devolute.net

…and for those wanting to cancel their cable/sky packages. Here’s why:
I’ve been a member of the Boxee Alpha test for a while now and it showed a huge amount of potential. Boxee is, at its most simple, a media player that draws content from the net (Division3, iPlayer, Blip.tv etc.) and from your local network (ripped DVDs, your music library, downloaded tv shows). This content is then presented in a wonderful ‘made for big screen’ (read: your tv, not your 15″ laptop monitor) easily navigable interface. A rather gorgeous interface too, I might add. Well, certainly in the Alpha, I’m a little unsettled by the new beta interface but it is well ahead of the rigidness of the AppleTV and the ugly mess of any recent Microsoft efforts. Boxee is based on XBMC, a brilliant Open-source media player with a similar, but not as ambitious, desire to take over your tv.  Boxee adds web-content to XBMC’s marvelous local network media management. I’ve been running XBMC on a hand-me-down 1st-gen XBox (thanks Ed!) for a couple of years now and it kicks the ass of Windows Media Centre and the like. It just works. No codec bullshit, no delay, no fiddling.

The Boxee box

This alpha potential has been realized in the form of the newly announced beta and the Boxee Box. Although Boxee is quite intuitive to use, it can be a total bugger to setup, as was XBMC before it. Your options are hack your Apple TV or build a Linux machine and dive into a bundle of .debs and Pulse audio problems. Oh, and good luck on 64-bit Ubuntu, it’s a bloody nightmare! The Boxee Box removes all these headaches and essentially makes Boxee suitable for non-geeks. It’s built by DLink, who in my experience seem to churn out reasonable rooters/modems, and we’re promised it’ll cost a quite reasonable $200. This investment will open up a world of couch-accessible online content. There is a growing amount of independent media available online and bringing it from tiny laptop screens and onto that new 37″ monster you have in your living room could be the shot in the arm that many indie shows need.

I was going to blog about how stupid the case design was. “Don’t they understand that people are still going to have audio equipment/a DVD recorder/etc under their TV?”, I prepared myself to rant, “don’t they realize that such a bizarre shape will make it impossible to stack and fit under televisions?”. But as further details have emerged, it seems that the Box is so small that none of this should be a concern and as the remote control is RF then you could even hide it behind your flat-screen if you want.

This thing is seriously small

The closest thing we’ve seen to this has been the Apple TV, which like Boxee could view web content. But being Apple, you were tied into the Apple iTunes marketplace, and thinking. No thanks, Jobs, no DRM crap for me. The Boxee Box’s design, cost and potential have lead to a very desirable little product and it is a testament to the Open-source projects that have gone before it. Put me down for one.

(More details on the Boxee blog)

Like most new BBC television programs, Design for Life takes its name from a 90s pop song. The Manics, durrr. Like ‘Life of Riley‘ and, erm, I’m sure there is something else… well unlike most Caroline Quentin vehicles, Design for Life isn’t shit.

As is the norm now for most new BBC television programs, it takes about 7 minutes to get started. Those first 7 minutes of the show are catching up, explaining what happened in the previous episode. In this day of Sky+, HDD recorders and (more importantly) iPlayer, is this necessary? I know it makes the show cheaper to make, but for crying out loud. Just make it a little shorter if you’re going to piss around so much.

It’s shot beautifully well and we get to see plenty of the beautiful bits of Paris, as apposed to the hours and hours of shots of that bloody Gerkin thing in London that anyone who watches the Apprentice has forced upon them. When talking about this show, I’m going to compare it to the Apprentice, because the similarities are obvious (and I’m lazy). It features a team of designers (business men?) who fight to show they are the best designer (most shouty business man?) to prove they can work with designer extraordinaire, Philipee Stark (Suralun?).

the Design for Life participants

Participant Nebil is the most ‘Apprentice like’, because he patronizes everyone he gets to talk to. This probably is an attempt to look better than everyone else but at least he does know his shit. I’m sure that to anyone who actually has their design game-face on, his “let me just explain this too you, thicko” tone will probably make him look like a bit of a dick. Still, he gets a lot of screen time because he has a lot to say and even his dick-ishness is minor compared with the mega-cocks that rut around in any given episode of the Apprentice. He gets his come-upance tho, which is another reason why I love this show. It’s obvious that the shows producers set him off against the other stand-out, Ilsa, because she’s got a pretty good set of claws and will bite back.

