Angus Hume

RT @FreeFreeHand: #Adobe New(ish) article: “Photoshop users attack Adobe upgrade policy change” http://t.co/LIyGqnqY Anyone here surprised?

Mac Rumors: Mac Blog: Impressive Steve Jobs Tribute Made Out of 4001 Post-it Notes http://t.co/9HwUQrRb

Has a career as a designer destined you to a life of back pain, eye-strain or depression? Chris Spooner has a great article and how we suffer and what we do (or should do) about it. Under exercising the bits that need it and over exercising the bits that don’t… yep, fair to says it taking it’s toll on me too.

Gollancz, the SF and Fantasy imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, announces the launch of the world’s largest digital SFF library, the SF Gateway, which will make thousands of out-of-print titles by classic genre authors available as eBooks. Building on the remarkable success of Gollancz’s Masterworks series, the SF Gateway will launch this Autumn with more than a thousand titles by close to a hundred authors. It will build to 3,000 titles by the end of 2012, and 5,000 or more by 2014. 

Not Quite Nigella reveals some delightful hidden treats around the light industrial areas of Marrickville, St Peters and Dulwich Hill. Don’t miss Home Made Fine Foods, who also sell their awesome handmade Pepe Saya butter.

So here’s the thing. I’ve been a customer for more than 12 years. I’ve put up with the lacklustre coverage and performance because switching telcos is about as futile as switching banks or queues in the supermarket. It always looks like the right decision right up until you do it and find you would have been better off, or at worst no worse off if you stayed where you were - plus saved yourself the hassle.

So I’m on the last month of my two year iPhone contract and I figure they will keep me because I’m too lazy to move. This despite the fact that for the last seven months they have been over charging me for an extra iPhone that I have not ordered and certainly did not receive. About 4 times I rang some poor useless sod in New Delhi who after only 30 to 45 minutes of my time was able to reassure me with utmost confidence that the issue had been resolved. And next month, there it is again. Rinse and repeat. And repeat, and repeat.

Although at least now I don’t have to call every month… no, no, no, I see what you are thinking, they fixed it… nope. See they can’t do that, because as the last guy explained, to his credit without giggling even once, “It’s a billing problem Sir… and they have not returned our email yet”. So still I get overcharged, then after I get my bill, the support office organises a partial credit. But they can’t fix the bill.

The hilarity doesn’t stop there though. Since I figure I’m going to stick with this joke of a company I make my way into Vodafone store in Broadway shopping centre in Sydney last Saturday. I want to find out if I have one payment left or just made my last one, because they don’t show that for my online account. Plus I want to see if dealing with someone in person might get some compensation for my wasted time over the last 7 months. So I briefly explain my situation to the girl behind the counter, and she wanders away to the computer and after a bit shouts across the shop for my name, then my phone number and then my pin. So I will probably soon find another half a dozen phones ordered on my account. Then she says, it looks like the system does not say how long I have to go. Then makes a phone call. Eventually I’m told I have one more bill to go. Fine I say. So then I try for an upgrade deal. Nope. There are no upgrade offers (remember this bit) and they are not authorised to offer me anything, but if I’d just like to call customer care… I know it’s been less than 10 minutes but I guess she has forgotten the whole customer care debacle I explained earlier. So then she tries to tell which plan is most suitable for me because it’s most popular, I try to explain that actually I don’t need even half of that and I have already researched my two best options - contract or prepay. I don’t really want to lock myself into a new 2 year plan on a bit of hardware that is being superseded in 3 months - not unless they can make it worth my while… hint, hint. Blank stares… no they are not good at hints. The second option is a prepay to continue with my old phone until the bump later this year. But I say, I have looked everywhere on their website and cannot see it written that I can continue to use visual voicemail and tethering. Blank stares… “Yeh I’m pretty sure you can” was the closest I could get to a yes. “You really need to call customer car sir…”. Yes, seriously. this girl is good, she did not giggle even once.

So tonight when I get home, there’s a letter from Vodafone offering an upgrade deal -but… she-said-there-were-no-deals… I’m thinking. Letter is dated last week, offering me an upgrade to an iPhone 4 and they will pay out ALL of my remaining phone payments! So that would be all of $15 then. I can’t help it, I’m giggling my head off now.

I’ve been contemplating a switch to Kindle for about the last year. Not a move made lightly for someone fond of the printed page, but on our last holiday it did not go unnoticed that half the space in my suitcase was occupied by large format paperbacks. You see, sightseeing sits almost equal with the decadent pleasure of spending half a day or more engrossed in a good book. And the suitcase issue is mirrored at home, shelves stacked two deep, piles to read, piles to shelve. And I’ve not forgotten that in our last rental easily 80% of our books spent 4 years in boxes in the attic. The latest Kindle is looking better, not great but better. Options are limited in Australia. But I’ve never seen one up close or had a chance to see what the typography is like. Paul Luna sheds some light on the horror that is ebook typography.

There was some mutual backslapping around the fact that social media budgets have grown on average 30% this year. Then someone goes and spoils the fun and asks how they all measure the sales impact of their activities.

If Fonts Were Dogs (via finelinedesign)

Excellent article on using Microcopy on your website.

ClickToFlash April Fools Joke. There’s two minutes of my life spent thinking my computer was compromised that I won’t get back. And I have to look at this for the rest of the day? Is it really THAT funny?

This tip assumes you are using MobileMe to sync your calendars of course. I’ve just recently upgraded to the new MobileMe Calendar and was trying to figure out how I had got subscribed calendars on to my iPhone previously. No matter, there’s a new way and it’s really easy. Just do ⌘I to get info on each subscribed calendar in iCal on your mac. There is a popup menu under the URL for location. Change this to your MobileMe account instead of “On My Mac”. And that’s it.

There are a few oddities still. 

• You cannot see these synced subscribed calendars in MobileMe
• To Dos are still completely ignored.

Both issues are counter intuitive. There’s not much to be done about the first point. But for To Dos I noticed yesterday a new app from BusyMac called BusyToDo which looks good. Although repeating tasks requires BusyCal on Mac OS X. Why can’t Apple do this? I already run Appigo ToDo on my iPhone, synced with ToodleDo. It’s a nice app, but really a bit more than I need most of the time, and I miss having the To Dos in iCal, in particular all the ones from my work calendar. So I may give this new app a go shortly. It’s on my to do list at least.

“You have not used your Toodledo.com account in over a year. In 30 days, we will be deleting your unused account to free up space.”

A big mistake. I use the service constantly via the iPhone application ToDo from Appigo (which is great). Obviously Toodledo are basing account activity solely on direct logins. This shows a degree of incompetence I find alarming. If this one email had not arrived in my inbox, in a month I would have found all my information mysteriously missing. 

Maybe I need to be looking for a replacement service.

The Tunnel is the first movie being produced under the $135K Project. The budget for the movie is being raised online so the final project can be released to the world for free via Torrent. Be a part of the project by buying individual frames for $1 each. I’ve paid for 1 second.

I frequently find myself making placeholder images in Photoshop, then I found this.

I can’t say that I’d have the patience to do this, but I’m glad someone does. If it takes this amount of resources to process just one person who stands up for their rights, what on earth would they do with a dozen, a hundred.

No sooner do we get the council to come and clear away all the rubbish, the Suitcase Dumper strikes again. I don’t know who wants a good flogging more, the dick who put them there or the one who opened them up later and spread around the contents.