word for say a 250 word article costing $2.50. If the article is critical to your business it may be affordable (The FT and the Wall Street journal seem to be doing well in this line) but if it’s about a political crisis or the actions of the local council?

So my first idea on this:

Sell the web based newspaper as an digital artifact, not just a bundle of content or a website subscription.

Allow access to single editions of the newspaper on the internet.

Give away a code inside each paper copy of the newspaper which would be good for reading the articles in that edition online forever. Once you’ve got the code (say in the morning), you can enter it into the newspaper website and your account is then authorized to read the articles from that day’s edition on any device you own.

Maybe you could also buy the codes online without having to buy the paper edition, plus if you got a subscription the content would be authorized automatically. Don’t want a particular day? Don’t need to pay.

Sell blocks of days prepaid in advance for a marginal discount. Because it’s buying a bundle of days rather than a monthly access subscription you should be able to get a slightly higher price, especially since it’s more flexible.

Plus you could make more money by allowing people to buy codes to access previous days, even after the event. Want to read the newspapers from the last major election, buy it now for 2.50. (You could charge more for old editions obviously)

Whether this is the idea to save the newspaper industry or not, I think it will take a lot of clever thinking to solve the problems.

This is a brilliant video of Senator Al Franken of Minnesota drawing a map of the United States entirely freehand and  including all of the states.

YouTube Video

(via NGM)

Fortunately, we were able to re-solder the USB connector back to the PCB and continue testing.

[Ars Technica]

How many websites would bother doing this, and more to the point how many websites have reviewers who could do this?

I just saw this comment while reading an article about David Letterman:

This article is poorly done. It uses sweeping generalizations, it is factually incorrect in several areas, and shows a general misunderstanding of television. …

I  enjoyed reading the article anyway, but should I have done?

I’m puzzled that this doesn’t seem to have a uk release date (or even a distributor as far as I can see)

The trailer looks great:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/summit/thebrothersbloom/

http://www.brothersbloom.com/

I picked up a copy of Wired UK yesterday and I started reading it this morning while I was eating my breakfast.

So far I’m impressed, it feels solid, there’s plenty of interesting looking stuff and I liked the infographics (which I spent some time interpreting). The pictorial on the 3d printer that uses regular paper was really clever too.

I hope to offer more thoughts on this once I’ve read more, but my first instinct is to subscribe for the year.

Which is good; because I was really hoping that it would be good, and it is.

DRM is stealing stories from the eyes of children.

Spotted recently while reading a forum
(which sadly doesn’t allow direct linking as far as I can see)

Recently seen in a Reddit thread:

Interesting early signs of improvement in Detroit. People are buying and renovating the unoccupied and abandoned houses:

Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive.

I ran into a problem in the last few days with YouTube. I would visit the site, but every video I tried to watch displayed the message “we’re sorry the video is no longer available”.

Other people seem to have noticed something like this too.

The answer, as found in the last message in the thread, is to update to the newest version of Flash player, which appears to fix the problem.

However it makes me ponder something: what changed in the latest version of Flash and why does YouTube not recommend this upgrade to users? (Ideally with a large and obvious message)

I was in the supermarket the other day looking for juice, only to find that the regular own brand wasn’t available! A disaster that was only averted when I realized that they were carrying a new branded juice instead. But why?

I had no idea until I came across this article which describes the financial difficulties of SunJuice, which unfortunately now seems to be in Administration.

SunJuice apparently provided 50% of all uk own-label juice.

I guess the costs were rising, prices weren’t and they got pushed a bit too hard by the buyers.

SamKnows has an article on some limitations that exist for 3g mobile internet access. (using usb dongles).

The killer is the limit for total bandwidth, as low as sharing 6.75 Mbits/s between everyone connecting to a single base station.

I knew the situation couldn’t be the same as land line, but this is much less than I expected.

I happened to attend a lecture today at the RSSA given by Roger Lockwood who the head of the Northern Lighthouse Board. The board manages and maintains lighthouses and other navigational aids around Scotland (and for various reasons the Isle or Man)

It was a brilliant lecture, the speaker was great and the topic was very interesting. It started with a discussion of existing lighthouses; then the switch to automation and the story of the last manned light house at Fair Isle South Lighthouse (only automated in 1998).

Interesting was the fact that they can run lighthouses on solar panels in Scotland with good reliability (although batteries were mentioned too of course for storing the power). Wind power has proved to be less effective, with the windmills tending to get damaged by bad weather. The panels also have no moving parts and require less maintenance.

Moving on to the importance of not relying solely on GPS and the importance of the lights and aids. This included some cautionary tales of vessels that have got into difficulty by assuming that the GPS was right and the beacons, buoys and light houses were wrong.

Then a discussion of the e-loran system which will give much better positioning information for vessels at sea, the progress made and the work still to do. (Apparently more base station beacons needed to improve coverage).

Some very interesting questions at the end including a discussion on jamming of GPS interfering with navigation (which is apparently seen as a real and serious problem), plus several cautionary tales about the importance of checking your navigation systems.

Randall Munroe (of xkcd) gave a talk at Google.

The Onion on a new Mac …

They got that Mac tradeshow look so perfectly too.