My pictures are no longer Qoop’d up

The title is a terrible pun, I know. I blame my tabloid roots. I’m a big fan of Flickr, but one of the things that’s been missing from it is the ability to easily get photos printed (this is actually one of the things that made Flickr better than other web-based photo services – it wasn’t focussed on making £$ from prints). Anyway, they recently announced a link up with a printing service called Qoop.

In typical Flickr style, it’s more interesting than it first sounds – Qoop doesn’t offer individual prints, instead they do books or posters. I’ve just got a poster from them, and it’s top quality, really nice paper stock and great detail and colours. Considering I’ve never printed from my digital camera before, but I’m very impressed with how the pictures came out. And all for $10 (plus postage). 🙂

What I’m Reading

  Paul Watkins – Mont Blanc, France 
  Originally uploaded by Custom PC.

No, this isn’t me. The magazine I write for, the mighty Custom PC runs a regular feature, modestly entitled "World Domination," in which we encourage readers to send in pictures of themselves reading the magazine on their travels. Once they’ve been to a country, we then claim it on our Risk-style map, with our aim being to get the magazine to visit as many places as possible. Harmless imperialistic fun 😉 It’s one of those feautres that was never really planned – it just evolved. The initial idea was to get people to send in pics of themsleves wearing a CPC t-shirt. It was supposed to promote our merchandise, and it didn’t really take off. So it got tweaked to being "a picture of you with the magazine", and now it’s incredibly popular. So popular that even with a whole page in the magazine, we still can’t print all the pictures. We’ve now got our own Flickr account where we can show off all the pictures, like the cracking one above.

Aside from Custom PC, I’ve recently been reading Monkey Games, which is a good round up of interesting gaming news. Plus City Of Sound has an excellent in-depth analysis of the new Guardian layout, including a neat annotated pic on Flickr, here

Import PSP and YourPSP.com, take 2

The
story so far: yesterday, a bit frazzled after a week at work, I tried
to register my imported (i.e. Japanese) PSP on the European PSP portal,
YourPSP.com. You need to give YourPSP.com your serial number; I did,
and it didn’t work, so I rather quickly wrote a very hot-headed blog
entry all about how Sony was discriminating against
early-adopters/importers.

Game weblog Joystiq picked up on it,
but since Joystiq allows users to comment, pretty soon people started
piping up saying they had managed to reigster US and Japanese PSPs on
YourPSP.com.

Hmm. So I tried
registering on YourPSP.com again. Still didn’t work. I tried again, fudging the purchase date to
the 1st of September, selecting model no. 1003, and entering the serial
number from inside the PSP’s battery case, not the one printed on the
sticker on the underside of the PSP. And it worked. So more fool me; I
jumped the gun. Had I read the YourPSP.com site more carefully, I would
have noticed it does say “the serial number is underneath the
battery.”  Although, in my defence, I would like to say the field where you enter your serial number
on the YourPSP.com registertation form is, incredibly unhelpfully, exactly the same
length as the not-the-real serial number on the sticker on the
underside of the PSP!

But basically, I was wrong. Whoops. Sorry.

So I retracted
the original angry-fuming post, deleted it, and put up a quick explanation. A bit
too late – Joystiq hasn’t heard my plea to retract it, and a couple of
other websites have picked up on the story that isn’t a story.

However, what
is interesting is the reaction the Joystiq post got. As well as people
calling me a fool for jumping the gun (well, yeah, but check the
name and header for this site 🙂 ), a number of people criticised me
for “whining”. For instance:

“Boo-Hoo. What a whiner…There are certain risks you take when import
stuff from other countries….And it’s worth mentioning that the
yourPSP.com site offers a free UMD movie (spiderman 2) to those who
register, so Sony has a interest in not letting people from other
markets take advantage of this…”

Well
firstly, surely whining is what the internet is all about 🙂 (well,
maybe secondly after the porn, or thirdly after the pirate software,
and fourthly after NSFW humour.)

