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After Our Time
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1–2 minutes·
No comments on After Our TimeAfter listening to an edition of In Our Time about the Jacobite Rebellion, I found myself writing yet another post on this weblog inspired by that wonderful Radio 4 programme. As I was finishing it, I thought that with all the posts I was making relating to In Our Time, I should really make a…
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The Strength of Weak Ties
Anyone who’s read about social networks and the ‘tipping point’ will know how important the connections between people are. It’s not enough to look at just the number and the individuals in the connections though – you have to look at their strength. While reading an article (I forget which) about social networks, I spotted…
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Food Miles
Sometimes, when I come across a particularly interesting article, I try to find the research paper that it’s based on. I don’t always read the entire paper (in fact, I normally skip over huge chunks) but it’s always instructive to see the results and analysis as the original author wrote them; it’s not rare for…
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Homemade scales
Last month, I mentioned that I was selling a lot of stuff using eBay – mostly games, but also DVDs, books, phones, etc. By using the Royal Mail’s online postage printer, I was able to avoid visiting the Post Office. The only problem is that I don’t have my own scales. For most items, you…
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BBC iPlayer: well over a day late and a dollar short
As has been widely noted, the BBC’s iPlayer application, which lets people watch the last seven days of TV over the internet, didn’t actually launch on 27th July. It’s still currently in beta, and if you apply to test it, it’ll take a couple of days to receive your login details. This is not particularly…
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UK people ‘hate BBC’
When I saw a headline on BBC News entitled UK Asians ‘do not feel British’ I was pretty shocked – did a majority of UK Asians really not feel British? If so, this was cause for alarm. On reading the article though, things were much calmer: Over a third of British Asians do not feel…
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The Death of Publishers
Update: Virginie Clayssen has done a wonderful French translation of this post on her weblog teXtes. Adrian Buys an eBook Reader A couple of weeks ago, I idly visited mobileread.com and discovered something incredible – Tiger Direct in the US were selling Sony eReaders for $100, a discount of $250. Thanks to the rampaging power…
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How many seconds?
I’ve heard it said that the iPhone has inferior features to other phones. On paper, there is some substance to this. Compared to the flagship products of Nokia and HTC, the iPhone lacks: 3G a high megapixel camera (competing phones usually have 3-5 megapixels compared to the iPhone’s 2 MP camera) video recording ability video…
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New Conversations
At GDC this year, I remember hearing some writers talk about the sorry state of story and dialogue in action/adventure games. One of the promising games that they looked forward to, though, was Mass Effect – apparently it would have a brand new conversation system. Over the months, details emerged. In effect, the game would…
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Echochrome
One of the most innovative games that’s come out of this year’s E3 is Echochrome for the Playstation; basically, if M. C. Escher could’ve made a computer game, this is what it would look like. I have some questions about the control scheme, difficulty level and gameplay (e.g. does the guy keep on walking all…