Some thoughts on keeping track of things

At the Custom PC Christmas lunch the other week, we ended up chatting about when we first came to regard internet access as an essential component of a PC. For me it was fairly late, as it took ages to get a broadband connection set up when I came to London after finishing my MA … (I remember having to let the BT engineer into the basement of the building I was living in to do the cabling; to my surprise, the room contained a roulette table and lots of boxes of beer and spirits – no wonder the owner of the shop on the ground floor was so reluctant to give me the key…)

Anyway, while net access was/is a big deal, I don’t think it is the change itself; it’s the conduit for the real changes, one of which will be this idea of always being on, and from this, a loss – or perhaps not loss, but a change in what’s considered private. When you use your PC to play music for instance, and it’s connected to the net, you can keep track of all the songs you’ve played via a service like Last.FM. I still have to manually upload my photos to Flickr, but if my camera had WiFi, it could do that more easily. This is the kind of data I don’t mind sharing; it’s stuff I want to share, and that I would, in the past, have shared in a more ‘analogue’ way – showing prints of my pictures to people when they came round, telling them about new CDs I’ve bought. This blog, too, is playing its part in recording things;  although I do occasionally write longer posts (like this one), most of the posts are short and sharp, written quickly and simply, and intended, primarily, to keep track of things; links, articles I’ve written, and books I’ve read. As much as people like to play up the ‘old vs new media’ aspect of the web, I think the biggest changes it makes (or will make) won’t be to the media world, but to people’s lives. The web’s most amazing potential is not to do with media or content, but is to do with community, with the links it makes. Links between people and other, links between people and events, links between people and their things, between, ultimately, people and their lives.

It’s something I’m interested in, so I’ve got myself some reading to do about it; I have two starting points, one a book called ‘Everyware‘ by Adam Greenfield, which is very directly about always-on computing and networked lives, and ‘The Human Touch‘, by Michael Frayn, which might initially seem only tangentially related to the topic; it’s philosophy, filtered via literature, but it’s about (so the reviews tell me), how the imagination constructs the world – a very fitting theory for an always on, virtual world…            

Custom PC web reading

Cpc_webreading_manFinally – managed to do something I’ve had my eye on doing for ages. I’ve uploaded the first CPC webreading on the Custompc.co.uk site, a regular little article that rounds up five interesting, tangentially tech related links from around the web. You wouldn’t believe how long (and how tricky) it’s taken to do this… but it’s finally done. A little step forward, but a step forward all the same.

I’ve long been a big fan of linklogs (link based weblogs, like Waxy, Linkmachinego etc) and I’ve also been banging on to people at Dennis about how important linking out to other sites on the web is; webreading is a fusion of both, although as the whole Custom PC site is still on the ‘old’ system, there’s nothing fancy like a webreading RSS feed/category link etc which would obviously improve it. I do, however, have a very, very cool graphic – the CPC webreading man! Isn’t he great? And people can leave comments, as well as submit links via email to me at CPC or via tagging links ‘cpcwebreading’ on Del.ici.ous.

Updated: The Custom PC web reading man was drawn by Lee Hasler. You can check out his site, here: www.eyeport.com.

Lost In Translation: Translator Etiquette

Pretty much all the IT hardware I see at work comes from outside the UK, and while some of it is designed in the US, a good deal comes from Taiwan. Despite the fact that I’ve met plenty of Taiwanese through work, and the fact that my Chinese doesn’t really go beyond ‘ni hao’ (and the international language of pointing and smiling), I’ve never talked to anyone via a translator. This changed last week, when I got to interview Fujistu’s head of design and several senior members of their design team last week. Direct from Japan, they also had a translator with them.

I was sitting next to the translator, and across from the Fujitsu team; at first I tried directly addressing the translator as well as the Fujitsu guys – something that confused everyone there and gave me neck ache. The best approach seemed to be to basically ignore the translator and address questions directly to the Fujitsu team. This does however, leave big pauses where the translator asks your question and listens to the response, and so there is the question of where to look and what to do while you’re waiting for the translation. While this big pause is a little uncomfortable, it does force you to rely on other aspects of the interview to judge how things are going, and how to follow up questions – body language, vocal tone – different and more challenging to an interview where you know the content and context of the answers.

I was really happy with how the interview turned out; it’s always good to get to talk to senior and influential company stuff. It’ll be a while before the article comes together though – still got quite a few different people to track down….

Make Your Own GeForce

The Custom PC website is quite a focus for me and all the other members of the mag team at the moment. I say focus, perhaps obsession is a better description 🙂

What we’ve currently got is based on an very old framework and it’s definitely looking and feeling creaky. While we’re planning a revamp at the moment, we’re trying to step up the amount of input we (the mag team) have into the current site, and where better to start than with Nvidia’s new graphics chip, the GeForce 8800 GTX? We went toe-to-toe with all the big hardware websites by putting up my review on launch day and following it up with Ben’s piece on the 8800 GTS the day after.

