Month: April 2011

  • Things a TV Channel Controller Should Never Say

    If you’re a TV executive you should be very careful when you axe something or say that you’ll never do something again. Recently Jay Hunt, Channel 4’s new chief creative officer said that the channel would no longer be making list programmes. That’s fine. They’re lazy, relatively cheap, and have run their course. But what’s…

  • ISS

    The International Space Station (ISS) is very visible at the moment, appearing as an often very bright, yet very fast-moving star. Taking advantage of a location that has much less light pollution than home, I took the above long exposure photo this evening showing the transit of the ISS across the sky, passing through Leo.…

  • My BBC DQF Proposal

    Another day, another proposal under the BBC’s Delivering Quality First (DQF) – aka, what significant cuts can we make as painlessly as possible? We’ve had plenty of them to date including the gutting of BBC Local radio, stopping late night or daytime broadcasts. Just today, the BBC News channel (or BBC News 24 as it’s…

  • Radio Well Worth Listening To

    A couple of things that I heard over the weekend: Into The Music Library – This documentary from Jonny Trunk is a great introduction into the world of library music. You’ve heard an awful lot of it, but mostly you’re not aware of it. The documentary concentrates on music from the sixties and seventies. It’s…

  • The Dangers of the Cloud

    Putting all your worldly goods into the “cloud” is brilliant isn’t it? You simply upload, documents, music, files, pictures, movies, whatever… onto one of the many cloud based hosting sites. After all, it’s fiddly, time-consuming, and often expensive to sort out your own hosting solutions. And putting your documents in the cloud brings with it…

  • Seagull 4B-1 TLR

    A couple of weeks ago, I dipped into the medium format world of a twin lens reflex camera. Namely a Chinese Seagull 4B-1. It’s very much an entry level camera. I’ve now run about three rolls of film through it, and you can see some of the results below: The first set includes a little…

  • Kindle Pricing

    Interesting news emerges from the US, where Amazon has decided to release a lower priced Kindle. The base model wi-fi only Kindle was $139, but Amazon is now retailing a $114 version which comes “with Special Offers”. That effectively means GroupOn style one-off discounts and other advertising messages. A couple of things occur to me:…

  • Lost and Found

    It’s been a lovely weekend, so today I was out on my bike taking some photos. I headed down to the South Bank and was near the front of Tate Modern capturing a couple of pictures of the people nearby. There were thousands of other people about. Tourists; locals; people working. I moved on further…

  • Monsters

    I missed Monsters in the cinema. And more fool me. It’s now out on DVD and Bluray, and it’s superb. What director, writer, and visual effects producer Gareth Edwards has managed is wonderful. This is low budget film-making without looking low budget. Andrew Kalder (Scoot McNairy) is a press photographer who’s asked to find out…

  • Source Code

    I very much enjoyed Moon, Duncan Jones debut film from 2009. Source Code is his follow up and it’s great that he’s stuck to his guns and made another film in a very similar vein. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Captain Coller Stevens, a member of the military. He suddenly finds himself in another man’s body on…

  • Wake Wood

    Wake Wood is one of the new breed of Hammer horror films, this one getting a direct to DVD release (as many horror films seem to do). The film that Wake Wood seemingly bases itself on is The Wicker Man. In Ireland somewhere, there’s a community of people who have some slightly unusual beliefs. But…

  • The Unthanks

    You can only hope that the current Unthanks’ tour must surely be coming to an end very soon. Their website suggest a few days time. The reason I say that is that Rachel Unthank is currently very heavily pregnant! She and her sister Becky shared the singing duties last week at The Junction in Cambridge…