A lot of people have asked me

Some people have asked

Someone once

I asked myself a question this morning: How do you go about being more creative?

It's not an easy question to answer; creativity seems to be something that you either have or you don't. You can take maths lessons, but can you take creativity lessons? I've never seen that on any college prospectus. Sure, maybe art lessons make you more creative, but no one ever says, "Here it is, the golden rule of creativity. Do this and you can't fail." Well, I sure haven't got anything like that, but here's some stuff that helped me to release my inner creativity.

First rule: Write stuff down

We're all people. And people are huge, complicated, squishy things with a tendency to forget things - I'm not sure I can remember the amount of awesome things I've thought of and just forgotten. Who knows how many you've forgotten yourself.

The solution? I have a notepad (several, actually) dedicated to noting stuff down when I think of it, for fear of losing it in the murky depths of my disorganised brain. The thing is, actual interesting ideas are few and far between, and of those only a few will even actually work and by feasible – so you've gotta increase your odds by amassing as many as possible.

Rule number two: Write everything down

You know those notepads of mine? They're never going to see the light of day. Why? Because I write anything and everything that I think of down in them, and well over 50% are damn stupid. It's very hard to judge an idea when you first think of it – just like it's very hard to judge something that you have written or created yourself, because you end up judging it in the context of a mind that's still thinking “oh, that's an awesome idea” or “damn, I screwed that up a bit”.

Strangely, I find it's best to write an idea down, and wait until you forget it. Then, with an unbiased mind, you can come back and review your list of ideas, picking the best out without any preconceptions. It helps you see the bigger picture.

Rule Three: Write everything down, everywhere

It's no good keeping that notepad sitting at home, waiting for the time an idea hits you as you stare through the sixteenth youtube video of the evening. Most of my ideas come to me when I'm out and about, and that's no use if you don't have your notepad with you, so take it with you.

It makes sense really: most of your ideas are going to present themselves at the times when your subconscious is most active – i.e. when it's getting the most sensory input. There's nothing like a stroll by the river with your mp3 player for ideas.

So no, I don't have a real answer to my original question. All I can do is capitalise on the opportunities that my muddled mind serves up and hope for the best.

So URL shorteners are everywhere. In this age of incessant tweeting, they've become a necessity and a very handy tool in a whole host of other situations. But as people try to cram extra words in to that 140 character limit, the shorteners are getting shorter.

It started with TinyUrl, which set the ball rolling. But then came Bit.ly, which was shorter, and then Twitter made it its default shortnener, so it’s usage skyrocketed, and it’s now the most used one at the time of writing. Since then, I’ve been interested to see how far I can go with it, and I’ve gone through, from TinyUrl, to Bit.ly, then to Is.gd, then J.mp, and when I thought it could go no further, along comes 'to./'.

Yep, you read that right, a website with no extension. It's run by the people who own the .to domain, as in www.example.to, and it’s the only one I know of with nothing after the dot. Actually, it creeps me out a bit, it just looks wrong. But at the same time, it’s awesome. Until we get a one letter domain extension, it’s the shortest possible, but this creates a problem.

It generates 4 letter codes, to keep it truly short, for example ‘to./a1b2’, where each character can be any letter or number. This means you get 36 values each time, which gives a total of just over 3 million combinations, with the 4 characters. This may seem like a lot. But bit.ly gets used on average 6 million a day, which means if to./ ever got as big, it’d run out of URLs in half a day, and then, they'd have to get longer, to create more combinations. All this entirely defeats the point of the self-proclaimed 'Nanourl', so don’t go telling anyone, or this whole thing could die in less than a day. Ok, so if they added one character they would get over 100 million combinations, and a 9 letter URL is still pretty short. But even that would only last just over a couple of weeks.

So let’s keep it to ourselves. Because I love to./, and I’d hate to see it die. You see, it has very little else going for it: a horrible interface; no analytics of how many clicks your shortening has got ect, no custom codes, none of the numerous other frivolities of the other shorteners, and it needs it shortness to have any purpose. It’s so minimalistic, it does its job perfectly, and it really is the shortest it’s currently possible to achieve. So use it, love it, and please, keep it quiet.