In addition to the reviews coverage, which will also be published in the mag, we also put up a neat jokey article called ‘How To Make Your Own GeForce 8800 GTX‘ – one of the complaints I often hear is about how the onward march of technology makes it so hard to keep up, so this should appeal to all those shocked by the GTX’s £500 price 🙂 The CPC site’s current architecture isn’t ideal for doing such a picture heavy piece, so we ended up hosting the slideshow on the ever-awesome Flickr. We tried submitting it to a bunch of weblogs and to Digg. Frustratingly, none of the blogs seem to have picked it up, which is a shame – but then part of the process of us being more involved in the site is to figure out what works, and what doesn’t, and how we should approach things. I think when we get more involved in linking out, people will be more inclined to link to us; knitting what we do into the community, into the wider web will be key, I think. A more-up-to-date, flexible site infrastructure should help, too.

The Mince Pies Are Back!

Pile of Pies

Shockingly, it’s that time of the year again. Well, actually, no it’s not. It’s not even been Halloween yet. But at Custom, we’re well into work on Issue 40, which comes out at the end of November, making it our Christmas issue! As well as reviewing performance PC hardware, every year we do a round-up of mince pies, pitting a team of hungry and opinionated tech hacks against a range of pies in order to decide which is the most festive. This year’s test assessed contenders ranging in price from 49p for six (Sainsbury’s Basics) all the way up to £5.50 for six (Harrods). Testing was as thorough, demanding and sickly sweet as ever, and the results should make for entertaining reading. I think we’re going to put the article up on the web for the first time this year, so I’ll post a link when it’s out 🙂

Ghosts and Goblins and difficulty

Until now, fingerprints have been the most deadly threat the super-shiny PSP has had to face. Now, it is wrath. The frustrated wrath of a player of Ultimate Ghosts n’ Goblins. Man, it’s tough… but strangely compelling, too:

“So why did I keep on playing? Partly it was because I didn’t want to write an article for Bit-Tech having only completed the first two levels. But it certainly wasn’t because of any involvement with narrative or plot, or any sense of satisfaction from solving puzzles, and nor did I give a toss, really, about any of the characters. Initially, I didn’t think I had any emotional involvement with the title, either, until I realised that actually, Ultimate GnG’s difficulty enables it to harness one emotion extremely well: it’s probably best called exasperation. I realise this doesn’t sound good (you can’t imagine it listed on the back of the box, can you?), but exasperation is a key part of the audience’s emotional response to many thrilling scenarios. Exasperation is present – and crucial – in everything from horror movies to romantic novels.”

The full article on Ghosts, Goblins and difficulty in games is here.

Oasis Masterplan video, directed (sort of) by L. S. Lowry


I’ve always had a soft spot for Oasis. Partly this is just becuase I was the right age when they first appeared, but I loved the music, too. I remember getting Definitely Maybe with money from my 15th birthday and sitting in the car in Milton Keynes while my Mum had gone into the station, just surrounded by that amazing breathy-whistly-drum thumping opening to Live Forever… Well, 11 years later and Oasis are now on to a Greatest Hits compilation called Stop The Clocks. They’ve commissioned a couple of videos for some of their excellent B-sides, like this one for ‘The Masterplan.’ It’s based on the art of L. S. Lowry, instantly recongisable to me as my Grandma’s house has several prints of his hung in the hall. His sombre yet striking style suits the nature of the song;  the animation of Noel G looks a bit out of place, but the mimickry of Liam’s walk and the town itself is great.

A Trip To A Real Army Surplus Store

The weather’s turned grim, so the following sentence already seems very old and dated, yellowing around the corners: it was a busy end to the summer. I went to loads of events at the London Design Festival and blogged about them for Treacle Down, including trying my hands at a massive paint-by-numbers installation and checking out cool Japanese things at the Conran shop.

The Jesteress and I also went on a weekend away to Nottingham to visit an old friend of mine from uni. My friend and her lovely boyfriend (who’s a professional sculptor!) took us to Anchor Supplies, a genuine army surplus store. There was a lot more there than just the usual green jumpers and shirts with German flags on. I’ve put up a full set of photos at Flickr, here, but on this page are some of the highlights. The picture above is an ammo tin on rollers (£65 for the rollers), and below you can see the range of ammo tins they had, starting from a fiver upwards.

PCBs and all manner of electronics were very cheap:


Not quite sure why you’d want a hospital bed, but you could still buy them:

And don’t forget, of course, your bayonet sheath:

More images here.