I thought it might be worth posting a link to today’s “Astronomy Picture Of The Day” (APOD) – partly because it’s a stunning picture in its own right, and partly because it includes the Devil’s Tower, made famous as a tourist spot for extra-terrestrials in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
Like any tourist spot, it’s also a great location for family photos.
A little late to the party, we’ve both managed to catch up with this serial over the weekend. In short, it proved to be one of the best sci-fi dramas to have aired on British TV in a long time.
Earlier series of Torchwood seemed to relish the post-watershed timing as an opportunity to push innuendo and sex. All that was missing was a poster on the wall of The Hub saying “You don’t have to be bisexual to work here… actually, you do”. Not so much “Dr Who for adults” as “Dr Who written by hormonal teenagers”.
Children of Earth, however, seriously toned down the sexuality and cranked up the drama, conspiracy and threat – and it was all the better for it. Yes, there were some plot holes – but nothing disastrous. Yes, some of the special effects could have been a little better in parts – but they were still worlds ahead of the wobbly-walls of BBC sci-fi from the past. But taking it as a whole demonstrated that the BBC can still create gritty and powerful sci-fi drama.
One thing I’ve disliked about the renaissance of Dr Who has been the move from deep, episodic stories to simplistic “must wrap it up in 45 minutes” plots. Hopefully someone at the BBC will take on board the generally positive reaction to Torchwood: Children of Earth and re-think that decision. There’s room for both types of storytelling, and a few more two- or even three-part episodes certainly wouldn’t go amiss.
The latest version of Firefox was released a few days ago. It adds some great new features, including native audio and video support, but it’s worth taking a specific look at what 3.5 means for SVG:
The lack of SMIL still puts Opera in the lead for SVG support. Hopefully the ability to use filters and masks for other content might draw a few more people into playing around with SVG in general. If you would like to see demos of some of the new features of Firefox 3.5 – including SVG filters and masks – there are links to a few of them on my personal blog post about this.
I was reading Planet Ubuntu yesterday, and came across this blog entry about a particular use of SVG in the browser. In the comments someone mentioned an application called Scour for cleaning and sanitising SVG files. This was a new app to me, so I thought I’d mention it here.
The SVG files we make available for download are the original Inkscape files. Occasionally the addition of an Easter Egg requires subsequent hand-editing of the file, but we always ensure that the resultant file will still load into Inkscape and remain at least close to the design of the original un-edited file. The reason for distributing Inkscape SVG files – rather than plain SVG files – is that we would like people to be able to load, modify and re-use our files without losing any useful data.
For some uses, however, it might be beneficial for you to have a sanitised version of the SVG file – one without the Inkscape-specific extensions which might trip up another application. That’s what Scour does – it strips out the Inkscape metadata and possibly modifies the structure of the file to produce something that is smaller and simpler, but which should render the same way as the original file.
So if you want to do something with our SVG files but are having trouble opening them in your application of choice, why not try Scouring them first.
Along with comics there will also be occasional blog entries here. Don’t expect too much – I’ve already got my own blog filled with technical waffle, pointless exposition and occasional rants – and Vince isn’t the bloggy kind (yet, at least).
So we’ve decided to keep the blog entries here infrequent and relevant: they’ll only appear when we’ve got something to say, and only then if it involves sci-fi, comics, vector graphics, or some other subject that we think might interest the kind of people who have willingly chosen to come to this site.
Thanks to volunteers from around the world, many of our comics are also available in other languages:
To read more about our translations click here.
If you are interested in becoming a translator, please email [email protected]
Our comics are released under a Creative Commons licence...
... which requires suitable attribution if you use them...
... and doesn't allow commercial use...
... and requires any derivative works to be released under the same licence.
This symbol indicates an SVG file that you can download and use under this licence