But the main
criticism the Joystiq readers have of my rant is that I should have
expected to be locked out of YourPSP.com because you ‘take risks’ when importing a
console from one territory to another.
This is true, you do take risks;
I was just asking “why” that risk exists. In the past, pieces of
hardware like TVs and even consoles have carried obvious risks
preventing easy transport between countries: different places use
different specifications of electric current, and
different broadcast systems. Getting a Japanese PS2 working in the UK
requires a bit of tinkering, because it has a 110V power supply and is
designed to work with an NTSC TV set. The PSP however, is a self
sufficient unit
that, by default, ships with a universal battery charger.

It is a
mobile piece of hardware, ready for deployment all over the world. And
yet people are still telling me I should ‘expect’ to face
restrictions from the very company I bought it from? Just because I did
what I was supposed to, travel with it? Hmm. Seems like we, as
consumers,
really have lowered our expectations. But then that’s to be expected, I
guess. Globalisation may be touted as a good for people but
in reality, all too often, it works only for big companies. DVDs
are a prime example of this – what on earth is the point of region
codes? If you buy a copy of ‘Lost In Translation’ in the US, it won’t
play back on a UK DVD player. But why? You bought the copy legally,
so the people who made the movie still get their money. Why should the
company who sold it you care where you use it? Region Codes
allow companies to artifically control prices, release dates and access
to content but for consumers, it make no sense at all.


The thing is, the internet really is changing all this. I hope DVDs
were the last stand for segmented, artificial
control of content (though sadly, all the stuff I’ve read about the
next-gen Windows makes me doubt this). Still, the internet is a great
leveller, and the ease of access it gives to black- and grey-market
produce is what is doing the bulldozing.
Grey market importers make pieces of kit only released in certain
regions available to all and sundry, while black market download sites
get movies and music out before its release dates and even to markets
where it wouldn’t ordinarily be released (like the amount of manga
released on BitTorrent, subtitled by fans, that wouldn’t normally be
available outside Japan).

So things look good for consumers: the more I
think about it, the more I see it as a big problem for companies to
deal with. Those Japanese companies making manga really should sort out
a way for overseas fans to buy it over the web; record companies have
to shuffle release dates to beat the P2P serives; and Sony has to
contend with importers moving its kit faster than they themselves can.
In fact, I actually think Sony deserve a bit of praise here: I fully
expected them to deny me access to YourPSP.com, just because, but they haven’t – maybe they’ve got their heads around this strange, ever-present global market thing better than I have.

Lessons learned:
1. Global internet market = good
2. Sony = not always evil, in fact, quite good sometimes
3. Ability to publish beliefs/prejudices instantly, especially on Friday afternoon = not always good
4. YourPSP.com = probably not worth all the aggro in the first place! 😉

original

PSP Madness: UNDO


A
retraction, and a ‘RTFM’ moment. Joystiq linked to my original, fuming,
steam-out-of-the-ears post about how import PSPs didn’t work with
YourPSP.com, and a discussion quickly sprang up – turns
out some people with Japanese PSPs have managed to register them on
YourPSP.com. So I’ve checked the YourPSP.com, and have got mine to
work;
you have to fudge the purchase date and the model number selection
box, and use the serial number from inside the PSP, not the one printed
on the sticker on the bottom (oddly it seems to have 2 serial
numbers?), but once this is done, YourPSP.com will accept import PSPs.
So I well and truly jumped the gun there! My apologies to all
concerned.

original

Books I’ve Read, 2005 – 2006

Not sure where I’ve seen this idea, but it’s out there somewhere on the web, and it struck me as a good one. So that I can keep track, this is a list of the books I’ve read since 2005, starting in late [April, I think?? It’s very long…] – Current. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu.
August – Sep 3rd. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima.
Sep 4th – 29th Sep. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner.

"Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

"Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don’t touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones. And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory."

30th Sep – 25th October. His Master’s Voice, Stanislaw Lem.
26th October – November. Storyteller, Kate Wilhelm.

November. The Traveller, John Twelve Hawks.

November. The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Nifenegger.

1st December – 21st December. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro.

