Things of Interest

Intuitiveness

I don’t hide my love of photography. I also find, being a human, that I like things that are intuitive.  I recently took the plunge and made the switch from Canon’s DSLRs to Sony’s A7R. My main reason for this is an upcoming trip to Japan. A trip that’s going to involve a not-insubstantial amount of […]

iPad as a camera

I was fortunate in that I travelled to some amazing places in 2013. Something that astounded me regardless of location, was the number of people using an iPad as a camera. Apple appear to be embracing this use case in their latest advert, What Will Your Verse Be? As I travelled between tourist hotspots, there […]

Bins and toilets

Quartz picked up an interesting story about some new bins that have hit the streets in London: Recycling bins in the City of London are monitoring the phones of passers-by, so advertisers can target messages at people whom the bins recognize. […]  The idea is to bring internet tracking cookies to the real world. The […]

Ofcom customer satisfaction report

Today, Ofcom released their latest stats for TV, Broadband and Telephone provides, and it makes interesting reading. On Broadband suppliers: For the third consecutive quarter, Orange/EE generated the most complaints as a proportion of its broadband customer base at 0.57 per 1,000 customers in Q1 2013. Complaints were mainly driven by difficulties in changing provider and […]

Real economics in virtual worlds

This is a really interesting article on hyperinflation that’s been gripping the world of Diablo 3 recently: But in the last few months, various outposts in that world — Silver City and New Tristram, to name two — have borne more in common with real world places like Harare, Zimbabwe in 2007 or Berlin in […]

Google as a photographer’s assistant

Trey Ratcliff, the photographer who’s done more than any other to popularise HDR (or, more accurately tone mapped) photos, put up an interesting post regarding what Google will do for photographers: So, along comes this exciting new announcement from Google – that they are using their massive server farms to intelligently organize and post-process photos […]

Land of the free

Autoblog: North Carolina is the latest state to line up against Tesla Motors by proposing a bill that would bar direct automaker-to-customer sales within the state According to Slate, a bill pushed by the state’s Senate Commerce Committee – and backed, of course, by the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association (NCADA) – would not only […]

Hidden messages only for children

This is one of the cleverest advertising campaigns I’ve ever seen, and it’s for a great cause. ANAR foundation is a charity that offers help to children who may be the victims of abuse or neglect.  They wanted to publicise their help number to the vulnerable children but in a such a way that those […]

UK’s appalling Instagram Act

As a creator who lives in the UK, this is terrifying. The Act contains changes to UK copyright law which permit the commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called “orphan works”, by placing the work into what’s known as “extended collective licensing” schemes. Since most digital images on the internet […]

Modern democracy?

From The Verge: The 45 senators who blocked a gun control amendment despite its 90-plus percent approval rating may be in trouble with the white-haired godfather of Silicon Valley, “super angel” tech investor Ron Conway. “We will employ the most sophisticated social media campaign ever built to remove these people from office,” Conway told The San […]