Microsoft's shiny new input device, Natal, has been circulating around the blogosphere for a few months now, and it's looking very interesting from where I'm standing. Interesting as in, I really want to try it, and interesting as in, I really want to see how it turns out. Will it be the raging success that Microsoft would love it to be? Or will it go the way of the Wii, great for a while but slowly fading out of fashion as the novelty loses its edge?

The way I see it, Natal has two audiences, both of which have very different desires and requests: there's the casual market, and there's the hardcore market. Now, normally I would object to gamers being classified in such black and white categories, but it makes a bit of sense here.

Casual gamers are, on the whole (in other words, please don't shout at me if these don't fit you), the girls, the younger kids and the older adults. Common sense would seem to suggest that this crowd would be highly receptive of the concept of motion tracking, as proved by the phenomenal popularity of the Wii, which has consistently outsold all of the other current-gen consoles, mostly down to casual gamers. The game prototypes that we've seen so far for Natal seem to reflect this; games such as a 'hole in the wall' style human Tetris and a gesture based painting application would hold the attention of the average 19 year old guy for about 10 minutes at most, excluding parties.

The hardcore gamers, on the other hand, are an entirely different bunch. I think most of them would agree that what they want is not a complete overhaul of all the concepts that gaming has built up over the last few decades, but an improvement on existing themes. Hardcore gamers are a tricky bunch to please, and Microsoft has their work cut out marketing Natal to anyone with a more than trivial relationship with shooter, strategy or competitive games.

As long as the response time and accuracy of the system is kept within good limits, which Microsoft assures us it is (although they would, wouldn't they?), I assume the hardware side is not going to be an issue. What will make or break this peripheral is software.

Natal can learn a lot of valuable lessons from the Wii in this respect: full of promise at launch, the Wii emerged with a bang and a slew of excellent titles including Twilight Princess and Wii Sports – a small but nonetheless revolutionary game. Sadly, today, I have not bought a new game for my Wii in over a year and very rarely turn it on, and even then only if friends are over. I just haven't been able to find anything new or exciting for the sad little gloss-white box in the corner of my living room. Instead of genuine creativity and originality, all developers manage to spew out onto the shelves are the same regurgitated Wii Sports clones, badly made puzzle games and samey platformers. Even Nintendo, normally an oasis of real innovation, has only managed a paltry Super Mario Bros. rehash as of late. The Wii Motion Plus addition to the controller does seem to be promising, but again, only if Nintendo can get the developers behind it, spending more than a month or two on each game they release.

Natal, though, is quite different to the Wii controllers. The Wii has to attempt to work out what you're doing simply by measurements of where your hand is moving, whereas Natal can literally see your entire body, in 3D. If it's really as accurate as Microsoft say it is, that could make it infinitely more powerful in terms of gestures. On the other hand, the Wii remote has real, physical buttons: much faster and more reliable in terms of direct input. Natal could, obviously, be used in conjunction with the existing 360 controller, but then that doesn't exactly allow you much freedom for actually moving and interacting with the game – making it slightly less useful.

One thing I would really love to see is head-tracking, which basically detects where your head is and changes the camera angle based on your angle to the screen – making it look a lot more 3D, without any new equipment needed. Check out the link above for an example using the Wii, made by the awesome Johnny Chung Lee who, I hear, interestingly enough, is on the development team for Natal. Fingers crossed on that one.

In the end, I think the most successful and useful implementation of this technology for both casual and hardcore gamers will be one that doesn't attempt to completely replace the input method, but simply enhance it. Something like head-tracking (hint, hint). Features like voice and face recognition would be fairly cool as well.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, Microsoft, if you give it to us PC gamers too then we might be prepared to forgive you for the abomination that is Games For Windows Live. Maybe.

I don't know how many of you use Spotify, the (partly) free and very wonderful music streaming service, but I really think they're missing a trick with their advertising. For those unfamiliar, Spotify offers a free version of their streaming service interspersed with adverts.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't think blaring a loud 30 seconds of hip-hop overlaid by a nasal man telling me about car insurance to someone fifteen minutes into a Mozart concerto is going to help anybody sell anything. Neither, I think, will showering me with the lilting melodies of Ludovico Einaudi ten minutes into a Pendulum album.