22nd December – 15th January 2006. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Herbert P. Bix

~~2006~~
16th January – 9th February. Shalimar The Clown, Salman Rushdie. [DNF]
10th February – 17th February. The Opposite of Fate, Amy Tan.
18th February – 23rd February. The People’s Act of Love, James Meek. [DNF]
24th February – 1st March. Strangers, Taichi Yamada.
2nd March – 25th March. Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, John Le Carre.

"’Sitting is an eloquent business, any actor will tell you that. We sit according to our natures. We sprawl and straddle, we rest like boxers between rounds, we fidget, perch, cross and uncross our legs, lose patience, lose endurance. Gerstmann did none of those things. His posture was finite and irreducible, his little jagged body was like a promontory of rock; he could have sat there all day, without stirring a muscle. Whereas I -‘ Breaking out in an awkward, embarrassed laugh, Smiley tasted the wine again, but it was no better than before. ‘Whereas I longed to have something before me, papers, a book, a report. I think I am a restless person, fussy, variable. I thought so then, anyway. I felt I lacked philosophic repose. Lacked philosophy, if you like…’

26th March – 5th April. The Search, John Battelle.

6th April – 15th April. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote.

16th April – 1st May. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin.

2nd May – 30th May. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck.

31st May – 4th June. Sun After Dark, Pico Iyer.

5th June – 14th June. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro.

15th June – 9th July. The Tyrant’s Novel, Thomas Keneally.

10th July – 23th July. Runaway, Alice Munro.

24th July – 1st August. Enzo Ferrari, Richard Williams.

2nd August – 15th August. The Corporation, Joel Bakan.
2nd August – 26th August. The Ghost In The Shell, Masamune Shirow.

16th August – 5th September. Coco and Igor, Chris Greenhalgh.

6th September – 10th September. New York Trilogy, Paul Auster. [DNF]

11th September – 16th September. In Search of a Distant Voice, Taichi Yamada.

17th September – 30th September. Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathon Safran Foer.

1st October – 10th October. Loving The Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots, Timothy Hornyak.

11th October – 16th October. Buddha (Book 1), Osama Tezuka.

17th October – 20th October. The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters (Installment 1), G. W. Dahlquist.

21st October – November. Possession, A.S. Byatt.

23rd October – 24th October. The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters (Installment 2), G. W. Dahlquist.

30th October – 31st October. The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters (Installment 3), G. W. Dahlquist.

6th November – 8th November. The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters (Installment 4), G. W. Dahlquist

November. The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters (Installments 4, 5, 6 and 7), G. W. Dahlquist
November. The Devil, Leo Tolstoy.

1st December – 8th December. My Life, Anton Chekov.

11th December – 15th December. The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters (Installments 8 and 9), G. W. Dahlquist.
15th December – 19th December. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (33 1/3rd series), Kim Cooper.
20th December – 29th December. Kafka On The Shore, Haruki Murakami.
30th December. Shenzhen, Guy Delisle.

* DNF = Did Not Finsh

On the iPod

‘Ah, iPod. Great product. Little wheel. Click, click. Very neat.’

I
recently went to a press event for a big Taiwanese
computing/electronics firm, and ended up chatting to the guy who heads
their UK office. The quote, above, is how he summed up the Apple iPod
digital audio player. I was asking him whether he thought Taiwanese
tech firms, who currently make the guts (motherboards, graphics, cases
etc) of a lot of the world’s computers, were, in the next few years,
going to take a bigger step into the limelight, and compete with global
tech companies/brands like Apple and Sony – not just in terms of
cash, but in terms of visibility and cool, too.

My idea
was that perhaps Taiwanese tech companies would experience a
similar growth pattern to Japanese companies like Sony. In the 1960s,
when Westerners first started seeing “Made in Japan” slapped on goods,
it meant cheap, tacky and unoriginal, but by the 80s, the label had
transformed into a prestige one, usually meaning sleek, high-tech and
futuristic. Sony’s Trinitron TVs and the original Walkman are prime
examples of innovative products that drove this change..   

It’s
interesting to see how the iPod has managed to transform Apple from a
bit-part player in IT – a curiosity and financial trainwreck –
into a company that is now perceived as one of the most innovative
tech organisations around.