I guess a large part of the show will boil down to “do you like Philipee Stark”. I do. Him and his bloody chairs, or whatever the hell he’s supposed to be most famous for. He’s pretentious, but y’know he’s a brilliant designer so he can afford to be and after all, this is design. You’re supposed to be pretentious. He also dismisses the participants easily, based on some seemingly whimsical idea he has. Again: he’s a designer. I’ve had designers happily shit on my ideas in the past and non of them were exactly Phillipee Stark. At least when he drops people he’s really nice about it. I’d love to be sacked by him. None of this catch-phrase “You’re fired” crap. I also like his attitude towards ‘wasteful’ design. He’s green without being sickly. Personally Alan Sugar really gets on my tits because turned Amstrad into crap (I love my old CPC6128) and I tire of his attitude and his stupid Labour ‘business-tzar’ beard.

Further contrasts to the Apprentice are easy to highlight. The participants are young, attractive and probably smell quite good. They are also very, very white. And middle class uni-graduates. They actually get very visibly nervous, which makes you feel a little more sympathetic. Hell, in the 2nd episode one of the participants has a genuinely great idea: Polly and her water-level meter. What have the Apprentice chimps ever done, but chuck crap at each other? Design for Life actually talks about design. Pitching, ideas, briefs, presentations and all the bullshit in-between. That’s some real genuine content from the BBC.

The show is at 9.00pm on BBC 2, Mondays but you can follow the show here, on iPlayer.

As an aside; it’s narrated by Adam ‘Adam + Joe’ Buxton. I look forward to the DVD release where Joe does a funny-man voice-over.

This is one of the finest headlines I’ve ever seen crafted by the wordsmiths at the Mail. I think they’ve channeled a certain similarly perceptive master of language in writing this. Does anyone remember this classic line from Alan Partridge?  More of this please. I don’t want to read an article. If you can’t consolidate a complete ’story’ in the headline, then don’t bother.

Via the ever brilliant @bengoldacre – an essential follow.

Current TV are an indie tv network who, I’m guessing reasonably confidently, depend mainly on the web for viewers.  They’ve done some good stuff. In particular, one thing I watched that stuck in my mind was a documentary on Russian nazi gangs who attack foreign students. It was hard hitting, it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d see on the BBC or CNN. It was ‘forgotten world’ reporting, exactly the sort of thing Current TV should do.  Naturally, I follow both CurrentTV US and Current TV UK on Twitter and something recently struck me.

Here in the UK we sometimes like to poke fun at the US’s attitude to current affairs reporting. Maybe we’ll laugh at the CNN homepage as it becomes full of reports of Britneys latest outburst. Or possibly we’d compare measured debate on Newsnight to O Reily / Becks insane outbursts. But on the web and especially at Current TV, the US often takes the intellectual high-ground (or at least the high-brow ground).  I attach the following as evidence from my Twitter client:

Current TV in my twitter feed

Sadly, this sort of contrast is pretty typical. If you don’t believe me, I recommend you go to the Current website and use the top-right icon to switch between the British and American versions. So in short: come on Current UK! You’ve got some great staff and in the UK we’d love some relevant localised reporting. Surpass your US brother and don’t fall into the Heat Magazine pit.

