Occasionally, I like to engage in a bit of recreational tech prognostication, and with the current hubbub over what Apple will do next, it seems there’s a considerable slice of the world who thinks the next big thing is a “smart” watch.

This is dumb.

Brutally dumb.

Apple, in its current aesthetic is a premium product company. If they are going to make a product, it will feel like the most materially luxurious version of that product. Hence the metal and glass design language they’ve adopted over the past few years.

Here’s the thing, most people don’t wear watches any more. They’ve become an enthusiast device, and the premium end of the market is mechanical. Mechanical to the point of fetishising that very nature, so that whole new classes of designs and movements are being invented, creating even more baroque ways to enable accurate progression via purely mechanical means. The joy of the modern watch is to wear a mechanical engine on your wrist.

That leaves the other wrist. Whatever Apple is working on, will be something you’d keep on your wrist while NOT wearing a watch. It will not be a portal to your phone, it will probably not have a screen at all. My bet, it’s going to be a motion recorder, like fitbit, which allows you to log and stream all your movement for interactivity like a wiimote.

More importantly, it also acts as a wearable passcode key for all your devices. Your mac unlocks when you approach, and locks again when you leave, your phone and tablet unlock when you pick them up, and it talks to iBeacon-using smart house devices (ie those who will fill the void left by NEST becoming a pariah for joining Google) around your house for smart house integration. iBeacon will be the new feature for home environment and control devices, the way AirPrint became a must-have for printers. It’ll be waterproof, and charge inductively.

There is no “how do I tell the time on my wrist” problem to be solved. There is no “how do I get a small music player for while I’m exercising” problem to be solved. There is no “I want to see my email but not take my phone out of my pocket” problem to solve, no actual people think like that. All the “problems” current smart watches “solve” were invented post-hoc purely to justify the concept of the “smart watch”.

Whatever it is, it won’t solve a glaring problem you, or anyone else thinks you have. It will solve problems that were so constant, so low level so much a part of the background friction of your life, that you never recognised them for what they were.

Update March 10th:

Here’s an article on an Apple patent for for doing one of the things I mentioned.

Opening disclaimer: I was supplied with the test unit by MobileZap Australia, and allowed to keep it.

The Kit: Bluetooth Keyboard Case is a leather folio style tablet case designed to fit full sized tablets in the 9-10 inch range. It does so by having plastic clips which grip around the corners of the tablet, are connected to the case with elastic, and can therefore stretch outwards, accommodating larger form factors. In this case, I’m testing with an iPad Air, which unfortunately is too thin on its own for the clips to grip securely. You might want to look for a specific iPad Air case if you want to use that particular tablet. Alternatively, if you have one of Apple’s smart cases around your Air, I’m using the black leather one myself, it will bulk it out sufficiently for the clips to maintain a firm grip on the device, and the cover flap can close over your screen before you fold the keyboard against it.

The construction seems very sturdy, being stitched leather, with a soft suede-feel inside. The back of the case has a magnetically secured kickstand to prop the screen up while open, and the whole thing is kept closed by a leather flap and loop arrangement, which seems secure enough.

The keyboard itself is removable from the case, and held in with magnets, which makes it convenient to keep the single sheet instructions underneath. It can be removed and used without the folio, as the battery is within keyboard itself. It’s a reasonable keyboard, featuring about 5mm of travel and a full row of function keys. My only real criticism of it, coming from a Mac background, is that the right shift key is too small for the way I type (right pinkie finger used to activate shift). Given a perfect world, I would have preferred a smaller single line enter key, and a relocation & resizing of the End & right Control keys, respectively. That said, the keyboard is very usable, and I was able to comfortably code up a website while on the road. This is probably the biggest blessing of an external keyboard for someone like me, who actually really likes typing on the screen – the on-screen keyboard eats half the display, which is problematic when doing extended writing / coding sessions. I’m writing this review on the keyboard, and having the full screen to read back and ahead is so much better for keeping the context of the bit you’re writing at that moment in your head.

In terms of battery life, I haven’t been able to determine how long it lasts – though my habit with electronic devices is to charge them every night, I’ve been using this keyboard sporadically since December 18, and it’s still working on its initial charge. The manual lists 80 days standby, and 90 hours use. Charging is an area where I have a criticism of this product, however. Although the single sheet user manual states the product comes with a charger cable, my particular example didn’t include one. Thankfully I was able to find a charger for a bluetooth headset that happened to have the required micro-usb connector. Pairing and activating the keyboard is easy, with a built in key combo to wake the connection up after it’s been switched off.

