Working in the west end of London has it’s risks. One of them is dreaded ‘wee nook’; those dark corners when drunk blokes relieve themselves after a Friday night on the Pimms. If one works in a building with such a wee nook in close proximity (as I do), one tends to notice that it actually dissolves metal fixings and stains everything else. So that got me thinking, how to stop the wee hitting the wall / door while teaching the culprit a lesson at the same time. Behold… the Gentlemen’s Serves-u-Right. A street urinal with a simple sprinkler to redirect the wee onto the unsuspecting perpetrator’s shoes.

Just checking my Google Analytics on the old iPhone… crikey! Not sure what’s funnier, the cut-off URL or the fact I’ve just entered ‘anal’ as a tag on one of my own blog posts.

This has to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long while. Poor Brad, he was doing so well. You can almost feel the internet sucking him in.

So here’s an age old conundrum that nobody seems to have solved. Or at least nobody seems to have put on the internet. I have a very funky Kurve CNC machined rear brake caliper and an equally funky carbon fork on a fixed wheel bike. This always seems to happen as you generally have to buy nice brakes in pairs, someone fits the front one to a fixie or single speed bike and there’s an overload of unloved rear brakes floating around. Hence how I got mine.

Notice that the pivot bolt that sticks out of the back of brake on the left is very short as it’s designed to go through a small rear chainstay, not a chunky fork. One solution is to replace the pivot bolt with a longer one but these aren’t available for the Kurve brakes (they are available for some Shimano brakes though). Another solution is to use a longer recessed bolt to bridge the gap. I’ve had to use a super-long 30mm recessed bolt just to attach a normal front brake, so I’d need at least a 50-60mm recessed bolt… and these don’t exist.

So my solution was to make one. I thought I’d share the process just in case it helps you out of a sticky situation too.

First, this is what happens in a normal front fork…

Now this is what happens when you use a rear brake with short pivot bolt… it doesn’t work!

Even using an ultr long recessed bolt doesn’t work…

So I need to make a longer bolt somehow. I’m also keen to keep the ‘recessed’ bolt feature, as it’s not only neater but is how the fork was designed to accommodate a brake bolt. I could try and surface mount a bolt but this may end up damaging the carbon fork’s outer shell. So you’re going to need some kit…

So first thing to measure stuff. Insert the brake into the front of the fork and hold it in place. Insert a spare bolt or allen key into the rear of the fork until it comes into contact with the brake pivot bolt. Make a mark on the allen key where it exits the back of the fork. If your fork has a recess (like mine) then mark where the allen key first exits the fork, niot where it finally emerges from the recess itself. Obviously, this is how far in the pivot bolt is inside the fork, or to put it another way, how long a custom recessed bolt shaft would have to be to just touch the brake pivot bolt but not screw onto it. Mine was about 40mm. Now add 10mm to this measurement to allow for a good overlap with the pivot bolt when it’s screwed in. I.e. now a total of 50mm.

So now we need to get some recessed bolts to use as parts. Seeing as my fork seems to be very wide, I got hold of two 30mm recessed bolts from my local bike shop. I’m a “known person” so I got them for free but expect to pay about £3 each. Put it this way, there’s a 35mm titanium one for $7 Toronto Cycles or a 30mm steel one at SJS Cycles for £6.99.

So I need to make a bolt 50mm long so I can do that with a 20mm recessed bolt and 20mm of the threaded tube from the other bolt. So next thing to do is to use a hacksaw to chop 20mm off the threaded tube part of the long recessed bolt. File it as flat as possible and offer up the ‘unchopped’ end to the end of the existing recessed bolt, so you have a nice, clean interface between them. Now we need a way of joining them together…

You’ll also need to chop the threaded bit off the normal bolt. Again, measure it so that it’s long enough to fit entirely within the normal recessed bolt and has enough extra thread to screw into the threaded tube… but short enough to leave that 10mm or so of the threaded tube free at the end. Use s file to flatten the end of the bolt and remove any rough metal. Then carefully cut a slot about 3mm deep into the end with a hacksaw. It doesn’t have to be too neat but it does pay to be as accurate as you can. That’s it for the manual labour.

Now add some strong metal adhesive / epoxy glue (I used Araldite Rapid Steel) to the threaded shaft and screw it into the normal recessed bolt. Be sure to clean the thready first mind as any grease will stop the glue holding. Use a flat headed screwdriver in the slot you cut to tighten it. Then screw on the threaded tube to  the rest of the shat that sticks out (again, with glue). Leave to set for at least 24 hours (or whatever your glue instructions suggest.)

Now you should be ready to rumble. If all goes well and you have measured everything relatively well, it should just work like a normal recessed bolt, only a really long one! Thus…

Finally, don’t forget to swap over the brake pads as they are directional and because you’ve flipped the brake, the left pad will now be on the right and vice versa.

Now there’s no excuse not to use all those rear brakes cluttering up Ebay!

