daveypea

I just wanted to recommend a programme to all those who have an inner science geek struggling to get out. Also, for those who weren’t quite paying enough attention in their science classes first time around.

Shock and Awe - The Story of Electricity. Produced by the BBC and Open University and shown on BBC Four and BBC iPlayer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00kjq6d

I’m not going to wax on about how this sort of stuff justifies the BBC licence fee alone. It just does in my book. This is what I personally want from TV. Intelligent, well thought out and presented documentaries, with a huge amount of care, and delivered with real enthusiasm. It feels like it’s been crafted out of passion for the subject not just flung together (take note Horizon!).

Prof Jim Al Khalili is a perfect presenter. Guiding the program effortlessly, charismatically and never getting in the way of the subject matter.

Perfect 10/10 TV. Bloody well done!

I also really enjoyed the previous series ‘Chemistry - A Volatile History’. It has ignited a hidden passion that I really gave short shrift to at school.

I urge anyone with a passing interest in Physics and Chemistry to hunt these series out. I’m sure for non UK, they’ll be available online or DVD/BR format soon. Each series has 3 episodes. 

For me, hero of the series Nikola Tesla. Without him (and Westinghouse) we would either all be living within half a mile of an ‘Edison’ power station or would be in the dark. Electricity would still be a play-thing of the rich. I certainly wouldn’t be micro-blogging.

dear-photograph:

Dear Photograph,
My parents divorced when I was 9 years old. I have no memory of them ever being happy together.

Chris Peters

iCloud - a greener storage solution? (Reference article)

• What irks me about everybody having their own massive library of songs, videos, pictures and movies is the management and storage of their collections. Enter iCloud, an idea so simple in conception, you have to wonder why it hasn't been implemented sooner. (Actually, given the levels of co-operation involved between the major players - perhaps you don't).
• Take music, for instance. I have a modest 60GB of music from legitimate sources. In the early days I purchased apps to help me convert it from my tapes, record player and CD collection. I opted for the MP3 format early and settled on 320Kb (eventually) as my compromise between quality and storage space.
• I labelled it, 'found the artwork', organised it, stamped it, filed it. And now... I manage it. Except I don't really. I found a halfway solution called 'DiskStation' which stores my collection, but it doesn't really work great with all the media players and devices I have in my house. Yes it sits on my network and is a RAID solution so at least I can have some protection from mechanical failure, but actually it's bobbins. It doesn't work properly with iTunes - which refuses to let me organise and navigate it, all I can do is shuffle play - with a 5s gap between next track functionality. The app for the iPhone is just the same. It's pants. The Sony PlayStation 3 can see it, but it too doesn't have the interface to deal with a modest 60GB collection.
• I would imagine that most people are in the same boat as me.
• I don't like iTunes, never have. It just isn't designed to work with large collections. I could go into in-depth reasoning here but I just can't be arsed. It is very poor, not to mention completely inflexible, if you have more than one computer and one media player.
• And herein lies the problem. My 60GB collection really is modest. I know people who have Terrabytes of stuff. How do they manage their collections? I'm guessing same thing as me - with a diskstation or compatible device, or maybe they have network servers.
• Point is. All of this stuff has to be managed, maintained and served. Basically people leave on their servers and this consumes power.
• If I put on my Greenpeace shirt for a second. What the hell is all this in-house media management doing to our planet? How much electricity to leave your server on all the time? Especially if you have to because it runs on Windows software and takes the better part of 15 mins to boot up so you never turn it off. So, it is with trepidation that I welcome iCloud.
• However I have my reservations. Is the storage of your collection in the cloud actually better for the environment? Is serving terrabyes of media data locally more or less of a power drain than streaming over a web connection?
• At first glance it would seem that only having one master copy of an album (or film or TV show, etc..) on a master media billion dollar server complex, without needing to store it locally would be an improvement. You would no longer need to run your own media servers at home, instead just relying on the fact that you own licenses (the calculation of which is a much lengthier subject).
• I don't know but I'm going to try and find out.
• In the meantime and in principle, I welcome an iCloud-type solution, but are Apple the right media giant to do it? Would Google do it any better? Do we actually need Google to do it better and provide some competition?
• Answers on a postcard please. In the meantime I'll watch this very carefully.

Well Studio

It’s me. Just setting up my Tumblr.