Google has shown the world how targeted advertising can transform a business model, so why isn't Spotify capitalising? Spotify has placed itself in an almost unique position in the music industry in that it could, if it tried, deliver relevant adverts to listeners, based on the music they've just chosen to listen to. Everyone wins: listeners get ads that they could genuinely have an interest in, advertisers get better value for money with their ad campaigns and Spotify get more advertising revenue as a result. It's simple, put the ads for teenagers with the teenager music, the ads for classical music with the classical music, and the nasal-voiced ads with the nasal-voiced music.

It makes even less sense when you listen to Spotify's own adverts, in which a cheery Roberta tells us that they're "dedicated to making sure the right ads get through to the right people... making sure people aren't bombarded with ads that weren't meant for them". Well, sorry, but that's not what it looks like from here. And stop playing that damn advert, by the way, it's past its sell by date.

Come to think of it, why aren't commercial radio stations taking advantage too? Sure, the music wasn't specifically chosen by the listeners, and adverts are targeted in the sense that they are generally aimed at the target audience of that particular station, but I think they could definitely do better. How's about the advert for the new Black-Eyed Peas album coming straight after the new Black-Eyed Peas single plays?

Think about it.

The front page of the UK's Daily Express newspaper today bore the headline, "The Great Climate Change Retreat". The 'article' describes how a "key scientist" today "admitted" that global warming is not real.

As with many of the things I write about, I disapprove strongly.

In fact, this article makes me want to find Ed Price, the author of this 'article', and give him a good old fashioned thwack around the ear. The Daily Express, he most smugly imforms us, has "led the way in exposing flaws in the arguments supporting global warming". Well I'm sorry, Ed, but I'm not sure your so-called evidence really adds up here.

The main point of the 'article' (assume a sarcastic tone whenever I use this word, please) seems to revolve around this single scientist, Professor Phil Jones, and his statement that there has "been no “statistically significant” rise in temperatures since 1995". Phil Jones, eh? The same Phil Jones that the Daily Express, just 16 days before, published an article on, calling for his resignation after it "emerged he breached rules by withholding research data from critics"? Was it that Phil Jones you were thinking of? Very reliable source, I'd say.

You see, just because one scientist with a flashy sounding title believes climate change is a lie doesn't mean that his opinion is somehow more valid than the hundreds if not thousands of scientists out there who see the evidence (and here i'm talking about real, independently reviewed facts and figures, not the opinions of a man who, in the Express's own words, "has trouble “keeping track” of the information") as irrefutable proof of global warming.

Global warming can't be proved outright. But then, nothing can really be proved anyway. In science, certainty doesn't exist; you only have data about what you can observe around you, and theories which seem to work for the data you have. Nothing more, nothing less. So, suddenly claiming that global warming is a myth just because you found some random person with a clever sounding name who sort of agrees with you is complete and utter jibberish.

In the end, it will do much more harm to our world if we wrongly assume that global warming doesn't exist, than if we wrongly assume that it does. Sensationalist headlines geared towards selling cheap newspapers to angry people, who think they have the right to dictate what everyone should think, is not the way to go about debating a serious, scientific issue.

Ed Price, I hope you're taking notes.

Okay, I know, it's been done to death, flogged, buried, then dug up and flogged again, but I have a bone to grind on this one, and everyone knows it's so 2004 to try and think of something new to write about on your blog.rnrnRight, piracy. Just to start things off, I'm fairly against it. Whoah! Step back, mister average internet user; put your flaming, troll-squashing ban hammer down slowly; and let me finish before you DDoS me into next year.

I can sympathise. I really can. Why should we pay for media that's readily available on the internet for anyone to have, free of charge and incredibly easily? It's not theft, not really, I mean, no-one's lost anything, you've just made a new copy and kept it for yourself. Well, yes, but it's not as simple as that. There are three main arguments for piracy:

• one, that you can't steal it because it's just an idea,
• another, that it's fine because you 'try before you buy' so that you don't pay for something you don't want to,
• and the last being that what is being pirated is too expensive anyway, or includes DRM which is too harsh, and 'deserves' to be pirated.

