Future Sci Chat #9: Transportation

This week on +Future Chat, the topic was transportation. We talked about dream modes of transport, went into the science of engines, and got way off track talking about exploding party balloons.

We also had our first aftershow, which was REALLY fun!
Future Sci Chat #9: Transportation

Test

Test Body

Attrell Update - The Growing Media "Empire?"

Here's my +Attrell Update for the week. In this video, I get awkward and talk about my desire to upgrade my equipment and be able to commit more time to my media work. You can head to http://patreon.com/RobA to find out more, and you can see everything I have going on at http://robattrell.com! Thanks for keeping up!

If you want to keep up with these videos, click on the "i" in the top right of the video and subscribe!

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I miss you Steph! Looking forward to your video this week!

Ottawhat #19: Kevin Kennedy

Check out this week's episode of the Ottawhat? podcast. New every Thursday!

This week on Ottawhat?, we chatted with Kevin Kennedy, a PE and drama teacher who plays football, directs plays in his spare time, and is an all around great guy!

Ottawhat #19: Kevin Kennedy

Fake it Show #2: Celebrity Encounters (with Damien Broomes)

After months of teasing my good friend Damien Broomes on my other podcast (Ottawhat?) without having him as a guest, I decided to have him on this show right away. Turns out he's actually got some really interesting stuff to say! Enjoy the episode!
Fake it Show #2: Celebrity Encounters (with Damien Broomes)

Little Design Thing that Irks Me.

So I've noticed this for a while, but getting a new phone, and a new iOS version, I thought I'd write about it today. When Apple first came out with a music player, it changed the way most of us listen to music forever. Being able to "reach out and touch your music" as Steve Jobs put it, was a thing that many of us had never done on a computer before.

At that time, the iPhone had a 3.5 inch screen, and one of the neat things that you could do to control your music was to scrub through the alphabet on the right hand side of the screen, which would let you get through your music much more efficiently than the click wheel that preceded it would allow. However, the screen at that point wasn't tall enough to be able to display the whole alphabet, and so they had dots in between groups of letters in the alphabet to save space (see the iPad screenshot below, click to enlarge):

As iPhones have gotten bigger, one of the things you can see is that the iPhone will now show you every letter to scrub through in the music app, because there is enough room for it. However, as you can see in the iPad screengrab, even though the iPad has almost twice the height of the iPhone, it still replaces every 2 out of every 3 letters with a dot. This means it is very finicky to try to scrub through your music on an iPad, and I just don't understand why they don't show you the whole alphabet. 

I'm not saying the Apple device lineup is perfect, but they make enough good design decisions that every time they take such obvious mis-steps, and every time these design decisions remain way past their intended usefulness, it irks users who have to deal with looking at it every day (just ask me about 1st-of-the-monthgate...actually, don't).

Future Tech Chat #23: Computing

This week on +Future Chat, we talked all about some of our favourite things about computing. We talked open source software, fanboyism, and the pitfalls and awesome things about early adoption. Enjoy!
Future Tech Chat #23: Computing