• 
  
  Tuffmail Email Hosting
  
  
  Dedicated email host, might be needed if I move to a dedicated webserver later in the month.
  
  
  (tags: Email Hosting IMAP)
  
  

• 
  
  Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality is “A Load of Bollocks”
  
  
  The process of relegating ISPs into their rightful place as a commodity is going to be a drawn out and ugly one. Hopefully content providers will allow Virgin to break the web for a bit, and leave it up to consumers to choose services that don’t try to co
  
  
  (tags: NetNeutrality Virgin VirginMedia BBC iPlayer)
  
  


• 
  
  Monocle.com design notes
  
  
  A monster article on the design process of Monocle. Haven’t read it yet. Suspect I should, since the level of detail cannot be anything but insightful.
  
  
  (tags: Monocle Design Web tldr)
  
  

Back home in Cambridge are boxes. In those boxes are packet upon packet of photographs. It has been an ambition for some time to get those photographs scanned, imported into iPhoto and perhaps a bit of Flickr, too.

The thing which has put me off, besides geographic distance and having too much else to do, is the thought of actually scanning these photographs. Scanning, cropping, colour correction, application of EXIF metadata… over and over and over, a living definition of monotony.

What I want is a very, very simple workflow that would ease the process. Something like this:

1. Enter some EXIF defaults before scanning. making the assumption that the precise date and time of exposure is unknown, allow approximate dates and times to be entered. You should be able to bump this up as you go along, too.
2. With EXIF information set, you scan the first item. In a single step, I want to be able to crop (maintaining the correct aspect ratio), rotate and apply basic colour correction (which should also carry over from picture to picture). I should also be able to override any of those default EXIF values.
3. With corrections made, click a button to move that photo into an iPhoto import queue, and scan the next photograph.

I’ve never found a piece of software designed like this. It’s always death by general purpose, or perhaps geared toward people wishing to carefully correct every single aspect of their photograph in Photoshop. I’m not after optimal quality. Just ‘good enough’. I just need a small piece of software that sits in the middle of this flow.

Does anyone have software recommendations? I’m interested to hear other ideas on how to go about this sort of Grand Project, too.

After a slightly longer drafting period than I’d planned, my article Kelkoo goes microformatic has gone live on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

It’s a lengthy piece on the recent redevelopment of Kelkoo and the microformats we added to it. It’s focused on the consumption of the formats though; putting them to use to build a related products widget for Kelkoo. That was my Hack Day V creation (up on hack.ben-ward). I hope it provides a useful introduction to hListing, and the practical benefits of microformats in action.

Feedback so far has been excellent, so thank you to all who’ve linked it with kind words.

For reasons I’ll elaborate on in a moment, I’m home from South By Southwest with two completely identical cameras. One of them is mine, the other… not.

In the interests of trying to return it to the rightful owner, here are two images taken from the camera. If this is you, or you took the picture, then I would very much like to return your camera.

A little background: During South By Southwest there’s a club night off San Jacinto called PureVolume. My attendance was down on last year (once SXSW-Music started up, the place became unbearably full of cigarette smoke), but on one occasion Steve spotted my camera had dropped from my pocket onto the floor. Picking up the camera, it was the very same. Breathing relief that the screen hadn’t cracked in the fall, the camera was returned to my person and the night continued somewhat uneventfully. Next morning, sitting parallel on the hotel desk were two cameras. I had not dropped my camera at all. But someone else had dropped their matching model.

I want to get the camera to the rightful owner if I can, so if that’s you, read on: To get your camera back you need to email heythatsmycamera@ben-ward.co.uk and give me some information. Namely: The manufacturer and model of the camera; also describe the unique identifying customisation that you’ve made to the camera body; and describe some of the other contents of the memory card.

I’m pretty sure the owner is a SXSW-Interactive attendee, so I’m quite hopeful that this post might find its way to him or her.

Good luck.