All in all this is an effective and reasonably priced solution, which has a distinct advantage of not being tied to any particular model of tablet. If you’re in a situation where you want to provide standardised keyboard covers for multiple types of tablet, or have multiple tablets, but only want a single keyboard cover, this may be something to have a look at.

If this article was of use, a donation would help support my projects.

So there’s this bug in the calendar app in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, where even though the reminders preferences are set to “None”, when you create new events they’ll show a reminder for the day before at 9am.

Having gone quietly mad trying to figure out the problem (there seem to be several solutions listed online relating to editing .plist files, none of which work), the situation and solution is thus:

When Calendar.app is started up afresh, there are 3(4) calendars in it:

• Home
• Work
• Birthdays
• (Reminders)

These have no reminders set in them, however any new calendars created will have the 9am day before default for any events created even if the preferences are set to none.

The solution is to create any new calendars, then create a new event, and open the inspector to you can see the event’s properties. Open the preferences, and toggle the reminders from none, to one of the other options and close preferences. Then open it again, toggle the reminders setting back to none, and close preferences again.

Problem solved.

If this article was of use, a donation would help support my projects.

The past month has seen some interesting developments on the “professional” artist path I began walking a few years ago when I started my Fine Art degree. So, it seemed like a good time to take stock, and write a few things about them.

I started my degree in 2007, initially thinking I’d study painting to improve my comic art skills. One of my goals was to come close to the sort of work Jon J Muth & Kent Williams achieved with books like Moonshadow and Meltdown. Around that time, the fact I’d released the first two parts of Surfing The Deathline lead to me doing a bunch of rough pencils and page & layout designs for a company pitching comics as a reading aid. That lead to me delivering studio session workshops to school groups at the Art Gallery of NSW, as a part of the Osamu Tezuka exhibition. Something had to give, and so I switched my degree to part-time. In 2008 I got my first chance to get into the studios for specialist disciplines, with rotations through painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking and photography.

To my surprise, I absolutely fell in love with ceramics, sculpture and photography, and loathed painting. In photography, I was able to dive deep into serious art-making almost straight away, and over that first 4 weeks, created the Cages series of images. In the second 5 week rotation, the Flight / Fight images were produced, and I started thinking sculpturally in terms of photographing things I’d constructed. While I enjoyed ceramics a great deal, it turned out that it was sculpture which truly captured my heart.

Three years later, I completed my sculpture major, and had my end of year show. A few months after that, I had my first piece in a large outdoor exhibition, and now a year later, and 6.5 years after starting my degree, I’ve had my graduation. Oh yeah, more importantly, I’ve had a yet-to-be-made work accepted for the 2014 Sculpture By The Sea exhibition at Bondi.

That leaves a year and a half to fill, so what am I going to do with the time? Well, in the same week of my graduation, I received word that I’d been awarded my first grant by the Australia Council – Australia’s main public arts funding body.

The grant itself is called ArtStart, and is for a pretty tidy sum – $10k. Now, it’s not free money to do with as I please, rather, it’s specifically for business development and training. Every cent had to be budgeted and money couldn’t be used for living expenses, making or exhibiting work, or paying oneself a salary. So, the final outcome is that I’m going to buy a rather fancy camera setup, and do a bunch of training in what amounts to product photography, as well as some accredited SketchUp 3D / Architectural design classes.

So, over the course of less than a month I got into one of the most important sculpture exhibitions in Australia, received my Bachelor’s degree, and got a nice big arts grant. Right at the moment, I seem to be making this thing work.

This is a living list of the glitches and bugs, and general “this is not a fit and proper product for sale” nonsense I’ve had while playing the Far Cry 3 multiplayer mode on Xbox Live.

• Can’t find servers – 5-10 minute waits to get into a team deathmatch game at times.
• Lag.
• Killed and shown hits in a place I had been seconds earlier, where there hadn’t been any gunfire.
• the bug where another player is raining from the sky as they run along.
• button unresponsiveness – crouch button not working until I’ve jumped
• spawning in places where you’re caught on the collision map, requiring a jump to be able to move.
• spawning in places where you’re caught on the collision map, and jumping doesn’t work, leaving suicide as the only option.
• stuck in aim mode after using and releasing a mounted weapon.
• “committed suicide” while randomly walking or running along a flat piece of ground with no weapons fire.
• killed in one place, then magically teleported to the other side of the map to bleed out.
• reloading a half full weapon empties it of all but 1 round.
• killed and told I couldn’t be revived because I had been revived already, despite this having not happened.
• had my view wrenched in un-commanded directions while shooting at enemies.
• reloaded a weapon, then immediately revived someone, then find the reload has unhappened after the revive animation is complete.
• get killed and then fall through the map, plummeting through empty space as the terrain disappears into the distance above me.
• get killed, have my body catch fire, respawn on fire and lose all my health.
• get killed, respawn and immediately die again in a secluded area with no enemy present.
• unbalanced numbers on teams. One occasion playing on a team of 2 against 10.
• reload a weapon, attempt to shoot with a full magazine, reload sequence is triggered again, get killed by the person I was attempting to shoot.
• kicked from server due to being idle, while running around on the map looking for someone to kill.
• Spawn into the beginning of the game, with no weapons.
• everyone else frozen while I can still run around, and kill all the opposing players, and keep killing them when they’re on the ground.
• Falling off the ship and getting stuck a foot deep into the deck below.

