This morning, Louise Mensch, MP for Corby and canny social media user, added some of the horrifying sexist abuse that passes for how to treat a woman on the internet to her favourites list so she could share it with the world. This is the sort of thing that should be done to expose the seedy underbelly of sexist, racist and downright hateful idiots that prove the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory daily. There was just one problem; I was on that list.

Now, hopefully, many of you would instantly see that my jibe isn’t one suggesting Louise Mensch get her kit off, but one that conflated her outrage at misogyny with her undying and over-the-top support of Rupert Murdoch, purveyor of The Sun, famed for its topless women paraded on Page 3, and hopefully laid out its utter hypocrisy in one short tweet.

Unfortunately, it didn’t get interpreted that way. I expect this from The Telegraph, as this falls firmly into their narrative, but even The Independent labelled me as one of the worst examples of misogynistic tweets.

As I don’t buy my ink by the barrel, this little blog post will not make anywhere nearly the same sized splash as the original reporting, but that’s the price we willingly pay for a free press. I’m sure Ms Mensch agrees with me on that point, at least. I stand by my stance that supporting Rupert Murdoch while, at the same time, railing against misogyny is hypocritical, but I do regret, if nothing else, the timing of my statement.

Update: @Hannah_Furness of the Telegraph contacted me and updated her article accordingly. Oh, and Darren Saunders said nice things about me, too.

Dave Allsop paints SLA Industries

Yes, very exciting.

Go on, buy a Kindle, make me a quid.

Feel free to ignore this experiment; you probably adblock the junk anyway. At least it’s not like tit-wank.com with NSFW adverts.

Huh, looks like a lot of British TV

Luckily, there are a few places that offer proxy or VPN services to allow you to watch out-of-region TV and I settled on a one-week free trial ($5 canadian dollars a month out of trial) of Unblock US to see if it worked. Unsurprisingly, given the title of this blog post, it did indeed work. Following their instructions for the PS3, I now have access to US Netflix with my UK account. Netflix don’t care where you are, as long as you’re paying them, it would appear. So, now you’re set up, hopefully by using my affiliate link, what more is there to do? Nothing, and if that’s all you want, you can consider this article finished. If, however, you want to tweak stuff, read on …

The way Unblock US works is that it offers its own proxy servers by changing the DNS entries for a few sites to its own IP addresses. If this makes no sense to you, stop reading now. We are about to get a bit technical and if you didn’t understand that, you definitely won’t understand this.

jearle@sausages# dig t.hulu.com | egrep '^[a-z]'
t.hulu.com.		193	IN	CNAME	track.hulu.com.
track.hulu.com.		193	IN	A	208.91.157.68
jearle@sausages# dig @208.122.23.22 t.hulu.com | egrep '^[a-z]'
t.hulu.com.		180	IN	A	184.154.113.147
t.hulu.com.		180	IN	A	50.22.86.53
t.hulu.com.		180	IN	A	68.169.54.229
t.hulu.com.		180	IN	A	173.208.155.19
t.hulu.com.		180	IN	A	173.208.170.19

What that demonstrates is that Hulu’s tracking URL is being proxied to a selection of servers when you use the Unblock US DNS servers. This is also true of the other Hulu IPs, but I chose that one as an example. What if we just want to watch Hulu on the Mac Mini plugged into the TV, but not use the Unblock US DNS servers? Open the Hulu webpage and see all the URLs it loads. Look up the DNS for all of them and add them to the hosts file until the page starts showing TV in the UK. You should end up with something like this:

jearle@sausages# grep hulu /etc/hosts
68.169.54.229	hulu.com
69.89.9.138	t.hulu.com r.hulu.com s.hulu.com

As long as you have an Unblocked US account, you should be able to pick and choose which services you watch on your Mac and leave the DNS server settings on the PS3 for Netflix.

I’m sure there are more tricks you can manage if you run your own DNS server and I may look into some of those later, but in the meantime, that should be enough.

Thanks to Ananyah for suggesting Unblock US to me in the first place. She’s on Twitter, too.

Kill it with fire

Be careful, though. If Growl’s lead developer catches you doing this, even though it’s mentioned on their site, he will suggest you turn the fire on yourself because, apparently, that’s his idea of customer care.

The Troll! It Burns!

Apple’s EULA serves one purpose and it’s one that pretty much everyone else is overlooking. With a $14.99 cap and a ban on selling your interactive books anywhere else, Apple have comprehensively killed the $300 text book dead. The price gouging that text book publishers are renowned for is dead if Apple’s new interactive format takes off.

If Apple are evil with this EULA, it’s towards traditional publishers who, when faced with guaranteed sales, have no qualms charging stupid money to a captive audience. That kind of evil I can live with.

Caveat time

The first caveat is that I work for Nightfall Games and am ex-Wizards of the Coast. The second is that I know Henry Ford probably never said the quote I attribute to him. The third is that I know it’s not really crowd-sourcing; it’s market research. Crowd sourcing is about using a crowd as a data processor, not an idea generator. Finally, while this article purports to be about D&D, it’s a much broader stroke than that and is really about having confidence in your talent and not playing it safe, in any field.

