Threads [1984]: Desolate and harrowing, BBC

January 21st, 2010 § 1

I’ve just watched this:

Threads is a 1984 television docudrama depicting the effects of a nuclear war on the United Kingdom and its aftermath. Written by Barry Hines and directed by Mick Jackson, Threads was filmed in late 1983 and early 1984. The premise of Threads was to hypothesize the effects of a nuclear war on the United Kingdom after an exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States escalates to include the UK.

It’s scary as hell, chilling, desolate and unrelenting, but worth a watch: I can only imagine the shock this would cause to anyone watching it when it was first broadcast in 1984, when the threat of nuclear attack was very real. My housemates and I had to watch an episode of the Simpsons afterwards…

p.s., It’s a fairly poor rip of the film: the sound is about 5 seconds out from the video by the end, I would recommend downloading it from Google and using VLC to adjust the sound timing. (hint: use the G key)

The extent of the cold snap

January 10th, 2010 § 1

Found this outside @derekmortimer’s house and hefted it a good way of the way home because it made me feel like King Triton (umm.. from the Little Mermaid?). Ok ok, like Zeus then

Learning Cocoa? Some good basic starting points

January 4th, 2010 § 0

I’ve spent the Xmas break trying to teach myself the basics of Cocoa in order to write a few iPhone apps etc. Initial impressions are good, but at first Cocoa (the API and Programming Environment) and Objective-C (the underlying language) can be a bit daunting to anyone used to Java or some scripting language like PHP due to some rather unusual syntax and the tight integration with XCode and the Interface Builder.

So, I thought I’d post a few of the best articles I’ve been reading.

The best so far has been Cocoa Dev Central: I’d recommend starting off by running through the ‘Learn Objective-C’ before tackling the Cocoa articles.

For a great walkthrough from start to finish of the process of creating a really basic app, check this PDF guide by Stroke over at Insanely Mac [mirror]

le basic app

If anyone does get around to following that article and you want the working code for it, here’s some I rolled earlier:

Compiled app and project folder

Ooh I’m writing a iPhone app: LettuceRemind

January 3rd, 2010 § 0

Coming soon… again.

I’ve decided to crack the LettuceRemind.com code out and have another stab. LettuceRemind, my iPlayer notification site which became time-starved and eventually abandoned a few months ago, is going to find a new lease of life as an iPhone app methinks. I see push notifications when new episodes come out, I see a list of tracked series to chose from, I see in-app comments.

The backend iPlayer scraping code is actually pretty much complete:

LettuceRemind backend doing it's thing

I’ve also had a stab at creating an API, for example:
http://dev.lettuceremind.com/api.php/series/recent

Next stop: learn obj-c and cocoa. I’ve found a good place to start is here: Cocoa Dev Central if anyone is thinking the same.

Anyway, just thought I’d post something and see what the craic is!

Ian

p.s., if anyone is interested in getting involved (particularly front end designers, but anyone really), just give me a shout: contact _at_ iandundas.co.uk

Ordering Dominos from the command line [vid]

October 26th, 2009 § 0

Claiming no credit for this, but oh man is it cool!

via @blacknight86 <- hero

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