parkersweb

Interested in which one you’ve found works best to recreate the paper experience?

Been using Pocket Casts for years - very happy with it and I think it has all those features?

It's the weirdness of the fact that the client has to buy a completely unrelated product in order to get the thing they need.

Typekit used to cost around £50/year - and allowed agencies to use webfonts on their client sites. Now the clients have to spend £26.50 / month on a product they don't actually need in order to get a font on their website...

We were typekit users before it was acquired by Adobe. Creating font kits on behalf of clients for websites that you host was standard practice.

It was only last year that I discovered that Adobe has changed the license terms so that it’s no longer permitted. At the same time you can also no longer take out a subscription solely to Adobe fonts - it’s only available as part of a Creative Cloud subscription.

So in order to comply with license terms a client has to take out a subscription for an Adobe product e.g Photoshop in order to legally use a font on their website.

Any wonder why most designers despaired on hearing of the Figma purchase?

Overall I think the new design is fine - the biggest gripe is the colour themes which seem to mostly hark back to Windows Vista / 7 aero vibes at the expense of contrast and ease of reading.

There’s also the gaggiuino project : https://gaggiuino.github.io/

Although it’s designed for use with a Gaggia Classic a number of users on the Discord server have already successfully installed it on the Rancilio Silvia

I actually love the fact that you can get pretty much anywhere in the city within 20-ish minutes by bike…

And for that reason the horse photo is still one of my long standing favourites: https://terriblerealestateagentphotos.com/post/62824754189

Just listening to ‘Fukushima’ on BBC World Service podcasts and ‘major nuclear incident’ is definitely one that springs to mind.

Thanks! This might be the clue I need - looks like the channel I’m using might be more prone to RADAR interference. Trying out a few changes now to see what effect it has.

I love audiobooks; I've listened to a massive number of them, I've read, recorded and edited for Librevox, I briefly looked at moving into audiobook production while I was a dubbing mixer on TV programs - and I'd still love to do it if I could.

But audiobooks suffer from some of the same malaise as the publishing industry in general - in that it's both blessed and cursed by Amazon.

Audible has a stranglehold on the audiobook market - but as Brandon Sanderson recently said "The deal Audible demands of ... [authors] ... is unconscionable". The fact that they only pay 40% of the sale price to the author for an _exclusive_ deal (25% if not exclusive) is frankly criminal.

It's bad for authors, but the knock-on effects on the industry where one player has a 90% market-share and a exploitative relationship with the creators is considerable.

About 12 years ago I spoke to one of the leading audiobook production studios about contract work editing audiobooks. The hourly rate they paid was terrible - barely a working wage. Worse still, the rate was based on per finished hour rather than per hour worked, so the liability for a poor quality reading / recording was entirely put on a contractor who had no control over it. Other engineers who were working in the field basically did the job for beer money between other gigs.

So - I can't imagine that AI won't replace a great deal of audiobook production - but that's because even now, with best-selling authors the economics barely work thanks to one behemoth of a player. With lower volume books it'll be a labour of love or an AI reading that is the only viable means of production.

[1] https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2022...

I have a 7530-AX and on the whole it's been good - but for some reason the 5GHz service keeps switching off; wondered if you'd had any similar experience?

I’m a rower but with only a very loose understanding of the physics.

My understanding of why you actually want the ‘peaks’ is because there’s a point at which you have to drop the blade back into the water to begin the new stroke. I’d guess you need to do that at the trough of the cycle in order cause the least disruption to the free speed generated.

From experience it’s also definitely true that for a boat to be balanced it’s absolutely essential the rowers move in sync.

I’d recommend Rory Cellan Jones on Substack [1]. He was the technology correspondent for the BBC until a few years ago - and is now retired partly because of the onset of Parkinson’s.

As a result he’s devoted much of his retirement to reporting on innovation in treating and managing Parkinson’s.

[1] https://rorycellanjones.substack.com

Wife teaches exercise classes for the older 50’s and this is a cyclical problem. High temps mean less movement is required to keep warm which leads to loss of muscle mass and lower mobility, which requires higher temps to keep warm and so on….

Yes - GPDR very much changed the narrative from ‘keep all the things’ to ‘this stuff is a potential liability’.

To be fair - if you’d told me that was what constituted a good gig, I’d have probably replied the same - whilst surreptitiously edging away ;)

Not the downvoter - but I’m guessing it was for using the term ‘woke’ - a derogatory term that is so often used lazily to excuse racism, homophobia or misogyny by people who don’t want to engage in discussion.

I’ve loved this series for many years - highly recommended.

If, like me, you’re unfamiliar with ship terminology I’d suggest not getting too hung up on understanding exactly what bit of the ship he’s talking about. There’s lots of great historical detail - but O’Brian also tells a fabulous story.

I feel the same - to the point where I’ve considered dumping Spotify.

I don’t want music and podcasts mixing - and I resent the fact that screen estate that should be given to helping me find great new music is instead given to desperate attempts to shove podcasts in my face.

I recently saw a CV with a very specific claim about developer efficiency improvements brought about by their introduction of a design system to the product.

I was instantly put off - because while it might be true there’s just way too many variables to claim a 68% improvement was down to your design system.

Does this make the Pi webcam a viable project now?

I looked into making one during the pandemic - but i think lack of auto-focus was one of the things that caused me to rule it out at the time…

Also - introducing Carl as a ‘friend’, if true, was unhelpful. Introduce Carl as the commercial guy needed to negotiate contracts and payment, because it would have signalled to the author that he should be engaging his agent at that point.

Interesting - 20 years ago we had a client who was a big publisher implementing SAP - it ran 2 years over the original timeline, finally went live in peak Christmas purchasing cycle. The system broke down, meaning they weren’t able to fulfil orders, and they went into administration in the following year…

It’s badly done - but it is there. Text overlay in the mountain image. Er-with-va - Snowdon Eh-ruh-re - Snowdonia

if you love apple varieties this account showcases some of the more unusual ones: https://www.instagram.com/pomme_queen/

If you’re interested in this you might also be interested in a project I’m currently involved with.

There’s a legal obligation in the UK for bus operators to supply live vehicle location positions and static timetable data to the Bus Open Data Service here : https://data.bus-data.dft.gov.uk

Had a similar experience back in the early 00’s. Kinda back-fired though - one of the developers had happened to notice that a .com domain name they’d been desperate to buy for some time (because it was the name of their licensed IP) had become available a few days beforehand.

He’d bought it immediately planning to hand it over to the business… wasn’t quite so keen once they laid him off!

Adobe purchasing Procreate in 3...2.... ;-)

I went to see him speak at a music festival in the summer. He spoke about one of his recent projects - the 10,000 year clock: https://www.solidsmack.com/design/what-jeff-bezos-and-brian-... The idea is that modern living has been divided into smaller and smaller sub-divisions as processors get faster, media competes for attention and attention spans get shorter. The 10,000 clock was an artistic endeavour to engineer and design for a much broader time span - and every day the peal of bells is unique to that day only. I found the way he thinks about extending the bounds of creativity in new ways quite inspiring.