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New BBC News Blogs – A Retrograde Update
BBC News is seemingly completing its movement of correspondents’ blogs across to the a new system. And frankly, they’ve made some significantly retrograde steps. I’d happily acknowledge that previously the blogs were somewhat hidden, and lots of website readers were probably missing out. And I know that this has meant a shift in the backend…
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RAJAR – Q1 2011
It’s early May, and that means it’s another RAJAR – that exciting time when radio stations in the UK learn their new listening figures. As ever, it’s a mixed bag, with ups and downs. In the up box is radio listening overall. It’s once again recorded a record reach, with 91.6% of the population listening…
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What Do I Do With My Music?
I’m facing a dilemma. I’m wondering whether I should ditch Apple for my music needs… Here’s where I am, as Duncan Bannatyne might say: I use iTunes to manage my music and audio. I have over 160GB of music/audio. Partly because I have a “reasonable” amount of music; partly because I rip that music at…
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Things a TV Channel Controller Should Never Say
If you’re a TV executive you should be very careful when you axe something or say that you’ll never do something again. Recently Jay Hunt, Channel 4’s new chief creative officer said that the channel would no longer be making list programmes. That’s fine. They’re lazy, relatively cheap, and have run their course. But what’s…
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ISS
The International Space Station (ISS) is very visible at the moment, appearing as an often very bright, yet very fast-moving star. Taking advantage of a location that has much less light pollution than home, I took the above long exposure photo this evening showing the transit of the ISS across the sky, passing through Leo.…
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My BBC DQF Proposal
Another day, another proposal under the BBC’s Delivering Quality First (DQF) – aka, what significant cuts can we make as painlessly as possible? We’ve had plenty of them to date including the gutting of BBC Local radio, stopping late night or daytime broadcasts. Just today, the BBC News channel (or BBC News 24 as it’s…
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Radio Well Worth Listening To
A couple of things that I heard over the weekend: Into The Music Library – This documentary from Jonny Trunk is a great introduction into the world of library music. You’ve heard an awful lot of it, but mostly you’re not aware of it. The documentary concentrates on music from the sixties and seventies. It’s…
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The Dangers of the Cloud
Putting all your worldly goods into the “cloud” is brilliant isn’t it? You simply upload, documents, music, files, pictures, movies, whatever… onto one of the many cloud based hosting sites. After all, it’s fiddly, time-consuming, and often expensive to sort out your own hosting solutions. And putting your documents in the cloud brings with it…
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Seagull 4B-1 TLR
A couple of weeks ago, I dipped into the medium format world of a twin lens reflex camera. Namely a Chinese Seagull 4B-1. It’s very much an entry level camera. I’ve now run about three rolls of film through it, and you can see some of the results below: The first set includes a little…
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Kindle Pricing
Interesting news emerges from the US, where Amazon has decided to release a lower priced Kindle. The base model wi-fi only Kindle was $139, but Amazon is now retailing a $114 version which comes “with Special Offers”. That effectively means GroupOn style one-off discounts and other advertising messages. A couple of things occur to me:…
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Lost and Found
It’s been a lovely weekend, so today I was out on my bike taking some photos. I headed down to the South Bank and was near the front of Tate Modern capturing a couple of pictures of the people nearby. There were thousands of other people about. Tourists; locals; people working. I moved on further…
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Monsters
I missed Monsters in the cinema. And more fool me. It’s now out on DVD and Bluray, and it’s superb. What director, writer, and visual effects producer Gareth Edwards has managed is wonderful. This is low budget film-making without looking low budget. Andrew Kalder (Scoot McNairy) is a press photographer who’s asked to find out…
Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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Yellowface/All The Lovers In The Night
Yellowface by R F Kuang I first came across R F Kuang with last year’s very enjoyable Babel, an alternate history of the British Empire told in a world where magic exists and is controlled by an elite group of individuals. Yellowface is very different, but no less enjoyable. It’s a book about books, and…
Hadrian’s Wall
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