If you use Twitter you’ll probably be familiar with the various link shortening sites used to crunch those long URLs down to something you can squeeze in a Twitter post. This is the same for images. Attach an image to a post and the image is saved on a server and a replaced with a short URL. Twitpic, Yfrog and Twitgoo are all good examples. I noticed that the links it returned had random charters at the end, like so…

http://twitpic.com/wdsey

So, as usual, this got me thinking. Could I just type any characters after the URL and still get an image? Like so:

http://twitpic.com/dino

Was any image ever given a rude word? Has anyone even noticed? Turns out the answer was yes to all of the above.

Not quite figured out what a ‘good’ one is yet but it’s maybe “the word you type in represents image itself” or the super rare, your name is the text AND you are in the image too. Not sure if it has a name yet either, so I’m notionally calling it Linkwhacking after the GoogleWhacking phenomenon from back in 2001. Seems appropriate.

Anyways, here’s are some I’ve found…

http://twitpic.com/dino Little does she know who she’s linked to	http://twitpic.com/drugs Jamba Juice seems pretty addictive
http://twitpic.com/3gs iPhone 3Gs? Nope, it a Nokia	http://twitpic.com/sn0w Bit of a cheat but sn0w has snow in the pic. Nearly!
http://twitpic.com/cute Hmmm, a Ducati 848 in red… cute!	http://twitpic.com/life Sad when you can get it all in one box
http://twitpic.com/win What’s not to like? Win!	http://twitpic.com/fail Caption reads “French EU Presidency: Facing an Environmental Emergency.” Fail!
http://twitpic.com/iraq Ironic how Iraq is the quintessential American scene	http://twitpic.com/osama Seems innocuous until you realise it’s a team called The Bombers. Doh!
http://twitpic.com/pc Suitably digital	http://twitpic.com/spunk Just wrong in so many ways

Having visited a fair few of the pages, many of the comments left with the images are from fellow ‘linkwhackers’, so it’s clearly being noticed already.

So now the hunt is on for more. It works equally well on other image sharing servers, so go find some my friends. Would be interested to hear what you find.

Just watched Lee Brimlow’s quick demo of Flash CS5 saving out an iPhone app. Watch it!

Now, first things first, we’ve made a few iPhone apps at Digital Outlook already in native Objective C and although I’m nowhere near being even remotely classed as a developer, I have been on a basic iPhone dev course and have spent a good length of time debugging and mildly fiddling with the existing apps we have. I’ve made a few simple apps myself so I’ve got a fair understanding of how it works I guess.

I’ve also go a VERY acute understanding of the process and costs involved in creating a native iPhone app from scratch from within an agency. At the beginning, they said “take a Flash app, budget the coding part, double it and add another half”. Cool. Nowhere near. Without going into detail, it seems iPhone App development isn’t quite as simple as it’s made out to be. Yes, your developer may know Objective C, applying it to the iPhone development environment is another thing. Us Flash guys could only stare on as seemingly simple issues took days and weeks to resolve.

So the fact that the Flash SC5 release will compile to iPhone is immense news for me, us and probably every digital agency and Flash freelancer on the planet. Sure there are things it can’t do. Sure you get a bundled app that you can’t ‘add to’ in the native development environment. Sure you can’t use the camera and a few other api’s. And it may be a bit slower than a native app, but take it from me, I’ll take all of those on the chin for the ability to get a creative idea onto the iPhone and into the hands of the world’s mobile consumers.

I can’t wait for CS5 to drop but in the mean time, here are some of my observations from native iPhone development from my Flash perspective.

