maynardcase.co.uk linkfest

Househunting
I am trying to buy a house. Yes, I am perhaps a bit foolish, but I’ve finally got to the stage where I can afford somewhere I would (vaguely) want to live. I have enough savings for the deposit. And I think that house prices aren’t going to crash, which is a great shame.

First place I saw last night was pretty good, actually - enough space, goodish location, relatively nice kitchen/bathroom and the place seemed to be sturdy enough. According to the guy showing us around, “the neighbours are quiet, the guy next door is pretty quiet - although actually he’s dead now.”

Watching
Team America: World Police - not enough (good) jokes.

Reading
The Girl Who Played Go (Shan Sa) was interesting but ultimately felt very cold. I’m not sure if it’s an artifact of the translation or of the original, but I found it hard to care about the characters and never really felt involved in their story. The narrative tone always felt emotionless and a depressing ending made it a bit unsatisfying.

Ratings for these are, as ever, here…

I’ve created music compilations as mini-presents for friends, but deliberately left off the playlists for two reasons:

• to avoid prejudices of the listener immediately dismissing tracks
• because I couldn’t be bothered

I’ve finally got off my arse and got some of these playlists typed up, so I thought I may as well share them here.

[now updated with 2002 playlists]
(more…)

I found a link to an article in Wired about the mystery of the Kryptos sculpture located in the grounds of the CIA headquarters. It’s an interesting read, but it also linked to a page of unsolved codes. The Voynich manuscript, in particular, is fascinating: it made my sci-fi addled mind immediately think of the author as a stranded alien or time-traveller in medieval society…

Mental note: must get out more.

I was extremely pleased to get an email today with a link to a page showing details of the mosaics at Canary Wharf. I had planned on paying tribute to them here but hadn’t managed to get decent pictures. They are well worth the attention that’s paid to them here.

I was also pleased to see a mosaic in Scarborough (my home town) has made it onto this excellent site.

Watching: Finished the LOTR extended edition last night. Still very good and I think the extended edition (while butt-numbingly long) does benefit a lot from most of the additions. I still think we need less Gimli-based humour but there you go.

Currently on my to-watch list:
* Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
* Spirited Away
* House of Flying Daggers
* Closer
* The Others
* Solaris
* Team America - World Police
* Garden State
* Napoleon Dynamite

In approximately that order.

Reading: Working my way through the second trilogy by Robin Hobb - “The Liveship Traders” - which is generally very good. There’s rather too much reliance on politics for the plot and some of the characters change unconvincingly (an annoying brat whose only concern is petty rivalries and romance suddenly turns into a mature young lady who sacrifices herself for the good of the family, for no apparent reason). However, overall it’s really fun, there’s a good bit of pain and suffering for added spice and it ties into her earlier trilogy (the Assassin’s Apprentice etc). Apparently the third trilogy develops the same world and backstory so I’m looking forward to that.

Inbetween the two trilogies I’m trying to find something good and non sci-fi/fantasy. I’m considering White Teeth which is allegedly very good, and Jonathan Strange (which is tending towards the fantasy, but there you go) - alas, only available in hardback at the moment.

Related to the previous post:

The marriage of geekdom and photography comes alive when trying to assemble several photos into a panorama. I have several methods of doing this, all of which suck. They generally get the whole “stitching the pictures together” thing right, but often the blending of the different sky colours or exposures just doesn’t work right at all. So then I discover Autopano, Hugin (using panotools) and enblend.

These tools really do absolutely kick arse. Enblend in particular is an amazing bit of work - seamlessly blending different colours based on some maths that I don’t imagine I could understand without some serious bit of work. You essentially have the freedom to take a huge number of photos covering a large area and it’ll just figure out how to join them all together. Very clever.

A more up-to-date version of this shot - click on the photo to see it full size.

Lots of stories about the early development of the Apple Mac are at folklore.org, a nice site if (like me) you’re nostalgic for the good old days when the OS took up less than 8k…

Wordspy is fun: a site devoted to “sleuthing of new words and phrases”. I like velocitize - an awful word but a useful concept.

A very interesting article from Spectrum magazine, on testing the communications between the Cassini orbiter and the Huygens probe. Good insights into making good tests!