GetUp are trying to get donations to cover the costs of airing a great spoof government FuelWatch advert to try and get the politicians on both sides to think a bit more sensibly about what they’re doing.
Update: It’s now on YouTube.
Plus there’s a fact sheet.
OK, so maybe you’ve got a few hundred, or thousand, photos that you’ve taken, but how do you search them ? You could try and tag them for everything (if you’ve got the time) but wouldn’t it be nice if you could just draw a picture and search for that ?
Well the Digikam folks are working on that by incorporating some of the existing ImgSeek projects code into the KDE4 version of Digikam (0.10.0).
They’ve got a short video demo of it up on YouTube (embedded below).
Bruce Schneier has a great blog article on “The War on Photography” that is causing problems for photographers in formerly free countries around the world. If you are into photography (and/or freedom) it’s well worth a read. One part I will reproduce here is a paragraph with some useful links for us photographers (I’ve added the link for “photographers rights” which wasn’t in the original).
This is worth fighting. Search “photographer rights” on Google and download one of the several wallet documents that can help you if you get harassed; I found one for the UK, US, and Australia. Don’t cede your right to photograph in public. Don’t propagate the terrorist photographer story. Remind them that prohibiting photography was something we used to ridicule about the USSR. Eventually sanity will be restored, but it may take a while.
The Aussie version is already printed and in my camera bag, and remember that:
The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid.
It’s just security theatre..
Links to useful documents:
This is a neat little spoof of the Federal Governments climate change propaganda by GetUp! in Australia. They’ve been raising money to try and get it aired during the AFL Grand Final tomorrow (Saturday 29th).
You can watch it on YouTube as well..
In 2003 Donna and I had the rare privilege of watching Marcel Marceau perform in Melbourne, and so it is very sad to hear that he has passed away today, aged 84. This former resistance fighter was a true artiste who could move an entire audience with the smallest of gestures and expressions. He, and his troupe, got a standing ovation that night.
The ABC has a transcript of a wonderful interview that Kerry O’Brien did with him in 2003 during that same tour, it is well worth a read, and ends with this wonderful quote:
The rest, as Hamlet said, is silence.
And I will do for the public this.
If only the video was there to watch what that last mime was..
“Perl, in a Nutshell” sung by Pudge, thanks for the pointer Alec!
For those who may be puzzled by the issues raised by the ABC showing of “The Great Climate Change Swindle” you might like to read this BBC News Report detailing research published in one of the Royal Society’s journals (you can read a PDF copy of the paper free of charge).
A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun’s output cannot be causing modern-day climate change. It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun’s output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen. It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun’s effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.
You may also like to read New Scientist’s “Climate change: A guide for the perplexed” and “The 7 biggest myths about climate change” to get an idea of the facts behind the issues.
Update: John Dalton has a nice writeup from his point of view called “Who’s Being Swindled ?“
It gets a bit weird when in the space of a month you’ve been loaned a rather good Sci-Fi book he’s written by a friend in Melbourne, find he has an article on the BBC News website and finally give up and Google him and find has a page on Wikipedia.
Especially when the last time you’d heard of him you were crashing on his and Feorag’s futon in their lounge in Edinburgh and all you knew was he wrote funny articles on alt.peeves and alt.lang.intercal!
If you do like the idea of dark Lovecraftian geek humour being applied to a the murky world of esoteric spying written by someone who knows about tech (not just pretending they do) then check out Atrocity Archives
Wonderful! (Via)
For some obscure reason I’d ended up on the British Council Australia website and was surprised to see what appears to be a photo of a piece of Banksy graffiti there, seemingly acting as the logo for the Landerer Scholarship.
Here’s the photo on the British Council Australia site:
Here’s a stenciled Banksy “parachuting rat” in a photo on the Art of the State site.
Hmm..
Update: This might explain it…