(yes, I realise I posted this just after kittens. Shameful)

This weekends article by Madeleine Bunting for the Guardian reads like parody. Lifestyle changes which will have arguably minimal positive effect on the environment: check. Angst over carbon footprint whilst still taking flights abroad and owning a large house: check. And as if to round off the parody so perfectly: Two paragraphs detailing the guilt of Aga ownership! Perfect! This is article, along with many disappointingly similar others, is part of the Guardians new 10:10 campaign. The idea is for us to sign up and make personal carbon cuts ourselves, 10% in 2010, so that pressure is put on the government to make similar efforts. It would be nice to think that we’d spend a little more time putting pressure on industry who of course are the real big polluters and whatever private citizens do is next to useless if we can’t get them on board.

The 10:10 campaign was launched in the Tate Modern because obviously a more smug middle class location was not available.I think the 10:10 tags are set to become some of this years more desirable items. Like those ‘Make Poverty History’ bracelets (I wonder how that one turned out?). All in all I think it’s a great idea. However it may contain too many elements which put us in danger of creating a wall of smugness that distances those who honestly care about climate change from those who are yet to sign up for the full effort.

Web developer hat on: The 10:10 website is superb in both it’s design and execution, except totally unnecessary use of flash of course.

What do you think? What are the blogs saying? What have twitter-users voted? All questions that are asked by the ‘mainstream media’ in their desperate (and some might say futile) attempt not to be rendered completely irrelevant by ‘new media’. This video, although obviously delivered tongue in cheek, is actually quite believable. There is less of a whirlwind of tacky special effects and switching between scenes on tv news here in the UK, but the desperate call for viewer feedback is still there. It’s gotten quite embarrassing; even on previously quite clever shows like Newsnight.

Maybe it’ll stop. Maybe Rupert Murdoch will work out how to use robots.txt. Probably not before we’ve all stopped getting our news from our television sets.

Stewart Lee

Stewart Lee isn’t just good at pissing off Christians, he’s also a very funny stand-up comic. Now he might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s great to have a comedian on that early in the evening on BBC2 who doesn’t insult my intelligence. Especially as he spends most of the time slagging off the BBC staples of Moyles, Clarkson et al. It’s not even a one off. He’s got a series out of it. God knows who let that happen. Presumably the same person who allowed the classic TMWRNJ with Richard Herring. It’s even produced by Armando Iannucci for crying out loud! What more do you people want?

Last nights show focused on ‘Toilet Books’, or rather celebrity hardbacks. Leigh deals with the whole thing not with anger, or angst but with a lofty disapproval. He’s cleverer than all of us (and of course much funnier). That’s just something we have to deal with.

See it on iPlayer here for the next few days.

And yes, it’s got the actor Kevin Eldon in it, obviously.

Star of this is Ed Helms of course, who’s musical stylings are probably the best part of the whole show. This post is primarily for one of my keenest commenters, Rami.

via Huff post

Happy new year! Lets start with something predictable. Anne Coulter, the blonde Fox News Sturmführer, has a new book and she’s already being such an unbelievable bitch about new first lady, Michelle Obama. From the Daily News:

Coulter wrote, “Her obvious imitation of Jackie O’s style – the flipped-under hair, the sleeveless A-line dresses, the short strands of fake pearls – would have been laughable if done by anyone other than a media-designated saint.”

Coulter said Cindy McCain, the wife of vanquished GOP nominee John McCain, “dressed well without freakishly imitating famous First Ladies in history.”

I found this amusing for two reasons; Firstly, Jackie dressed exactly how a first lady should. Any emulation of her look is common-sense for any woman lucky enough to be able to pull it off (read: not the Bush wives). Secondly, Cindy McCain? Well dressed?

A 'well dressed' Cindy McCain

I can’t remember if that was before or after she stopped playing with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Yup; lets hope Coulter gets that jaw un-wired again and we can enjoy her dropping bitchy lol-bombs well after the inauguration.

via Huffington Post

Ahmadinejad

Channel 4 are courting controversy as usual and are letting the President of Iran take the reigns of their ‘Alternative Christmas Message’. I usually don’t watch the Queens message (because I know what she’s going to say anyway), but I think I’ll be watching this. I’ve not heard much from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since Obama won the election. Although Obama isn’t exactly going soft on Iran, he doesn’t seem to be partaking in any G. W. Bush-style goading of the Iranians. So if Ahmadinejad mentions anything about his new less-threatening counter-part, it could be quite interesting.