To all three of these, I call bull.

Firstly, and mostly because it seems the weakest argument, the 'try before you buy' argument is downright stupid because there are so many ways of streaming the same content from the net, also for free, and often in a completely legal way. Services like last.fm, YouTube and Spotify have brought media into a new realm: it's easy to access from a multitude of devices, quickly and simply. If you really want to try an album or a song before you buy it, it's not difficult to do a quick search, listen to it a couple of times and decide whether it's worth buying. Hell, it's a lot easier than finding a torrent with a decent amount of seeds and waiting while the whole album downloads. Oh, and it has the advantage of not being illegal.

So, next, you can't steal an idea. I'm not going to get hung up on terms here, since most of the arguments I've seen for this are over the technicalities that prevent you from specifically calling piracy 'stealing'. What you call it doesn't change how right or wrong it is.

An oft quoted example is this: if you had, say, a bike, and I used my hyper futuristic cloning device to make me a new one exactly the same as yours, did I steal it? No, because you still have a bike. No-one has lost anything.

To this I counter that in fact, yes, you are depriving the artist and whoever else is involved the right to have some of your money in return for obtaining some of their music. Think of it like this, would you class stealing an iTunes gift voucher from a store as stealing? After all, those cards cost next to nothing to produce, all you're doing is getting yourself a copy of something from the iTunes store at no charge to yourself. No-one's lost anything, Apple still have their own copy of that music in their servers. Secondly, if you can't steal an idea, you are implying that an idea is worthless, that it has no value. If this is the case, why is a DVD with a film on it so much more expensive than a DVD with no film on it? The film is what pirates would call an 'idea', although I think it's slightly more than that, and yet its presence on the disc ramps up its value by at least 2000%, at a low estimate. So is that 'idea' still looking worthless?

The last point, at least, I can see some genuine issues in. The media industry needs to wake up and see how futile DRM has become in order to build more trust in its consumer base. At the moment, it is almost always a hindrance to the average, paying consumer, and yet cracked versions of games are posted on the net just hours after their release, despite multiple layers of copy protection. And yes, prices could be lower. But guess what? The more people pay for their music, the more money the labels, artists and shops make and the lower they can afford to push their prices in order to get ahead of the competition.

Some people complain that they wouldn't be able to afford to buy music even if they wanted to, and that through their piracy the music industry is not losing any sales at all. Well, tough, I say. If you can afford the equipment to play your music collection on, surely you can afford the music itself as well! If not, perhaps you should have thought of that before and bought a cheaper computer or music player so that you could use the rest of that money on some quality music? It's like buying a coffee machine and then saying, “Oh no, I don't have any money for coffee beans! That means I should get free coffee beans!”

It's not your God-given right to have access to music. It's not in the Geneva conventions. Anyway, you have a right to clean water and you still pay for that with no complaints, don't you?

Recently I was thinking of common themes that are used in successful logos. The ticket that started me on this exciting train of thought was the use of red, blue, green, and yellow in logos. This colour combination is everywhere. Primary colours are generally seen as less professional, but in the world of computers, it's everywhere. Most of you will see it every day; it's the colours of the Windows flag. But these four colours are also used in the Google logo and their icon for Chrome, eBay’s logo, and also AVG antivirus. Now these are all big names, with really well-designed logos. But they all use the same basic 4 colour combination.

This initial idea led me on to see if I could find any other patterns, the first immediately obvious one was animals. Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird, the great open source IM client Pidgin, Twitter, Grooveshark and the Linux penguin are just the examples that spring immediately to mind. I'm sure there are some glaringly obvious ones I’ve missed, but there really are a lot. I don’t know what's caused this trend, but I guess animals just make good, recognisable mascots. While researching this topic I found this great article on Circlebox Blog, which shows many more, slightly less obvious examples. But it shows I’m not the only one who's noticed this.

So there you have it. If you're branding anything that will appear on a screen, make the logo an animal and make it from primary colours. You'll thank me for it.

We of Random Tales are proud to announce we are part of a select group of websites whose names have spoonerisms; yes that's right, we are Tandem Rails! The only possible definition for this new phrase is some sort of railway-style track that can only be ridden on with two-seated bicycles...