With 2013 upon us, we’re in the window in which Apple CEO Tim Cook had promised that there’d be something new for Pro customers. Many people interpret this as code for a new Mac Pro which would in some way resemble the current behemoth.

I’m not so sure. I wonder if we’re in for an FCPX-style paradigm shift. Back when Apple introduced the first G3 PowerMac, there were two models of machine serving the Pro desktop market – the Powermac 8600, and 9600. The only difference was that one had three PCI slots, the other had six. The replacement G3 had 3 slots. Apple’s answer to those complaining, was to suggest that many of the previous two-card solutions had consolidated onto single cards, alleviating much of the need for six slots. Further, they suggested that the small fraction of the user base who needed more slots could go buy a PCI expansion chassis, which would plug into an existing slot and provide up to six more.

I hope we’re in for a similar shift on the Mac Pro.

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The period 1970 to the mid 1980s is often called the “Renaissance of Australian Cinema”. Discuss the ways this period can be considered to be a Renaissance through the construction of identity and nationalism? A list of suggested films includes: “Walkabout”, “Wake in Fright”, “The Cars that Ate Paris”, “Sunday Too Far Away”, “The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith”, “News Front”, “Mad Max I – III”, “Puberty Blues”, “Breaker Morant” and “Gallipoli”.

The Australian film renaissance, also known as the New Wave of Australian cinema, was a period in which some 400 films were produced over roughly 15 years ¹. It was driven primarily by two government policies, which occurred sequentially. The first, was in the 1970s, when the Gorton & Whitlam governments established financing bodies, which would directly contribute to projects. The second phase occurred in the 1980s with the introduction changes to taxation law that encouraged private sector funding of film ².

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Discuss the way in which a concern with the politics of sub-cultural identity and difference animates the work of an artist of your choice.

As Carol Hanish was paraphrased ³ with the title of her essay The Personal is Political, I would like to explore the way an artist examines the sub-cultural personal politics of those who self-identify within the Goth / Industrial subculture. In the spirit of the post-Modern denial of a natural or valid distinction between “high” and “low” culture, or of the arbitrary assigning of labels such as “good” and “bad” to these culture-forms respectively, and to do my bit, however small, to push back against the stigmatisation that comics and comics practitioners have suffered ⁴ at the hands of cultural and academic hegemonists. I will be basing my exploration on the work of American artist and writer Jhonen Vasquez, and in particular, his graphic novel work Johnny The Homicidal Maniac (JTHM) ⁵.

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So here’s the latest project I’ve been working on – a field airbrush.

Much as I love airbrushes, they’re not that outdoors friendly. My current studio setup is a waist-high compressed air cylinder, going through a regulator and “powering” a pair of airbrushes. I’m probably going to replace this with a portable compressor setup soon, but in the meantime I wanted to be able to have the ability to use an airbrush when out of range of power. You can get aerosol cans to do the job, but I wanted something a bit more sustainable and able to be recharged in the field.

The main component is a 5 litre garden spray bottle. This has a pump handle in the lid to compress the air inside. Normally you’d put liquid in it that you wanted to spray, but here we’re keeping it dry.

The brass fittings are attached where the sprayer wand is unscrewed from the handle. The connection of plastic to metal is a bit tricky – you need to bulk it up with teflon plumber’s tape and silicone sealant to get a good seal. The brass fitting will cut into the tape and plastic, so the silicone is necessary. The smaller brass piece only needed tape to seal. I bought the brass fittings from a plumbing supplies place so they were able to match the airbrush’s airline cap thread and diameter.

The way it works is that you pump up the cylinder (which has a safety release valve so you can’t over-pressurise). The original trigger for the sprayer is still inline so that allows you to unplug the airbrush without losing pressure. It also allows you to isolate the metal / plastic connection from constant pressure. The trigger has a button to lock the valve open, so you don’t have to keep it pressed by hand.

In use, you get about 4-5 minutes continuous air from one fill of the tank. You can easily keep the system pressurised by continuing to pump the system with your other hand while using the airbrush.

Total cost, about $35.