Reprocessed, by Matt Patterson

Something approaching a weblog

June 2004

2.6.2004

CSS: Separating content from presentation, second edition

This is something I should have done a while ago...

8.6.2004

The effectiveness of a reasoned, well-constructed and accurate critique

Amidst the maelstrom of complaint about the way Apple have handled recent security problems John Gruber has complained about Apple viewing security updates as a marketing problem, in Security cannot be spun. One of his complaints was the way about the that the 10.3.4 update was announced, merrily trumpeting that it included 'recent security updates'. As he says (near the bottom of the article):

17.6.2004

The unadaptive iPod

I've only had an iPod for a few months, but that's been long enough to realise a few things about it, good and bad. My department's boss, Dan Hill, wrote a very good critique of the iPod's physical design, pointing out the disjunct between the appearance of impenetrable perfection and the reality of constrained manufactured product, and praised the adaptability of the software.

23.6.2004

Audiophile music encoding

Is anyone out there aware of any serious comparison of audio encoding formats (encoding, bit rate, that kind of thing) of the What Hi-Fi? persuasion? I'm only asking because I want to start playing with MusicBrainz, and it doesn't seem to understand Apple's AAC, so I should probably encode new music in something else to give myself some raw material to experiment with.

25.6.2004

Swans, redux

Sometimes someone knows something is utterly beyond hope, but they can't walk away. I think that Swan 1 knew that there weren't going to be any cygnets. She kept hoping, for perhaps a month after her eggs should have hatched. Gradually, as the days went by, there were fewer eggs in the nest, down from seven to four, and eventually to none. She stayed on the nest, even after we stopped seeing her partner by her side (before, he'd usually been fetching food or, resting on the bank, in a guard position between the nest and the path).

R2-iPod

Ah, the joys of being an iPod owner. Lately my iPod has taken to hanging once every couple of days, requiring a menu/play-pause reset to bring it out of its sulk. It's also taken to bouts of extreme whimsy, jumping out of one album into another mid-song, often only managing one or two tracks before it leaps again.

26.6.2004

Public lettering

Is there a visual equivalent of 'overheard'? ('Overseen' sounds daft.) Anyway, here are some poor-quality camera-phone pictures of amusing public lettering I've run across recently.

29.6.2004

On iTunes and random play

I may be an exception, but I listen to my music exclusively by leaving my iPod (and iTunes, for that matter) on random play, set to shuffle by album not track. I don't use playlists (I find the process of making a playlist quite traumatic, actually). Before iTunes I used to listen to CDs by pulling out albums and moving between them as the mood took me, and as albums which had lain unlistened to for a while caught my eye.

Not forgetting:

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