I have a theory.

It's not a very interesting one, but it's still a theory. However, we will get to that later. In the mean time... jars. Now, I have three points. Firstly, stereotypically, and by stereotypically I mean that I certainly do not have a sexist opinion but that this is what the majority of people often think or joke about, men are stronger than women. Secondly, stereotypically women are generally associated with cooking, and by that I mean whether being in a household family or a couple, the female usually does the cooking. My third point, jars are often used in cooking, be it jam or pickles we often need to use jars. So with all this knowledge, which, may I add, is quite general knowledge, why do jar companies insist on making jars so god damn hard to open?

I am sure everyone has experienced a time where they're mother or a female friend has asked them to open a jar, I ask you wonderful Random Tales reader, why does this even happen? If it is well known that females will often the be the ones opening jars and that they find it very hard to do so, why, I ask, are they so difficult to open? Some may say it is to do with keeping the contents fresh or well sealed, however, water bottles are well sealed and yet still easy to open.

So, what can we gain from this? That jar companies do not realize their mistake and keep jars like this because (again stereotypically) they are probably male businessmen and have no trouble opening jars themselves? Or that jar companies are infact fake shell companies that are led by fascist, sexist neo-nazis who want women to feel demeaned by not being able to open jars and having to ask men to do it?

You decide.

Though you may say that I have made an interesting point, the subject of jars is merely a way to present my real one. At the start of this post I mentioned a theory and you will know the name of this theory from the title. However, Jar Theory is not what I have just been talking about, I shall explain what it is now.

My theory is this: I believe that you can make a blog post about almost anything, even the most boring of things, and make them a (mildly on my part) interesting read, simply by talking about it intelligently. I call it Jar Theory merely because of the context I have used to convey it to you.

Now I know this is a life changing revelation and that you will almost certainly now be comparing me to the likes of Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, but seriously, take all that new loving attention you have for me and focus it on Random Tales and make sure you stay tuned for more borinterestingly (boring topic but interesting all the same. Yes a theory and I've made up a word, I'm on a roll) posts in the future.

Here at the RandomTales offices, we spend a lot of time on computers. When you run websites, it's a bit of a prerequisite. At the risk of sounding like some horrific bit of product-placement, we really couldn't do our jobs without our beloved Adobe and thier excellent suite of tools, so naturally, when we first heard of a new version of Creative Suite, we were very excited.

News of the specifics of the fifth iteration of this software has been circulating the rumoursphere for a long time now, so this isn't some insider info, sneak-peek gossip style article. Hell, Adobe officially announced it back in October last year at their MAX event. Nonetheless it has some really cool features that we're all very excited about, and so I thought I'd do it the justice of an article.

I use Photoshop more than any other program, and some of the new features really are awesome. One is 'wet' brushes, reminiscent of Corel's Painter application. If you run a brush through a blue and a yellow area, a green streak will appear, just like if it was real paint. The further you move the brush, the duller the colour will become, as if it was drying out, just like real paint.How much of a place this messiness has in Photoshop's pixel-precision environment is debatable, and its practical applications could be limited, but its a nice idea nonetheless.

Staying on the topic of brushes, they've gone 3d. you have an image of a paintbrush you can rotate in 3d space, and the brush tip shape for your 2d canvas adjusts accordingly, becoming narrower the more vertical you have it, and splaying as it is tilted down. This is a more practical feature, and should really offer some great opportunities to tweak your brushes to perfection. They will almost certainly work with the latest generation of tablets, where the brush changed its angle as your tablet pen does, giving a really realistic paining experience.

A final, and most impressive feature, is the new warp tool. Looking similar to the puppet system of After Effects, it allows you to build a skeleton on any image, and pose it to any position, bending it around the joints you create.

Seeing it happen makes much more sense than my description, so click here to see a video.

Flash will also gain an export to iPhone function, meaning many more people will be able to create apps. Apple will still have to approve them, of course, but it's an exciting development for the platform.

All in all, CS5 is looking mighty impressive and we can't wait to upgrade. Adobe usually announce about 6 months prior to release, so it should arrive about April.

Here's hoping for some inbuilt fractal interpolation...