Wendy’s Fruit

Hidden in this 2006 article about big burgers was a wonderful quote from Wendy’s about their market research:

Wendy’s experienced the discrepancy between what people say and what they do last year when the chain put a fresh fruit bowl on the menu. Despite a $20 million marketing push, the fruit did not sell. “We listened to consumers who said they want to eat fresh fruit, but apparently they lied,” said Denny Lynch, a spokesman for Wendy’s. “On paper it sounded great, but it didn’t work.”

Your customers will lie to you if you ask them what they really want. This is due, in part, to the observer-expectancy effect and other such stuff. It’s a cognitive bias thing, basically, but if you’re asked what you want, you will usually answer with what you think an ideal version of you would want as opposed to what you really want. You want fruit options instead of fried potato produce right up to the point they get to the counter and order the Double Fat-Bastard with fries.

Henry’s Horse

It may be true that Henry Ford never actually uttered the following quote, but it certainly fitted in with his philosophy.

If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse”.

This is how Steve Jobs ran Apple. How did that work out?

Conclusion

Your audience will lie to you. Your audience doesn’t know what they want. Your audience will feel a sense of self-entitlement if you give them what they ask for instead of something better than their wildest dreams. If you think you need your audience for ideas, it’s even worse because, and this may surprise a lot of you, good ideas are easy. Good ideas are cheap. I bet you have good ideas every day and know someone who has a great idea for a new movie, game or book. Good ideas are ten a penny, but execution is the key. You can turn to your audience and ask them for all the perspective in the world and what you’ll get is more perspective, and that’s not a good thing.

It’s too easy to get caught up listening to the people that want to share their opinion, but if you do that, you’ll just know what the sort of people who want to share their opinion think; You’ll get a skewed view. My advice is to nut up or shut up. Stick with what you know, in D&D’s case, it’s hit points, character classes, levels, etc., and they’d best serve their audience by giving them a system they know and adding something I’ve obviously not thought of that makes it magical. They can do that, right?

“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” – Kay (Tommy Lee Jones), Men In Black

Comments welcome. I’m not a comments off blog.

I have many roles, but one of them is a little more demanding of hardware than the others. For a handful of weekends a year, I turn my talents to the paddocks and tracks of World Superbikes and MotoGP, armed with an iPhone, a brace of cameras and a 3G iPad; I rent massive lenses and face down the fire-breathing machines at the sharp end of the world championships for MotoRaceReports.

Carlos Checa at Donington World Superbikes, 2011

Ditching the MacBook with Aperture/Lightroom installed, and relying on an iPad, was at first a scary proposal, but when I realised how little actual retouching I do on-site, I figured it was worth a go. After having done it a few times, I’ve upgraded to a 64GB iPad 2, but I can’t see myself returning to lugging a laptop around.

All kitted out, ready to go

Taking photos of motor sports is a tricky vocation and I won’t bore you with the technical side of it, but if you imagine I can return from a weekend’s work with well over 40GB of photos, you should understand the daunting scale of certain aspects, especially when I don’t end up with 40GB of usable photos. Slapping the camera kit in the iPad and attaching a big SLR full of photos, I can pick one or two photos in a session to upload to Twitter or our website, depending on the subject. All this is possible without spending money on Apps, surprisingly. I’ll describe my workflow and you should see how simple it is to get photos from trackside up on to the internet before anyone else.

Firstly, take the photo. That’s the hardest bit to get right, but let’s assume you can get a decent picture you want to share. Connect the camera to the iPad and get the Raw photo into the Photos application. At this point, you are allowed to be impressed how well the iPad deals with noise on high ISO photos and remark as to how it’s just like Aperture in that respect. From here, you’ll need to size the image to a reasonable twitter size and convert it to JPEG or PNG. I do this with a major time-saving cheat: I zoom the photo to how I want it to look in the Photos app and take a screen grab. If it needs rotating to landscape, I do this in Adobe’s free Photoshop Express for the iPad. Then, I tweet the resulting photo and Boom™, it’s on the internet.

John Hopkins, wildcarding at Silverstone World Superbikes, 2011

You will get a few odd glances from other pros if you’re doing this trackside, but many of them are on a lot slower turnaround. In the Media Centre or the bar, showing your pictures to your friends and colleagues is a lot easier on an iPad too. I’ve seen Netbooks cropping up for those filing copy, but I’ve not seen any other photographers using an iPad yet, although some have taken an interest.

Could I recommend that other photographers ditch the laptop for an iPad? I think so, as long as they have a workstation at home for the post-event editing. The iPad cannot replace a computer, but it can lighten the load while photographing al fresco, and that means more space for bigger lenses in the camera bag.

Update to the original article: I now use Photogene for raw conversions and edits. It’s great.