Shiny like Chrome

Earlier in the week, for reasons that I've not been able to work out, Safari died on me. Clicking bookmarks in the bookmark bar froze the program. Deleting preferences, clearing caches, resetting the application and other suggested fixes didn't fix it.

I've stuck with Safari since it was a beta, and have been happy enough with it - we're only talking about a web browser after all, and it's the content that really counts, not the conduit.

I've had Firefox installed for the odd website that didn't play well with Safari, but in contradiction to what I've just said, I never really liked it much and don't fancy using it all of the time. So I've installed Chrome and I have to say I'm quite happy with it. Rather than trying to import settings and bookmarks from my sick version of Safari I started at scratch.

The first thing I set up was the Save to Delicious bookmarklet, because I store most of my bookmarks there and just use what I can fit in the bookmarks bar locally. (Delicious is great, and seems to have a better future now that Yahoo! have sold it. If you've never looked into Delicious, you should). Then I added extensions for bit.ly and Evernote. I don't like the default setting of new tabs opening next to the current one, instead I want to open at the end of the tab bar, like Safari, and there's an extension for that too.

I subscribe to one or two RSS feeds, and although they're all in Google Reader I don't like that interface and prefer to read them in NetNewsWire. Chrome doesn't seem to have native support for sniffing out feeds and subscribing to them, but a bit of Googling brought me to these instructions and the RSS subscription extension.

And I think that's all the tweaking I've done. What have I missed? What are the extensions you like and use the most?

Thirsk fire

I heard about Storify a while ago, and it's now gone into public beta so I was keen to have a play.

Then tonight there was a big fire in Thirsk, so I had a little play.



If you're not familiar with Storify it's a way to curate content from various social media sites to help tell stories.

How has the BBC doubled the TV audience for the Australian GP in only two years?

Earlier this afternoon Jake Humphrey, presenter of F1 race coverage on BBC television, tweeted about the viewing figures for the weekend's Australian Grand Prix:

You guys are amazing. In 2008 less than a million got up to watch the Australian GP live. On Sunday it was OVER 2 million at 6am! #bbcf1less than a minute ago via webJake Humphrey
jakehumphreyf1

2008 was the last Championship that was covered by ITV, in 2009 the BBC took over, so the clear implication of Jake's tweet is "We've more than doubled the audience!!" Which would be something to shout about.

But with viewing figures it's never that simple. How can you be sure you're comparing like with like?

In 2008 the Austrailan GP started at 15:30 local time, meaning that British F1 fans had to be in front of the telly at 04:30 to catch the start. This year the red lights went out at 17:00 local, which meant viewers had to be up at 07:00 to see the start and 06:00 to see the build up to the race (although it would feel an hour earlier with the change to BST overnight).

For what it's worth I think the BBC coverage is better than ITV's was* but it's not so much better that it will have doubled the audience. There are only so many F1 fans and even if the programme is better now it can't create more fans from nowhere - although having had a good couple for years for British drivers and constructors in 2008 and 2009 won't have hurt.

Grands Prix used to start at 13:00 local time wherever they were held, and European viewers had to get up early or watch races into the evening. Now Bernie Ecclestone has done deals to get races on screen at better times for us in Europe, in order to get higher audiences and more sponsorship revenue.

If you're on telly at 04:30 you really are only going to get the die-hards, if you're gifted a more civilised start time you're going to get better figures.



*When ITV won the rights from the BBC in 1997 they too did a much better job. Programmes stagnate, teams get stale and ideas run out. A new contract should result in a better show, for a while at least.

Tits on the Radio

Swearing on the radio is a funny business. Radio in the UK has no watershed, so if you can justify it, and get clearance from the appropriate senior editorial figure, you can say fuck in the middle of the afternoon in a Radio 4* drama.

I'm writing this having listened to the Radio Academy's Radio Talk podcast about late night phone-ins, where about 25 minutes in the talk turns to swearing. There's a discussion about why radio and TV differ in their use of bad language.

But generally, radio is much less sweary than the telly. I think this is a good thing. There is an argument that says that our listeners will be swearing in their day to day language, so why not swear on the radio? Good radio is meant to be conversational, and what could be more conversational than slipping in the odd fuck?

I think there are big differences between radio and TV, how the programmes are constructed, and how we consume them. Radio is a much more intimate medium than TV. As a presenter if you swear on the radio it's like you're swearing directly at your listener. And for good radio presenters it is the listener, they're communicating to one person, not many.

On the other hand telly programmes are aimed at mass audiences, and a TV presenter isn't swearing just at me, but to the crowd. It's a much more indirect insult.

