Month: April 2008

And this blog post explains all the value that they’re getting out of being involved. Very excited to have them with us!

And truth be told, he’s right. The last few years have seen a decent number of fairly feeble attempts to harness the wisdom of the crowds that do indeed end up schlocky and amateurish. People will get better at it in time.

People always generalise from their own experience. You get several incredibly bright, diligent self-starting friends in a room and–shock–they’re naturally productive and find their own equilibrium.

“The django_fireeagle package contains code to handle the Fire Eagle authorisation process within Django. You can use it to manage connections between Django users and their respective Fire Eagle access tokens.”

Should you want to cut down the time it takes to develop Fire Eagle related goodies using C#.

Lovely site full of video clips of sexy TV and film title sequences.

It is gorgeous and unfortunately I guess only works if you’re in Berlin. If you are in Berlin and you have a Fire Eagle invitation, then you should totally have a play.

San Francisco sometimes weirds me out a bit. I’ve not really come across anything like a UK Garden Centre, although I’m sure they exist. There are however, these amazing little boutique places. S’weird.

Okay. I’m lying. It pisses me off. My personal belief is that you’ll see his name in biographies in twenty years time as the man whose lack of clue resulted in the BBC’s inability to adapt to the digital age.

What can I say. It looks gorgeous. It’s full of future technology stuff. I have to kit out my apartment from scratch. I will probably not buy it. I’ll probably have spent the money on something else ridiculous.

I know I’ve been going on a bit recently, but this is precisely the problem we’ve been trying to fix. What you want to do is capture someone’s location in one place and use it everywhere.

It’s a good album. There are a few songs that have stuck with me, which in my album-less digestathon of iPod smart playlists and ratings is my indicator that it’s a great record.

In the end, I think I’m most fascinated by this piece because of all the things I wouldn’t have done and the decisions I don’t really understand. Gripping combination of mental exfoliant and moisturiser.

Seriously, it’s worth sticking with. A few of the later episodes are are better than many of the Doctor Whos of the last couple of seasons. You know, for kids. Also occasionally K9!

The lightning represents innovation.

A good list of some of the prime candidates for the job. My favourites would be Tony Ageh and Simon Nelson, both of whom I’ve been honoured to work with and who I have significant respect for.

The only problem is who follows him. There are some particular candidates that I think would do the job well, but I’m afraid I suspect they won’t end up with the job.

Pretty funny as politically charged satires on the horrors of anti-gay rhetoric go. It’s not quite as clever as I think it thinks it is. Some of the analogies are a bit forced and hurt their own message. Still, enjoyable.

Surprisingly fun making disk images and putting in background images and aliases and stuff. You can see our finished work for Leopard users if you’re a Fire Eagle user when you download the widgets.

This one could just grow and grow – particularly given all the geocoded information in Wikipedia.

Those of you who have Fire Eagle invitations will – with any luck – have already noticed that we’ve started adding some select apps into the gallery. More to come. It’s actually quite overwhelming.

Constructed by Steve Marshall.

At some point when the current lunacy is over and my teeth are fixed, I have an apartment, Fire Eagle is completely launched, my taxes are done and Web 2.0 Expo and Where 2.0 are over I shall redesign too.

The next lot are a little less depressing: awesome, eagle, evening, fucking, new, think, totally, want. Top people mentioned: Biddulph, Brother, Cal, God, Jones, Paul, Simon.

Also demonstrates some of the value and fun you can have with accelerometers.

Very happy about it. Spent quite a lot of yesterday early evening knocking up a quick scale drawing in OmniGraffle 5. I’ll plug in the numbers today when I go around this afternoon.

It’s hard to know how to respond to that, except to say that honestly, how many things last exactly forty-five minutes. I suppose you could time the TV shows you’re watching.

You require willpower to develop willpower. Nasty. To be honest, this connects well with my experience. I’ve managed to make myself more focused, and my flat’s normally a tip.

I love the way your brain attempts to rationalise this documentary-style footage of what’s going on with the fantastic, allegorical and occasionally just insane stories from the Bible.

I can’t help but wonder how easy it is to walk down without killing yourself though.

And then you can go straight over to Amazon MP3 to buy it. If you’re in the US that is.

Particularly horrified by the picture, which captures my exhaustion and desire to get into trouble only partly as well as it gets my double chin and my ‘raises handbags’ gesture.

Awesome! Everyone likes pubs!

He probably hates it. I don’t mind! I still think he’s neat.

I’m not sure I like the sense of grazing and herding architectures. Although superficially bucolic, it has something horrible and locust-like about it if you think for any period of time.

Occasional errors will be introduced through replication. For error correction 3d printers will connect to each other and blend their schematics. It’s not quite what I expected as our future but it makes sense.

I don’t need an apartment. I’ve never needed to play table football as much as I do right now. I wonder if it’s okay to lick it.

With any luck the same effect will take Clay’s book higher up the Amazon rankings.

I’m sure Cal was scratching on the front door of the Steam offices (or whatever they use instead – orbital organitropolis probably) for one of these a while back.

Very exciting – impressed by both sets of people there. Remarkable good taste, by all accounts.

It looks great, but unfortunately I’ve not had much of a chance to play with it yet as I don’t have an invitation. Sad Tom.

Design patterns are now established. Probably people need to redesign less. So is it a bold new step, or is it a distraction from where the changes actually should be happening?

I mean, otherwise, there’s a precedent for surveillance where we just sort of have to take Phorm’s word for the idea that they’re not tracking personal or private stuff. It seems particularly sinister to me.

Well unfortunately it’s not that awesome, as it only seems to actually broadcast your location when you press a button, presumably as a consequence of being kidnapped or something. Fun though.

“But wait, you say that my iPod isn’t wrapped up in a pretty little white case? Oh, I guess you haven’t heard of a pretty little white case I like to call my skull.”

Difficult to really get too worked up about stuff like this, to be honest.

God, the five dollar bill is a monstrous horror of crap masquerading as a bank note. I don’t know what they think they’re doing. Having said all that, my current favourite is New Zealand’s currency. Gorgeous.

It looks gorgeous. Here’s an admission for you. The visual style of a fair few of my presentations are based around colour combinations that I’ve lifted from their type sample pages.

Still, this way I won’t lose it if I need it in a hurry to freak out a n00b.

Disappointed by the fact that over-half of them are from DC Comics 31st Century super-teams, particularly The Legion of Substitute Heroes, who are intentionally lame. I know too much about this stuff.

It’s from Milton R Cudney’s “Eliminating Self-Defeating Behaviors” (apparently published in Michigan in 1975 by Life Giving Enterprises). This sense of what is natural and ordered basically fucks us all.

Absolutely fascinating book of what appear to be map-like visualisations of literary themes, books, sentence lengths and the like. I’m trying desperately to find out where to get my hands on it. Any ideas?

The last one on the page I think is absolutely beautiful. I wonder if there are any sites where you can find really amazing designs that you can take into a laser engraver to have put on your machine…

It’s a decent piece that I in most part agree with. I’m a little disappointed (as ever I suppose) by the need to package up complex issues in a couple of minutes. My position is … simplified … let’s say.