Entertainment

I have an ebook reader and I love it. For people who enjoy reading for fun and who are fine with the whole electronic screen thing they can be a great investment. They are not cheap however, so it's not a throwaway purchase by any means. I happened to get a great deal on mine and only spend £150 on it. It is still a niche product, so how can this change?

The creative industries have long been lobbying governments to help protect their antiquaited business models from the real world as it evolves to digital. They claim to be protecting the "creative" people, by ensuring they get fairly compensated for their work. They claim to be offering fair prices to consumers for their work so let's have a closer look. A fair price for creative products is hard to measure, there is no exact formula so I'm going to break down in broad chunks where the money goes, so you can judge for yourself.

Since the Amazon Kindle eBook Reader was released I loved the idea of one, I've been waiting for the right product at the right price supporting the right formats before I jumped in. I have no intention of buying a device which only does proprietary formats locked to one vendor or another. I am not going to build a collection of eBooks tied to the manufacturer of my reader, so I've been doing some research. I've found ePub to be initially baffling, but after some initial reading found it to be a brilliant, standards compliant format.

Between yesterday and today I watched the Matrix trilogy again, and this time I spotted a flaw in the plan. Commander Lock is charged with the defence of Zion from the imminent arrival of an army of Sentinels in Matrix Revolutions. He is already facing an impossible mission, which is complicated further by councillors over riding him and sending his resources away on other missions. Even with that, he made a mistake.

Earlier tonight I caught a BBC iPlayer advert which made me think. I've searched the streaming sites for it to either embed or link to but can't find it, so I'll have to describe it instead. Remember the BBC are funded as a "public service broadcaster" in the UK.

What is with the need for everyone to be "the best"? It's applied in various forms with equally ridiculous results when you stop to think about it. I never thought I'd see the day where I'd be quoting from a song that I detest but even Tina Turner knows the difference; "you're simply the best, better than all the rest".

Part of what makes a compelling story is finding the right point of view to tell it from. It's always a balance between suspense and resolution, and very restrictive to stick to one character. Most stories jump between scenes and show the events in a story building from multiple viewpoints. In the Harry Potter books the story mostly follows Harry from day to day, both internal and external. Now imagine how different the Harry Potter series would be if told from the viewpoint of Draco Malfoy.

When a story written for one media is converted to another it fails to do the original justice, the fans are disappointed and it's considered a flop. There are many reasons for this which I'll explore more in other posts. In this post I'm going to explore the concept of being lost in translation. This is not about language, nor is it about local cultures; these can be worked around. It's about moving from one media to another. Like so much in life, every project is different, some are better adapted than others. It really comes down to the motivations and priorities of those involved.

This blog post is more about getting prior art for an idea I've had onto a publicly searchable space than anything else. It's about the merging of PC desktop widgets onto live TV broadcasts. I'd hate to think some corporate employee would stumble across my idea and patent it as their own only to lock the possibility up from the consumer. The idea itself is not novel, it's not unique, like any other ideas, it's just a slight twist on something already in existence. In this case by merging two concepts to form a new one.