bikes and things

Woo, yeah, you have an app. No actually I just want to read the damn content.

Xkcd getting it bang on as usual.

I recently read the fantastic Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet by Andrew Blum, which goes into the nature of our modern communications systems and the cables, machines, routers and people that make it all tick. The physical manifestation of this communications fabric is largely hidden in plain and un-assuming buildings which don’t reveal themselves to the average person.

With this in mind it’s fascinating to see that our physical communications fabric wasn’t always so well concealed as this series of images from the Retronaut shows.

Via MG Siegler.

A strangely beautiful look at the various Tweets happening around the world in realtime. Leave it to build up for a bit to see how the concentration of activity is based around the world. Might even leave it on over night and see what happens to the image later when the other time zones have all woken up.

Try it at tweetping.net

Actually after a while it starts to look like this.

Via FutureFabric

Whilst catching up with family over Christmas the usual duties of helping out with the odd IT query were carried out. I was pleasantly surprised to see my Dad with a Nook e-reader but then we opened up his laptop so he could tell me all about his Army friends from the 60’s and 70’s he was re-connecting with on Facebook. Internet Explorer had so many crap toolbars installed that half of the screen was in use.

Then at Mum’s house I used her laptop to check something online. 15 mins later it started up. Each individual action required waiting 10 seconds for the UI to update. Shocking how bad all this stuff is. Think an iPad might be the best option for Mum in the future.

Shocking to see how bad general computing is for the Mum’s and Dad’s of the world.

NASA have been busy recently, planning manned missions to Mars as well as plans to land on an asteroid. Fortunately in between this they still have time to make awesome images such as the one below entitled Black Marble. The title is a reference to the famous 1972 image taken on the Apollo 17 moon landing mission.

Whilst the original was famously taken with a Hasselblad (I’d still really like one) the new version was made from a composite of satellite images. The full set can be seen on the NASA Flickr stream.

This new global view and animation of Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite. The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took satellite 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.

It’s well worth viewing the full sized images on Flickr which show the staggering levels of detail in the files as per the below 100% crop.

And how about this shot for an even more interesting perspective of the original blue marble shot? Worth poking around the Flickr stream for more examples of this kind of thing.

Via PetaPixel.

Hard to believe that iTunes is getting on for 12 years old. I remember first using it whilst finishing up my degree on my old PowerMac G4 400mhz albeit with a very limited selection of MP3 files. Ars Technica have an interesting run down of its development.

For me the most interesting thing is the evolution of the GUI. iTunes has always been a bit of a testing ground for UI developments that then sometimes made it into the main design of OS X, some with more success than others.

My love for my little Brompton is well known – especially now it’s got flat bars on. It makes the perfect bike for getting to meetings in Oxford as walking at either end is painfully slow.

Building a Brompton is a labour intensive task. It takes a factory of 115 skilled people, some 1,200 parts and six hours to custom build each individual bicycle.

It’s nice to know that this ingenious bicycle design is still built in the UK just beneath the Hammersmith flyover. This little video and article gives a short insight into their processes. Best to not scroll down to the outrageous comments on the Torygraph though.

Incredible to see my current camera of choice laid out in all its complex technical and engineering beauty in a “things organised neatly” style. Amazing to think of the precision of design that goes into this.

Interestingly enough I couldn’t find a decent enough image to use on this blog post and the embedding options at 500px aren’t great. So for $2.99 I bought this image to use. My currency converter of choice says that it’s £1.88 which is fairly reasonable really. Less than the price of a coffee to reward a photographer for their hard work. Plus I get to get a decent high res file at 1920px wide for my desktop background.

Image © Martin Kozák

Via PetaPixel

I recently bought a MacBook Air for typing, blogging surfing and some light Photoshop and Lightroom work. I liked the idea that you could throw it in your bag without a charger and just use it wherever. The problem with this? Crap cafe wifi.

From passwords, to login forms wanting everything including your inside leg measurement, to slow connections or ones that want you to pay £5 for an hour. At least 50% are shit. Having ended up on one of these crap connections I suddenly wondered if I could just use tethering on my phone. In iOS6 you can share a connection via Bluetooth which is incredible and no extra fees from O2. The first thing is obviously to turn off Dropbox and Backblaze which would chew through the data. But it’s surprisingly fast and usable. So unless the wifi is free, no logon and fast I’m just going to resort to this in future.

I was going to post about this after this Wired article came out which included a couple of decent photos of the interior with those fantastic coloured pipes. Then It’s nice that found a few more photos.

Seems like a superb commission to get – be the first official photographer within Google’s data centres, especially if you are anyway nerdy. I would love to shoot something like this (and get paid for it). The scale of it is ridiculous as well as those pipes being colour coded which reminds me of an excerpt from the Steve Jobs bio where his first factory in the US is done out like this. All the robots painted Apple colours of the time. The Google pipes almost seem Willy Wonka like in a way.

All images © Connie Zhou

There’s also a walk through video which is also pretty interesting.