Anders Pollas

Bike mes­sen­gers, oh these dan­ger­ous crea­tures liv­ing their lives in the city, pass­ing by at high speed when you expect it the least. And they film it too. Good stuff at this fine site, “I make near death look fun”.

I haven’t watched them all yet, but the drag race one is pretty cool.

Inter­est­ing post over at The­Unof­fi­cialAp­pleWe­blog; My gripe with Skype and five good rea­sons why you shouldn’t can­cel your other phone ser­vices just yet.

To make it short, Greg Scher ques­tions the hype about Skype while focus­ing on why you might want to hold on to your reg­u­lar con­nec­tion for a bit. And he’s quite right. VOIP isn’t new, some peo­ple won’t find the qual­ity good enough for call­ing non-techers (who know what the deal is) and Skype is sort of mess­ing with ter­mi­nolo­gies, P2P and VOIP.

His five points are valid too:

You can’t receive calls from land lines, tra­di­tional VOIP ser­vices or cell phones.
…
No loca­tion aware­ness and No 911
…
You can’t use your land lines or cord­less phones
…
WiFi just isn’t per­va­sive enough…Yet.
…
You can’t take your address book with you…

But! If you dis­card the idea of aban­don­ing your land­line phone con­nec­tion (which you prob­a­bly swapped with a cell phone any­way — which makes the need for a sec­ond phone even more obvi­ous) — I don’t think it’s too bad. As far as I know, lit­tle boxes are avail­able to act as a bridge between your com­puter and your reg­u­lar hand­set and I guess it’s just a mat­ter of time before the address book prob­lem is solved. WiFi is nice (couldn’t live with­out it) but for most peo­ple, a nor­mal cabled con­nec­tion will prob­a­bly be sufficient.

And: The main dif­fer­ence between Skype and most sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies before it is that it just works. Don’t under­es­ti­mate the power of ‘it just works’. Now it even (finally) work across plat­forms. Which can’t really be said about Net­meet­ing. And as the costs of mak­ing long dis­tance calls are really low I think my grand­mother will for­give the odd con­nec­tion drop — I can cer­tainly sur­vive not being able to dial 911.

So while I under­stand the con­cern, that true VOIP won’t be here for quite some time (heck, I’ve been to tech fairs in the mid-nineties where badly dressed VOIP peo­ple tried to con­vince us that at the end of ’99 we wouldn’t have reg­u­lar phones any­more), I can defi­nately under­stand why peo­ple are thrilled by the result so far.

Arh — det er da et fjol­let bjergnavn… Til gengæld har man ærlig og redeligt fort­jent at over­leve hvis man bliver væk netop der… Gad vide om So Fanta nogensinde har været i bjergene?

(Denne post står i skærende kon­trast til mit ønske om at lave en bedre og mere begavet blog — jeg vil prøve at lade være med sådan noget pjat…)

Out­foxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Jour­nal­ism, a doc­u­men­tary on Fox News, seems inter­est­ing. A Fox News reporter has this com­ment:

“It’s unfair, it’s slanted and it’s a hit job. And I haven’t even seen it yet.”

There’s also a peti­tion to strip Fox News of their mis­lead­ing trade­mark “Fair and Balanced”.

Cre­ativeBits has an inter­est­ing lit­tle piece on image manip­u­la­tion from the ter­mi­nal using sips. Pretty cool stuff (at least for lighter-than-light hack­ers like myself), but what really hit the spot was the claim that you could use this exact tech­nique to pull:

Now, that I told you about this com­mand, you tell me what can you use it for, besides get­ting chicks of course?

Why didn’t any­one tell me about this before? I was at Bryggen yes­ter­day pack­ing a 12″ Power­book, sit­ting among loads of girls dressed in almost noth­ing. If I had known that a lit­tle image manip­u­la­tion would have worked won­ders, I might not have focused on con­sum­ing stu­pid sam­plers of ice teas and crisps from bad ass multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions. Note to self: Add a forum for leav­ing tips and tricks on life to pollas.dk…

Sit­ting at the local cafe, doing the morn­ing rou­tine; pour­ing cof­fee into my sys­tem, catch­ing up on mail and news. Two brew­ery deliv­ery guys have just fin­ished load­ing what­ever these guys load — now they’re both enjoy­ing a pint of lager. It’s not even 10AM — in a cou­ple of min­utes they’ll be back on the street, dri­ving an 18 ton truck through the city. Hmm…

From the excel­lent Lon­don Under­ground Tube Diary, an excel­lent weblog about the under­ground trans­port in the city you gotta love:

All you can do is to hope it’s either fake or not permanent.

