Technology
ID cards: voluntary? Only if you’ve never been on holiday
Clauses in the draft Immigration and Citizenship Bill give state officials the power to make anyone who has ever entered the country, at any time, prove who they are without needing any suspicion of a potential crime.
Civil liberty groups warned that the catch-all clauses would effectively cover any British citizen who has ever left the UK, even for a holiday, because they will have “entered” the UK on their return.
Refusing to hand over the necessary documents would be a criminal offence with a maximum penalty of almost a year in prison and/or a hefty fine.
It’s probably the result of badly worded draft legislation, but if it isn’t fixed it’s all rather chilling.
Very quick example of video from the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000
As promised, here’s some quick footage from the Sanyo camcorder I was banging on about. The embedded version is standard definition, but you can view it in HD by clicking through to the Vimeo site.
Quick example of video from the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000 from Gary Marshall on Vimeo.
Have your say on website accessibility
BSI British Standards has published a draft of the forthcoming BS 8878 standard on its website, and it’s keen to hear from interested parties. From the press release:
Julie Howell, Chair of the committee responsible for drafting DPC BS 8878, commented, “Once published, this standard will be a fantastic tool for organizations wishing to understand their responsibilities in enabling disabled people to use web content. DPC BS 8878 encourages the enhancement of the overall user experience - a much more holistic approach than we have seen previously and one that I hope will yield exciting results. Right now we want to encourage as many people as possible to read and comment on the draft standard to ensure it is as relevant as possible.”
I interviewed Julie last week, and she means it when she says she wants lots of input from interested parties - not just disabled Internet users, but anybody with an interest in accessibility. The consultation period ends on 31 January.
“If you’re on MySpace, you’re a cretin. And poor.”
Rupert Murdoch’s biographer Michael Wolff reckons MySpace could soon be worth absolutely nothing. Why? Because everybody on it is a “cretin”.
if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.
First impressions of the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000 and CA-8 digital camcorders
I’ve been playing with two video cameras over the last couple of weeks, both by Sanyo and both from the Xacti range: the Xacti CA-8 waterproof camera, and the HD-1000 high definition one. This won’t be an in-depth review, but I think I’ve played with them enough to get a decent picture (sorry) of their pros and cons.
The CA-8 first. The gimmick is that it’s waterproof to 1.5m for 60 minutes, and it is - me and my colleagues at BBC Radio Scotland have been having a merry old time dumping it in fish tanks, in baths and in the River Clyde. That side of things is great, but it feels as if the waterproofing took the bulk of the budget. Image quality is poor, low light performance is dismal, it’s standard definition and I really didn’t like it. That said, if you’re a running, jumping, mountain biking extreme sports kind of person, it may be worth checking out: like most camcorders its picture quality is best in normal daylight, and the waterproofing could come in handy if you’re doing sporty things.
The HD-1000, on the other hand, is great. Which is just as well, because I spent my own money on it (well, vouchers and stuff I’d got for my birthday). There’s lots to like about it, although there are a few major cons too. Crucially it’s only about £100 more than the CA-8: shop around and you can get it for about £320.
Pros first. It does full HD (although for reasons of space and “that’s good enough” I’ve been using 720p instead of the full resolution), it takes SDHC cards, it’s got a 10x optical zoom and there’s built-in image stabilisation. And by god it needs it, because it’s a pistol grip camera. That’s fine in most circumstances, but it’s not as stable if, like me, you have RSI. The positioning of the zoom control doesn’t help either, because it’s where the hammer would be if it were a real gun - so moving it with your thumb destabilises the camera, causing some pretty dramatic shaking even when you’re not zooming in.
The f1.8 lens does a reasonable job in low light and there’s a shoe connector for an additional light, although I do wonder what that would do to the already precarious balance of the camera.
It’s a very camera-y camcorder in a lot of respects, which I like - although I suspect many people will hate it. Go into the menus and there’s lots of tweakery: ISO speeds, aperture settings, exposure compensation, changing from multi-spot metering and 9-point autofocus to centre weighting… it’s all stuff you’ll be familiar with if you’ve got a reasonably high-spec stills camera, and fiddling can make a big difference to the quality of the footage.
