Nick Richards — Nick Richards

The Guardian, newspaper bastion of the liberal left, has redesigned their print edition. Newspaper redesigns don’t happen very often and when they do people get very excited, not least because it’s an object that readers have an intense familar attachment to but even for these sort of things the clamour was loud, eloquent and rather informative. The pick of the commentating bunch for your erutition were this long survey from Dan Hill of which probably the best bit was the comparison of the design to the brash vernacular of the tabloids and weekly celeb magazines; and Andy’s typically detailist comments picking up on the subtle cues that designers use to move our eyes around a page and the ways that The Web has influenced the approach they’ve taken. »

Quick interesting thingdump: David Seymour came to Saracens via the back door, but nobody better typifies the exhilarating new breed of opensides. Carl Shimer from work on Symbian vs Windows Mobile vs J2ME, vs Linux a programmers perspective. If you have an audio recording of somebody typing on an ordinary computer keyboard for fifteen minutes or so, you can figure out everything they typed. The idea is that different keys tend to make slightly different sounds, and although you don’t know in advance which keys make which sounds, you can use machine learning to figure that out, assuming that the person is mostly typing English text. »

From Collision to Convergence (Or how I learned to stop worrying and watch TV on my mobile phone). Has one of my favourite ever usibility maxims: “If you really like navigation go watch Master & Commander.” Preach it. And that’s all I should really say about that. »

I’m what you could call one of those thirst for knowledge people. I’ve always read pretty fast and when I was younger people would constantly be surprised (I hesitate to say impressed) about what I’d get through in double quick time. Part of this was that I read a bit quicker than the average bear because I did it so much, part becuase I spent so much time reading. And to this day the hour commute each way is still productively used to further my twenty year mission of knowing every fact in the world. »

Mr Ballmer is the CEO of Microsoft, one of the bigger companies in the world and someone who you would imagine society would describe as a ‘role model’. more context. So, would you say he’ll recieve the same general condemnation as Mr Rooney? »

Whilst on the train on monday someone came over the intercom to ask personal stereo users to turn the volume down, so as not to disturb other passengers. One question, how is the target audience going to hear him? »

A panoramic video of Bon Nuit Bay in Jersey, home of the crab salad and cream tea. »

Containers for housing is simply further ammunition for my contention that containers rock and are one of the finest things in the world. Why? Standards my dear, standards. I was asked to define ‘nerdcore’ the other day: this is it. I find it worryingly appealing. We should make benevolent games for all spaces and all technologies. Advertising Ghosts is a great place to track one of my interests, really old and often weathered adverts. »

In the celebratory spirit of Australian injury comes this great news from the Tri-Nations rugby: Ashley-Cooper had taken his seat in the grandstand and was about to start eating a pie when Jones told him he was on the reserves bench. Good taste that man to attempt to get his pie in early and churlish of the coach to prevent it, playing or not. Feeling duty bound I took a rather fine Steak and Guiness pie on board at lunch today to try and make up for Ashley-Cooper’s loss. »

Economics is great. I was chatting with a former Microsoft manager the other day and he revealed that after much analysis Microsoft had realized that some piracy is not only inevitable, but could actually be economically optimal. The reason is counterintuitive, but intriguing. The usual price-setting method is to look at the entire potential market, from the many at the economic lower end to the few at the top, and set a price somewhere in between the top and bottom that will maximize total revenues. »