Also, and I've only instinct rather than RAJAR and BARB figures to support this idea, I suspect that radio listening is more likely to be done alone whereas television viewing is a more social activity with groups of people watching together as friends or families. So again the swearing on the radio is directed at me whereas on the telly it comes at us.

I like it that there's little swearing on the radio, and wouldn't like it to change. I don't buy the argument that swearing more on air acts as some sort of leveller between presenter and listener. But am I wrong - what do you think?

*UPDATE: Thanks to Justine Potter who suggests Radio 3 is a better bet to get your really bad language on the air in daytime.

Lock 'em up and throw away the key to the ballot box?

Prison. What's it for? Punishment or rehabilitation? Do convicts merely lose their liberty or are their human rights taken away too? Do we differentiate between people in for a few months for minor offences and those locked away for longer terms.

What if you happen to be inside when an election is called? If you were sentenced to time in a British jail today you'd have to be expecting to serve more than four years to still be there when the next general election happens. In Scotland the average sentence (not including life sentences for murder) is over nine months (281 days).

Today MPs voted by a margin of 234 to 22 (where the hell were the rest of them is this is so important?) to defy the European Court of Human Rights' decision that inmates should be enfranchised.

This isn't a simple issue, it's not black and white. There's a whole rainbow of shades of grey between the two extreme opinions. If you believe that convicted criminals lose their human rights and should be left to rot then it's clear cut; how can you let these people have the vote? Of course you can't.

But I think that prison is about more than punishment. Convicts lose their freedom. Massively. And so they should. But we shouldn't forget about them. One way we judge a society is by how it treats its prisoners, and it's important that however long they're sentenced for that they're prepared for what will happen when they're released. Teach them functional skills, prepare them for work, keep them busy to avoid the fall into drug use and the "university of crime." As the end of a sentence approaches and we're trying to prepare a convict for life outside again, why not let them have a vote if an election comes around? Inmates preparing to be released should be encouraged to take an interest in the society that they'll be re-joining. Let them engage by voting.

On Wednesday Eric Illsley, the MP for Barnsley Central pleaded guilty to charges of fraud relating to £14,000 worth of expense claims. He's due to be sentences in four weeks. If he gets more than 12 months the Representation of the People Act 1981 will cause him to be disqualified from parliament, his seat will be declared vacant and a by-election will be called. If he gets less than a year he doesn't have to give up his seat. How he'll represent his constituents and where he'll hold surgeries is a bit of a mystery. It's grossly hypocritical to have laws that allow MPs doing time to keep their jobs, but to stop convicts from voting them out of office.

So where do I stand on this? Well, not all prisoners should be allowed a vote, but perhaps those in open prisons preparing for release should get their place back on the electoral register, or maybe those serving less than a year. And what about prisoners on remand who are yet to face trial?

It's not easy, but sometimes being a small-l liberal means you have to support things that aren't popular.

That Fox News map of the Middle East

All over my twitter stream for the last few days have been people tweeting and re-tweeting this screen-grab of a map of the Middle East from Fox News.

Egypt is in the wrong place, it's where Iraq was when I last looked.

Everyone's getting hot and bothered about the channel's ignorance and the poor grasp of geography shown by American as the crisis in Egypt unfolds.

But it's not a new image. Do a little Googling and it soon becomes clear that the map dates back to July 2009, as these sites explain.

And just look at the picture. If it was anything to do with the current story wouldn't Egypt be one of the highlighted countries rather than Syria, Iran, Jordan and Israel?

And who's to say that it hasn't been Photoshopped? If it was a photo of a telly with the map actually on-screen I'd be much less dubious, but a clean graphic like that could easily have been tinkered with and who'd know it?

Last week I read this excellent blog post from Paul Bradshaw about verifying online content.

With some justification we're told not believe all that we read in the papers, but we should also remember that things are even easier to spoof online. As well as reading Paul's post it's worth being aware of snopes.com which is a great site for dispelling urban and internet myths, and a good way to waste hours of your time.

Driving the desk

In music radio in the UK there's a group of people who believe you can't be a real presenter and connect with the programme, really feeling the music, unless you self-op. That's not a euphemism, it means you have to push all of the buttons yourself. It's called driving the desk.

It's one of those things that can be tricky to explain, is actually quite simple, and in total contradiction of myself is really bloody hard to do well.

Most people can learn to do it adequately in a day or so. But some should never be let loose near a fader.

This man is one of those...



(via someone on Twitter who re-tweeted @ricksimmonds)