This is the personal website of Dashiell Dunn, a South Australian student with an interest in technology, design, words, sound, and serial commas.
I’ve been looking at videos of plasma speakers and musical tesla coils on YouTube, and I now have two questions:
Also on YouTube: Steve Ballmer advertising Windows 2.0. I love the way he thinks he’s got charisma.
I’m posting this to help spread the word about the Steal This Film series and the movement it documents. In brief, there are two documentary films in the series, both are a bit more than half an hour in length. They’re about BitTorrent, P2P file sharing, and the free culture movement in general.
If you’ve ever downloaded a copyrighted song or movie from the internet, you have an obligation to watch these. If you have never done this, you also have an obligation. Because I say so. You can download them (for free, of course) through BitTorrent from stealthisfilm.com, or you can watch them streaming on Google Video (#1 and #2).
You will hopefully find these films to be thought-provoking—particularly the second one (so, if you’re only going to watch one, let it be that one). If you do watch these films and find yourself seeking more information, you’re clearly an intelligent person, and so you can do research on your own. I’d suggest you start by reading Free Culture (which I’ve previously blogged about), a book that’s freely available to read online (how fantastic is that!?).
Unlocker is a fantastic program that I have been using for some time. Basically, it allows you to unlock—and then delete/rename/edit/etc—any file that Windows says is currently in use. It’s simple, free, and works very well.
Volumouse is a tool which I have found useful. It lets you control your PC’s volume with the scrollwheel (and modifier keys). I’ve got a multimedia keyboard, so I can use that to control the global volume, but I’m using Volumouse to let me control the wave and line-in (for TV) independently so I can easily mix everything together.
My two major issues with MySpace, ignoring the issue of the people who actually use it:
First, it is letting users with no skill or clue customise the appearance of their MySpace page without any real restrictions, which almost invariably will look god-awful, will sometimes be completely unusable, and on rare occasions can cause actual damage. Letting people customise their personal pages is all well and good, but:
Secondly, and I believe more importantly, the design of the site itself is dreadful. When I say design, I don’t just mean how it looks; I mean how it is actually laid out, in terms of usability. Right from the start, there’s no obvious login link that’s universal to the site–you have to go to the main homepage first and use the form there. In fact, having a coherent, universal design is something MySpace really struggles with. For example, reading a blog looks totally different to viewing a profile which looks totally different to viewing a group which looks totally different to MySpace Music (Speaking of which, what is MySpace? There’s certainly no clearly defined identity or even a vague one; even the internal capitalisation varies).
It’s obvious that MySpace is full of different bits and pieces just tacked onto each other, rather than being properly planned from the beginning (at least, I hope that’s the case, and it wasn’t actually planned to be like this). When viewing someone’s comments, you have to click a link to add a new one, rather than just having a quick form right beneath all the existing ones. There’s a great big search bar on the header, but by default that doesn’t search MySpace; no, it searches the web. Who would even use that? And all these issues arise from just a cursory viewing of the site.
If you try to create and customise a profile for yourself (or a fictitious alter-ego), it is incredibly difficult to work out what the hell does what. I’m actually surprised at how many people manage to work out how to customise their profile. The whole thing is just a catastrophe, albeit a ridiculously popular one.
Maybe I’ve been spoilt by community-type websites that actually look good and work well, like Last.fm, but there’s really no excuse for MySpace being so bad.
July 2008 update: MySpace has been updated and it does suck less; visually (outside of users’ editing), things are more uniform. Still, I’m not going to be happy until they provide an option to view profiles without customised styles.
Firefox 2 has been released, and in a word: fantastic. It’s not a revolution, but it’s certainly an evolution. Apart from the new features (which are numerous, including in-built session saving), it’s a lot more polished and responsive—for example, I have always been annoyed with the lag when downloading. No longer; it’s just how it should be. Visually, Firefox has also improved in minor but not-too-minor ways, which also improve the experience.
I’m thoroughly impressed by this. I expected a bunch of new features and options, but the improvements in speed and the interface have caught me by surprise. If you haven’t already, get it.
And, most exisiting extensions still work (with automatic updates required in some cases).
Python 2.5 came out last week. Plenty of nice stuff, including improved performance, upgrades, and new language features. For me, the best things are
Have started using del.icio.us. Is good.
Stock.XCHNG. Over 200,000 free stock photos made by submitters. A very useful site.