Pushy coot:
I swear to you the one on the left up and pushed off the other.
If I was God, here’s what I’d do now. I’d force all the rolling networks to cover nothing but the death of Michael Jackson, 24 hours a day, for the next seven years. Glue up the studio doors and keep everyone inside, endlessly “reporting” it, until they start going mad and developing their own language – not just verbal, but visual. And I’d encourage viewers to place bets on which anchor would be the first to physically end it all live on air. And while that was happening, I’d create some other stations that covered other stuff. Current affairs type stuff. I think I’d call them “news channels”. They might catch on.
—
Charlie Brooker on the Michael Jackson coverage.
My plan was to finally get round to the second Headlessness podcast, call it ‘The Michael Jackson Edition’ and then put no Michael Jackson music in it. But that might have looked look I was having a go at people other than the people I intended to be having a go at. Too late now, anyway, I suppose.
Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours? Now for the next two days, go to talks and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on. I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it … Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.
Garage:
Another stunner. Car salesrooms are never good, though, are they?
Trails, EveryTrail and photo integration
Another walk this morning to play with the Trails iphone app and the EveryTrail social network. This rather follows on from what I said about them yesterday. This time, I wanted to integrate photos. Rather than use the iphone camera, I took my main camera along to make things trickier.
This time, every time I saw something I wanted to note, I added a waypoint in Trails and jotted a few words, but in addition snapped a photo with my camera. Getting home, I was hoping to upload the photos directly to EveryTrail, but since it asks for photos of under 1Mb, it seemed as easy to test out the Flickr integration at the same time. I uploaded my photos to a dedicated Flickr set, which, as it turns out, is the thing to do when you went to call them into EveryTrail.
I was hoping that I’d be able to associate each photo with the waypoints I’d added, but unfortunately that option didn’t exist. EveryTrail does let you place your photos on the map manually, but since Flickr only gives EveryTrail read-only access, it seemed a lot to hope that this geotagging would transfer across to Flickr. Further, trying to add the photos to the EveryTrail map using OSX Firefox wasn’t a good experience.
Instead, I manually added my photos to Flickr’s map (as I would normally), and then imported them again into EveryTrail, which immediately knew where on the map to put them. The main map on EveryTrail now shows both my waypoint notes and the photos, but inevitably these don’t match exactly since I added the photo locations by hand. When the locations are very close, it can be tricky to select the photo rather than the associated note (or vice versa).
The next thing to try is using photos from the iphone. Here the locations of the waypoint notes and photos should marry more precisely, and I wonder if that’s going to cause problems. Basically, it’d be nice if EveryTrail could integrate photos and waypoints somehow.
Clent House:
The speed limit restriction sign is probably useful, though I wonder if it holds any legal authority now.
Netto:
I find it impossible to look at the Netto logo without thinking ‘dog saliva on my vegetables’.
Somerfield, Stamford Hill:
I can’t help it. It’s a low contrast building.
Prime office space:
I don’t know why I find this kind of tempting. It’s the sort of block you imagine being completely empty except for a shady law-enforcement agency at the back of the fifth floor.
Oh, and because I’ve taken to naming all my computers and devices after endangered species, I called my iPhone Cui-ui.
iPhone app: Trails
I arrived to the iPhone party only yesterday, so when I say Trails is the first iPhone app that’s really grabbed me, it’s not a reflection of app-cynicism on my part. It’s one of the many GPS tracking apps available, but one of the easiest to use, and one that stands up robustly to ducking in and out of other apps.
The feature that did it for me, though, was the ability to add waypoint markers as you go, to which you can attach a written note. I went for a walk this morning to try it all out, and was having so much fun I walked much further than I intended, stopping to add markers whenever there was something I wanted to hihghlight, or whenever I was struck by an impression. The beauty of the notes is you can use them however you wish. Mine ranged from the moderately informative:
…to the slightly whimsical…
…to the just plain silly:
I don’t know if any of this relates to that term psychogeograpgy or not — but I love the idea of location-senstive rambling (in the verbal sense, that is). You can upload all this lovely rich data to a handful of social networks. I chose Everytrail, since it seemed from from cycling or running associations. The above screengrabs are actually from the Everytrail data. You can view the Everytrail page for this particular walk to interact with the map and read the other notes.
You can also download trails to Google Earth or your GPS device if you want to follow someone else’s route.
The idea of location-sensitive fiction isn’t new, but I’m quite struck by the possibility of being able to knock-up a first draft literally as you go.
UPDATE: Oh. Everytrails widget even sort of works with Tumblr:
Pylons and parks
Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Trail Maps