• Objective C may look like AS3 but it works in a whole different way. From declaring variables to having a .h header file to your .m main class files. Don’t even think of using a ‘Trace’ or C ‘Print’ command. Underestimate the differences at your peril… but don’t be scared either. If I can do it, so can you! (No, seriously, I’m not that clever).
• Debugging already written code is really easy when you know your way way around. Moving graphics, font sizes, swapping sounds, changing text etc. are all pretty straightforward with a simple search to narrow down the location to work on.
• The assets are held externally to the project, so changing graphics, movies, audio etc. is simple too, just swap out the file and recompile.
• The graphics are just plain old JPEGs and PNG files, so your designers are more than up to the job. It’s just like a Flash project as far as that goes.
• If you have time / money, put a rough Flash demo together first. Changing your mind and feature creep during production can be slow and costly.
• The iPhone development suite is really slick (unlike Android I may add!). The on-screen emulator is great and allows you do test it (with a few exceptions) without needing an iPhone or a developer account.
• If your app uses accelerometers, cameras etc. the emulator will fall short as it’s can’t ‘emulate’ an accelerometer. You can get around it by installing an app on your phone to transmit the accelerometer data to your mac, then add a little code to your iPhone build to receive the data and substitute the values in the emulator. Here’s an example of screen-capturing the emulator using this technique. See the Accelerometer Simulator by Otto Chrons for more.
• The icon is VERY important. Make sure you spend time on it. And by the way, the glassy shine and round corners are automatically added to your icon on the phone itself. You can switch the shine off though, but not the corners.
• If you don’t have them in-house, freelance iPhone developers will charge you anywhere from £250-£500 a day.
• If you shop around and do your research, you soon find out that the cheap way to get an iPhone app done is to go ‘off-shore’. South America, China and India are all much cheaper than your average LA, London or New York dev agency. However, they do come with the usual health warnings about production values, creative sign-off and time-zone / communication problems.
• If you have the money and it’s your first app, get someone local to hold your hand and learn from. If not, make sure you have scoped the project within an inch of its life. After the project, budget for an extra half-day for your iPhone dev to explain what he/she did to your Flash dev team. Shame to pay all that money and lose all the knowledge.
• Memory management is now your problem. You have to allocate memory and release it as you go. This is one of the big areas that Apple check when you submit your app to the App Store. You don’t have to allocate actual memory size as in assembly language, but you do have to ‘manage’ closely.
• Do register with Apple and get a developer account. You can get the dev environment for free and start compiling but you can’t transfer anything onto your iPhone without a developer license and associated provisioning files.
• While I mention it, the process to authorise your computer and set up your first app is a bit of a faff. Still not 100% sure I understand it but the instructions on the Apple site are clear enough to get you started.
• The app submission process is pretty simple and the time taken to get a response is anywhere from 2-4 weeks. I know the guys at Apple and even they can’t affect this process, so don’t ask! However, in general, if your app is basic and doesn’t have any advanced functionality such as external database calls or live data, you go into a ‘less risky’ pool, and are generally through in less time. If you are rejected, you go to the back of the queue.
• Make sure you look at what everyone else is doing too. Download everything remotely related to compare. Look at the top 3 in each category too, there’s a reason they are there, whether it’s the content, the execution or the user-interaction. It’s all vital knowledge.
• The ‘Games’ category is the most varied and the most competitive. Before you assume your first app should be a game, consider that it will be up against the EA’s and the Need for Speed’s of this world. If you’re not in the top 20 pretty quickly, you pretty much free-fall until you become all but invisible to the regular browsers.
• To charge or not to charge? 59p says “Aaaah, hell, why not”. £2.99 says “This better be good or I’ll tell everyone it’s a rip off and rate it 1 star”. Initially, you need to go for ratings, so consider an introductory low rate then change it if you see an appetite and good ratings. It’s easy to change the price on the fly.
• And finally, if you can wait until April 2010, consider using Flash CS5!

Was helping out iPhoto with it’s face recognition the other day, confirming who was who, when a few interesting examples popped up…

Yep, can't argue with that.

Technically, he didn't have a name at that point. Top marks.

It seemed to be happy with everyone else in the painting but had issues with the mask.

Just funny. Must have been confused by the very bushy eyebrows?

Hmmm, can't even think where it was going there.

No real reason to this post other than I recently had to use a circuit board in a design and couldn’t find a high res example anywhere on the interwebs. I ended up scanning one I had to hand so thought I’d share. Download the large JPEG here (3114×3763 pixels @ 1.84mb). Hope it helps.

Spotted this t-shirt design while on holiday last year and thought I’d share. Not sure if I’m reading too much into it but if I have it right, it was very clever statement on China’s hosting of the Olympic games and the country’s dubious human rights stance, specifically referring to the now infamous Tiananmen Square incident.

Searched high and low for one but can’t seem to find one anywhere. Any help tracking one down would be most welcome.

On a recent visit to LA, our ‘man on the west coast’ Shann Biglione showed me the Griffith Observatory overlooking the city. The view was stunning, even if my crappy iPhone camera wasn’t up to the job of going it justice.

We had a short chat with a chap who can only described as an ‘Astro Nerd’. He was very unselfishly allowing passers-by to look at a bunch of stars through a telescope. Deep down I know we had some astronomy connections in our family and I mentioned my surname. Astro Nerd squinted, mumbled something about recognising the name but ultimately, wasn’t that impressed.

Googling “Burbidge” (and ignoring all the woodwork results) the main Wikipedia entry is indeed for my great aunt Margaret Burbidge, with a slightly smaller entry for my great uncle Geoffery Burbidge. To my knowledge, I have never met them but a quick scan of the Wikipedia entry, they sound really quite impressive.

In recent years, Geoffery is known mostly for his alternative cosmology theory, which contradicts the Big Bang theory. I actually get where he’s coming from here too. Have a look at his web site and you get the idea.

He also has an asteroid named after him called “11753 FKLG FG RTG Geoffburbidge“. Now pause… take a few moments to think how amazing that is!

Now, if that wasn’t cool enough, Margaret not only has the usual bunch of awards and what-not to her name but is also mentioned on the NASA website for her asteroid, the slightly snappier “5490 Burbidge“. The NASA page has a few sub links, all a bit dry for me but I did manage to glean that said asteroid is in orbit between Mars and Jupiter.

Here’s where it is right now… literally, right now…

Makes me think a little more when I look up at the night sky. I can say hello to old 11753 FKLG FG RTG Geoffburbidge and 5490 Burbidge… if I can remember their names. I may just call them the Burbidgaroids for short but I have a sneaky suspicion that’s a medical affliction. Can’t wait to tell the kids about the Burbidgaroids though.