I asked if perhaps the Taiwanese
firms were ready to make this move; and if they were, if they would
need one key product to really kickstart this move, and help them
grab mindshare, and be seen as innovative, cool and pioneering.

His
response was interesting; ‘the iPod is great product. But that’s it.’
One neat product, no more. It’s interesting to see the difference
between his short summation of it, and the reams and reams of
stuff other people are capable of churning out about it – for
instance GQ editor Dylan Jones’s horribly titled ‘IPod, Therefore I Am’ book.

His
view was pragmatic; the iPod is a great product, but the
story of Apple’s change is just that; a story, a tale. What’s
more, it’s something that’s very much in the eye of the beholder,
and the people writing about, eulogising, hyopthesising, theorising
over the iPod are outsiders. For him, someone inside the tech
industry, one product won’t – or can’t – change things that
much. One question that is rarely asked by all those obsessed by the
iPod is how it’s changed Apple’s market position, margins,
profitability, growth rate – all those dull, grey economic statistics
that people working in companies do tend to be terrible bothered about.

However, you
then have to wonder if, while its true that the facts may not be
changed by one product, perhaps a change in image is more valuable:
a company that sells to consumers exists in their minds as well as
in the real world, and what keeps the iPod dominant, as much as its
real-life competence and convenience, is surely its hold over the
imagination of those who own it. People like Dylan Jones can project
hundreds of pages of thoughts into its each turn of its nice
little wheel…

original

All In All Is All We Are

Very strange being on the tube yesterday, after all this. Even when the tube is packed, there’s normally a very careful sense of space around each person; a preserved isolation. People don’t make a lot of eye contact on the tube and a lot of the time they don’t chat to each other on the tube; the noise from the carriages drowns out the conversations. It’s a very different experience from being a bus; there, you catch snippets of a life from an overheard mobile phone conversation, a chat between people sitting next to each other. You can see lives at each stop; people coming in and out of shops, running to get to the bus stop on time…

The tube, on the other hand, is strangely suspended from all that. Little dark capsule of relief from all the complications of life up above. Little dark capsule of relief from a city full of other people. On the tube, you’re normally alone with your own thoughts.

But yesterday was very different. Lots of eye contact. You knew – or thought you had a very good idea – what everyone was thinking of, if not what they made of it. I don’t think anyone knows what to make of it.

Good words from Ken.

Computers, sex and glamour

If you read enough (or even a little) about gadgets, technology and computers, sooner or later, you’ll find some journalists using the phrase “sex appeal” to describe a small, metal electrical gizmo. This is misguided, and lazy: firstly, if PCs genuinely did have to exude sex appeal to propagate as a species, the vast majority of them would make even the laziest Panda look like a viagra’d up lothario living life in permanent fast-forward.

Secondly, and perhaps more annoyingly for me, as an IT journalist, there’s a strange desperation to the term “sex appeal” when applied to a computer. It’s borrowing attraction from somewhere else; a latent admission that computers aren’t attractive and interesting for what they are. You could even go so far as saying describing a computer as having “sex appeal” is hand holding for a nervous audience (and writer):

DON’T WORRY LADS, LIKING COMPUTERS DOESN’T MAKE YOU AN ANTI-SOCIAL WEIRDO.
THEY ARE SEXY.
LIKE GIRLS ARE.

You see a similar tactic on the front pages of a good number of computer and technology magazines – PC Format, T3 etc. – interesting gadget, cradled in the tanned, PhotoShop-smooth arms of a model.
Red-blooded re-assurance.
You’re not a bit odd for being interested in technology.

Still, it’s perfectly understandable why it happens, and it does neatly illustrate the way in which  we live through technology; not only in terms of how we function day-to-day (e.g. texting a friend to say we’re running late), but the way we often humanise technology. Give it our attributes, describe it in our terms. Calling an iPod ‘sexy’ reflects the iPod’s success at becoming a part of our life – we’re telling a story about it in which the object becomes vaguely human.

Similar to how we anthropomoprhise pets, maybe.

“Good Boy.”