What d’ya know, Kerry is work­ing from a Power­book. Rule of thumb: The good guys use Macs, the evil ones are usu­ally using some cus­tom built PC-thingies with OSs noone’s ever seen before. At least that’s how it seems to be in the movies.…

[via 3650 and a 12-inch]

Seems like publishing-bits-for-money is pick­ing up. The debate on how to make money on blog­ging, whether blogs are good because of the inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism or bad because of the thou­sands of ama­teurs run­ning loose on our beloved inter­net has been there for as long as blogs have had just a bit of momen­tum. What’s inter­est­ing though, is that while not that many blog­gers are mak­ing money from any­thing apart from the odd Google ads, another approach is start­ing to emerge.

The last cou­ple of months I’ve noticed how some sites, mostly indus­try pro­fes­sion­als within the web devel­op­ment / dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­mu­nity have started to offer arti­cles as down­loads, either as ‘a sin­gle down­load for a fixed price’ or as part of a sub­scrip­tion plan.

Take con­trol of your Air­Port net­work offers insight on just that for a mere $5, Cre­ative mag­a­zine Design-In-Flight has over 40 pages of reviews, arti­cles and com­men­tary for $3 or four issues for $10. Sine­l­ogic Press had a week of free down­load of their Bud­get Design arti­cle before it landed af $9. There are plenty more out there and this model has been around for years. How­ever, it looks like it’s catch­ing on.

They all deliver in PDF, some as a down­load, some as emails. So it looks as if sub­scrib­ing to a whole weblog isn’t the most obvi­ous model after­all. But, Dar­ing Fire­ball is try­ing just that.

What’s most appeal­ing to adver­tis­ers is quan­tity. More read­ers, more hits. More traf­fic. More page views.

What most appeal­ing to you, the reg­u­lar read­ers of this site, is qual­ity. Atten­tion to detail. Appre­ci­a­tion of nuance. Depth.

An adver­tis­ing rev­enue model leads to try­ing to appeal a lit­tle bit to very many people.

He’s a good writer but doesn’t do 20-page arti­cles appro­pri­ate for down­load. But if you want his insight, you might wanna con­sider pay­ing a few bucks. Sounds fair, right?

What­ever the rev­enue model, I’m glad that peo­ple are start­ing to real­ize that with weblogs and other forms of web based writ­ing, even though much have changed, the good writ­ers offer­ing rel­e­vant and inter­est­ing mate­r­ial will always come out on top. And just as every­where else, they can’t do it for free.

Don’t under­es­ti­mate the power of peo­ple writ­ing for free, either in their own time or as an inte­grated part of their work. Peo­ple with love to the medium and a non-profit approach will always exist and as long as they feel they learn some­thing, can get their fund­ing from some­where else or just feel like mak­ing a dif­fer­ence, good, free stuff will be out there. This is in many ways what has dri­ven the weblog phe­nom­e­non. But imag­ine how much extra work can be put into writ­ing and invent­ing if just a few thou­sand peo­ple pay a buck or two each… If you find an inter­est­ing share­ware appli­ca­tion? Try it out — it’s not expen­sive. If some­one offers good stuff for $3 per down­load? Don’t even think twice — pay up and see if you like it…

Yet another rea­son to love Ham­mer­smith:

The OYBike Sys­tem is a street-based rental sta­tion net­work that allows you to hire and return a bicy­cle 24/7 via your mobile phone. The OYBike sys­tem is based on the avail­abil­ity of rental bicy­cles at key locations.

[via Smart­Mobs]

You should grab a bike and drive to Ham­mer­smith Bridge…

I’m work­ing a lot out of dif­fer­ent cafes. I like the fact that even on days with shit­loads of work, I’m still able to go out, fak­ing hav­ing a life. And I like to drink decent cof­fee too.

But that also means that I carry around basi­cally all my work with me — and I don’t really like the idea of hav­ing it stolen while I’m at the lit­tle boys room or order­ing more espres­sos. That’s what Kens­ing­ton Savers are for, but what I need is cafe own­ers real­iz­ing this and drilling some holes in their tables. You offer wifi, you drill holes. Please?

(Funny thing: As I was writ­ing this, the lady run­ning the cafe I’m sit­ting at right now asked me to look out for her lap­top while she went to sort some­thing out. I should just ask her to start drilling instead of bitch­ing on the inter­web, should’nt I?)

After­noon snap­shot: While tak­ing a walk at the har­bour, a Ger­man guy with a huge tray of straw­ber­ries is lean­ing over the side of his ship shout­ing “Gen­mod­i­fizierter Erd­beeren?!” at passer­bys…