Other than the stability, there are a few other downsides. Autofocus can be slow and easily confused, although it’s better if you switch on Face Chaser. This attempts to identify faces and keep the focus on them, adjusting brightness and contrast to avoid the face-in-the-dark syndrome that can affect cameras when they’re confused about lighting conditions. Battery life is adequate rather than brilliant, and the manual doesn’t emphasise the need for fast SDHC cards enough: try shooting in full HD on a basic SD card and the results will be disastrous. Last but not least, the Full Auto button really bugs me. Press it and the camera reverts to the default settings, which is great if your fiddling has made a complete arse of things, but as far as I can see it goes to the factory defaults and I can’t find a way of overruling it with my own default settings.
Overall, though, I’m really quite taken with it. You don’t expect a £300-ish high definition camera to be perfect, and the HD-1000 isn’t. However, when you consider that many manufacturers are flogging standard definition SD card cameras for more than the Xacti currently sells at, it’s excellent value for money. I’ll post some video soon - I just need to go somewhere interesting so I can film it.
“If this is the future of journalism, I don’t think CNN has anything to worry about just yet”
Interesting post by Alan at Broadstuff, reacting to the “Twitter is the future of news!” stuff going round the internet at the moment:
the bulk, the 90%, was pure cr*p, with stuff such as:
- Wild surmises to gain attention
- Re-tweeting mainstream media in an endless circle jerk
- Mediawhores jumping on the bandwagon with crocodile tears and faux sympathy
- Hatemail
- Hatemail to the hatemailers
- People arguing with any or all of the above…this was not news - it was a hose of sewage, in which the few nuggets of real news were virtually impossible to pick out.
By happy coincidence, I wrote a typically cheery column about the very same thing in the last issue of .net (it’s not online yet, sorry):
…More than anything, I’m tired of the sheer self-absorption of the electronic elite. This month they’re all twittering, so when something interesting happens they hear about it on Twitter, because of course that’s where they are. Within minutes, Twitter is the future of news! …If this time next month the technorati are drinking Special Brew with tramps and they see something interesting on a cardboard box, drinking Special Brew with tramps will be – yes! – the future of news!
Small Apple sale, not many dead
“Hi, I’m Steve Jobs - and I’m bargain crazy!” Doesn’t work, does it? Anyway, the UK Apple Store’s one-day event is on, and there’s the odd discount - a fiver off an iPod, thirty quid off an iMac, sixty quid off a MacBook and a free horse.
I’m lying about the horse.
Mourning the modem
According to the latest bunch of government statistics, 94.1% of Brits connect to the internet via broadband - and the percentage of dial-up modem users has dropped below 5%. That means to all intents and purposes, dial-up is dead. Which in some respects is a shame.
Don’t get me wrong. Dial-up was desperately slow, horrifically expensive and hopelessly unreliable, and today’s net users would be flabbergasted by our excitement when modems went from 14.4kbps to 28.8, and then upwards to the dizzy peaks of 56kbps - so photos of naked people loaded almost immediately, and you could download an MP3 in about a week.
Of course, broadband is miles better. But there’s one thing missing.
Broadband doesn’t boing.
I loved the crackles and boings as my modem laboriously dialled my ISP, negotiated a connection and finally shut up. It was the equivalent of the HBO “waaaah” at the start of The Wire, or the “Previously” intro to NYPD Blue: a sound that told you something interesting was going to happen. And no matter how many times you went online and nothing interesting happened whatsoever, the boings never stopped having that effect.
For all its joys, broadband is just there, like a light switch. Dial-up was an adventure.
Desktop Monbiot
This revolutionary software uses your computer‘s webcam to detect when you’re feeling happy, or idealistic, or wasting time staring dreamily out of the window while the Earth plunges towards ecopocalypse.
BANG! The vociferous Guardian pundit’s face looms out of your screen DOUSH! He delivers a pin-point demolishing of your most cherished illusions.
More Apple-related tomfoolery from David McCandless.
What if bandwidth is the new oil?
Forgive the self-promotion, but I enjoyed writing this what-if for PC Plus:
Of course, bandwidth isn’t controlled by sheikhs or delivered in trucks, and we’re pretty sure that the US won’t invade a sovereign nation to seize control of its cable TV network – but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t striking similarities between oil, gas and bandwidth.
While I’m thinking about it, dear readers, what’s your take on self-promotion? Would you prefer it if I didn’t link to individual articles? Should I do it more? Could you care less?