I would blog about my obsession, if I knew which one to choose. Technology, music, iPhones, software, art, photography, creativity, productivity, coffee, design, and jelly beans. But not necessarily in that order.
I don't play a lot of games, but I get good value from the ones I do. One that gets a bit of use on my iPhone is Subway Shuffle. It's simple to learn, looks good, and is quick enough to play when I have that 10-minute wait for the wife to turn up, or at least for the levels that require under 50 moves. A couple of levels still have me stumped. That or I can't work out how to get them in the "optimum" number of moves. The concept is very similar to the parking lot games where you have to remove your car by moving all the others around. In fact the disused mathematician in me suspects the games to be isomorphic.
In case you're wondering, the aim is to move the red train to the destination with the big red circle. You can only move each piece along a line with the same colour. Deceptively simple.
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Today I bought myself a new toy: I upgraded to the Live 8 Suite. Consign me to being a hermit. I don't need to go out anymore.
Although I'm at risk of only seriously using a fraction of what this app can do, I'm totally in awe of what's on offer.
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A repeat. It's worth looking at, if only to know what 6am looks like in Sydney in late May.
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This is neat. It's a prototype of things to come. Watch the video to see it in action.
Using a webcam is one way to view this. Another way would be a VR headset with stereo cameras that augment what you see. VR-assisted AR if you will. Something in between is the smartphone approach, where the image is overlaid on the continuous image from the built-in camera. This is here now, for example with the iPhone 3GS.
And via Owen, AR as marketing, this time from Mattel.
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Now this is interesting. It's the semantic web opened up to all, by another name, but FluidDB is effectively a giant, social triple store. There will be duplication, conflict, and confusion of course, but that's the real world, inhabited by us imperfect beings, and software, like us, needs to be able to deal with it, and turn data into information into knowledge.
Some more comments on applications for FluidDB by Filip Dousek.
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With the demise of further development of Google Notes, I didn't seriously think for long about implementing my own web notebook. Instead, I've persevered with Evernote and it's gradually infiltrating my daily habits.
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One of my reasons for being vegetarian is the discomfort, or even revulsion, at the nature of much of the factory farming that ends up supplying our food. Even for non-animal-based produce, the degree to which the manufacture of our grocery items are industrialised from start to finish is breathtaking. Equally breathtaking is the degree to which the advertising and marketing of our foods departs from the reality, either by distorting or avoiding the realities of the food lifecycle. Most large-scale food producers do not want you to know where your food comes from.
There are exceptions of course, and there are many small and medium food producers that use alternative production techniques and delivery as a differentiator, targeted at those who value those things, and who can afford them. The reason that the remainder of producers get away with it is that consumers do not want to know. Like climate change until recently, the modern food mass-production situation is an "uncomfortable truth" that has not yet had the attention and scrutiny it deserves.
While the large-scale production of meat gets the bulk of the attention of those against unnecessary animal suffering, the dairy industry has mostly escaped the negative press. Animals Australia is looking to fix this with its campaign on so-called bobby calves, the uncomfortable truth of milk production.
The campaign points out that in order to produce milk,
dairy cows need to give birth every year. Because the calves aren't all
necessary to either replace or grow existing dairy stock, and male calves less
so, they are mostly slaughtered, often for veal. The calves are removed shortly
after birth, shipped to slaughterhouses, sometimes taking to days to get there
without food or attention, and then disposed of. In the meantime, the mother
cow is giving the milk destined for the calf to a milking machine to be
consumed by humans.
The campaign is not recommending abolishing the dairy industry; it is attempting to put reforms in place to reduce the suffering of the calves before slaughter. Understandably, the dairy industry is resisting these reforms. For more information on this and other campaigns, check out the Animals Australia site.
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To give a brief perspective on the dairy industry, it's worth referencing The Ethics of what we eat (link to my blog post, and Amazon) by Peter Singer and Jim Mason on the subject of milk production.
People... think that cows are placid animals without much of an emotional life. [...] Cows have strong emotional lives. They form friendships with two, three, or four other cows, and, if permitted, will spend most of their time together, often licking and grooming each other. On the other hand, they can form dislikes to other cows and bear grudges for months or even years.
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At Lawnel Farm, Lovenheim watched a cow give birth, and begin to lick her calf, but forty minutes later a famrhand came and took the calf away. The cow sniffed the straw where the calf had been, bellowed, and began to pace around. Hours later she was sticking her nose under the gate to the barn in which she was confined, bellowing continuously. Meanwhile her calf was in another part of the farm, lying shivering of a concrete floor. Within a few days he was dead, and his body was lying on the farm's compost pile [ref provided].
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Although the natural lifespan of a cow is around 20 years, dairy cows are usually killed at between five and seven years of age, because they cannot sustain the unnaturally high rate of milk production. Male calves that survive are sent to auction at an age when they can barely walk.
There is more information on the life of dairy cows on the Animals Australia fact sheet. There is also information from Dairy Australia on their animal welfare information page.
Disclaimer: I am a financial supporter of Animals Australia.
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Here is an interesting proposition for music-heads like me. It's a portable music workstation with knobs, buttons, and a bunch of audio goodies.
It reminds me of the old Casio VL-1.
I think this would make a nice add-on to the iPhone. In fact, with a mix of knobs and buttons on this, with the touch-screen interface of the iPhone, you could have a very portable composition setup, with the ability to upload to somewhere at the end of it.
It would be nice to be also be able to use this as a portable hardware add-on to Ableton Live, for that only slightly-less portable setup.
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