The Scotsman - Scotsman Magazine - Adventures in motion pictures

IN A converted Edinburgh warehouse a young dancer spins her way round a computer screen, flashing a glimpse of thigh with each flick of her skirt. Shs followed by an older dancer with a more sophisticated routine and a hoop dress. As the rings of fabric rotate like living, abstract art, the dress slips, psychedelically, from yellow to red to pink to green to blue to purple. The film might only be 20 seconds long but is mesmerising. Is also over a hundred years old.

Restored and now computerised, these haunting images were rescued from a tatty old strip of celluloid which was bought in a flea market in Sydney in the late 1970s and then stored, forgotten about, in the collector's Highland attic. But a few years ago, when the owner finally retrieved the reel, he noticed the name Edison printed beside the fils date, 1897, and realised that he'd been sitting on a fragment of film-making history.

It might have been prolific inventor Thomas Edison's idea to create a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear" but, as head of the project, it was his Scottish protégé, William Dickson, who actually developed a machine that could record and replay movement. The film now flickering on that Edinburgh screen was one of Dickson's original reels.

Thanks to Edisom's skill at using the expertise of others to claim fame for himself, William Dickson has disappeared from the minds of all but a few film buffs. But his is an extraordinary story of scientific derring-do...

An fascinating article. For even more information than the article and to view the clip of the dancer, visit http://www.edisonfilm.co.uk

Pocket Reader

The Pocket Reader is completely portable, letting you capture quotes, addresses, phone numbers and more wherever you go. Then, when you get back to your PC or Mac, simply attach the serial cable (included) and the Pocket Reader automatically transfers the text to your computer, where you can edit and paste the information into e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet, and other software.

Looks like you'd need a serial-USB convertor to work with the latest Macs. But at under £34 this device looks real interesting. Paul has bought one so perhaps I'll take a look at that before deciding whether it's worth the money.

Jim Roepcke's weblog: have browser, will travel | Rare "Think Different" Posters

To all the people who laughed at me when I was buying tubes of Apple's Think Different Posters for $10 on their web site and from their company store, take a look at this:...

I wonder how much Jim is worth ;-)

PlayStation 3: The next generation - Tech News - CNET.com

...research efforts for the PlayStation 3 are focusing on distributed computing, a method for spreading computational tasks across myriad networked computers

Organize, collect, share your books with Singlefile - seems to ba a neat idea. I'm sure I could implement the bones of this in Conversant for my own purposes.

One set of exam papers down, and one set (almost ready) to go. Hopefully the weekend will be a bit more relaxing as a result.

The two-week Easter vacation starts today. My students don't return until 8th April. Time to catch up with all the things that have been queuing up recently. Here are some of the things I need to do over the next two weeks:

• Catch up with my family
• Catch up with my sleep
• Take lots of long walks with Rio (and anybody else that wants to tag along on the dog walk)
• Catch up with all the great stuff that's happening with Conversant and Radio
• Catch up with the extereme learning stuff
• Catch up with the departmental admin
• Catch up with the coursework assessments/organisation
• Tidy up my office at work (OK, that would be a displacement activity ;-))
• Tidy up my study at home
• Tidy up the garden
• Tidy/back up the files/folders of my iBook

My last reserves of energy ran out on the train through to Linlithgow this morning and my brain shut me down. Alas, I didn't receive an external interrupt until the warning bells on the ScotRail service sounded as the doors were shut and locked just before pulling out of Linlithgow station. Yes! This is just an reverse-anthropomorphic way of saying that I slept past my stop B-{

To make matters worse, a colleague was waiting to pick me up at the station as were going to a meeting together. So, I got off at the next stop - Polmont - from where I phoned Paul and eventually got through to him. The good folk of Polmont in the station waiting room had a good laugh at my predicament ;-)

To cut a long story short, 20 minutes later I caught the next train back to Linlithgow and finally met up with Paul. We arrived at our meeting 30 minutes late. Needless to say the good folk in the meeting had a good laugh at my 'excuse' for being late!

Must....get....more....sleep. But hopefully not on the way home tonight since if I sleep through my stop then, It'll be 30 miles further on before the next station - and no way to get back since I will have missed the last connection!

Must...stay...awake!