We never get to hear Iranian politicians without it going through some pretty heavy filtering. Remember the “Israel must be wiped off the map” ‘translation‘ in the Western media? I’m no fan of Ahmadinejad’s often frankly dickish behaviour, but an appearance like this on Western TV is definitely a must watch for anyone interested in the nonsensical  ‘war on terror’ and the Middle East

Coldplay (aka “Radiohead for bed-wetters”) are getting a lot of radio play. Too much. Even on ‘alternative music station’; BBC 6music, they pop-up a surprising amount. Like they were/are with the iPhone, the BBC are currently in a multi-media Coldplay-luvy blitz (although the ‘toys out of the pram’ moment that Chris Martin gave Radio 4 is pretty funny). We’re told repeatedly how big they are. They’re so big because we’re constantly told about them! It’s a vicious circle. With the new album, ‘Viva la Vida’ (aka “The beginners guide to raising your bittorrent ratio”) it’s just more evidence of ripping off others for fun and profit (mainly profit, actually).

Now indie band the Creaky Boards are claiming that they wuz robbed. Sure, this could just be coincidence and a bit of cheeky publicity grabbing from the ‘Boards, but remember this is Coldplay we’re talking about. This is the band responsible for ensuring that any time Kraftwurks gentle Computer Love is played, the younger members of the beige-Mondeo owning public cry, “isn’t this a Coldplay cover?”.

It’s not just melodic piracy either, it struck me that the current visual style Coldplay have recently adopted closely parallels that of teenage-angst mongers ‘My Chemical Romance’. I’m not the only one to notice this.

In short: Music by the numbers (lead by what the market deems profitable, as opposed to musical integrity) : Still tedious.

Image thanks to the eternally wonderful Natalie Dee

Even a 4 year old knows that. Or so said NYUs Clay Shirky at the recent Web 2.0 Expo08 [blip.tv video]. He detailed how things are shifting away from passively watching television and into more interactive forms of media. He uses the example of the millions of hours of work that has gone into Wikipedia and other community-based wiki-like project by a great many people.

“Media that is targeted at you but does not include you may not be worth sitting still for.”

Shirky knows why we watch television. It’s because since WW2 we all have so much free time. Isn’t it better that we interact with something rather than just sit there and consume it? I think he’s right. Collectively, we watch far more adverts on TV than we do using brilliant collaborative projects such as Wikipedia. Has anyone watched television recently? 99% of it is rubbish. Getting involved with media is a lot more fun than an osmosis-like filtering of it into ourselves.

Still, regardless of this, Peep Show does start again tonight and I’ll definately be taking time out from the collaborative Web for that!

Video found via random($foo).

I’ve just been sitting here and the whole house shook for about 4 seconds. So, being the geek I am: go internet go! The ever-useful Sheffield Forum tells me that I wasn’t imagining it. Even more surprising is the news there that it was felt as far west as Manchester and that according to my friends who I’m talking to over IM, as far East as Hull. Wierd. They felt it strongly too. More news later, I guess. It’s always interesting to see how the big media (like the BBC) react to this sort of sudden unexpected news.

Update: The BBC have got an initial report here. Got two pals in North London saying they felt substantial shakes.

Update #2: One guy hurt his leg when his chimney fell on him. My Mums piggie bank nearly fell off the telly. That’s it. No doubt the Japanese/San Franciscans are looking on and sneering at us making such a fuss. Unsupprisingly, it was left to b3ta.com to make the defining point.

Hurrah! A full day of selective quoting from his many speeches, taking care not to mention anything he said about stopping poverty, the US class system or his anti-war stance. The picture of the day can be found here.