- The Lyrebird can impersonate other birds, car alarms, camera shutters and chainsaws… It’s almost impossible to believe this video is real, it’s so extraordinary.
Author: Tom Coates
- I’m completely obsessed with Coca-Cola BlaK I have no idea what it is, I have no idea what it tastes like, it’s almost certainly revolting. But I must try it. It sounds extraordinary, and the branding is so… weird!
- According to the BBC, 24 and Buffy are the latest TV shows to be offered for download “Films and TV shows such as the first series of 24 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are to be offered for download.”
- The BBC has a new ‘most popular now’ feature, complete with Flash maps and stats features It’s all very shiny and everything, but I can’t help thinking they’re missing the point a bit. It’s very pretty, but there aren’t any addressable archives to speak of. A decent infotoy, but a toy rather than a resource. Disappointing…
- Apple has a trailer for Monster House and it looks pretty cool In a nutshell – It’s a big scary house that eats people. Thanks to Kerry at mugwump.typepad.com for sending it to me, cos it’s ace…
- George Nimeh has used his IA ninja skills to visualise Yahoo’s complete network and turn it into a poster Click on the PDF for the full orgiastic infographic – just be prepared for your computer to run like a dog. I think we might get this printed out for the office…
- The Michael Jackson 45 degree tilt trick Apparently originally done with cables in the video, but accomplished in a completely different (and patented) way in stage shows…
- I have to say I’m impressed by Yahoo’s Gay and Lesbian Pride portal It’s really quite classy of the organisation to do something like this – and dragging in so many cool bits of the company too. Surprisingly happy about this.
Spotted in Wired Magazine and consequently making me laugh – represented in part here because it was neat (and directing your attention in particular to the bottom and third books from the bottom on the left). In addition recommending that you go and check out the full artifact from the future over on Wired’s site:
I’m going to get me a copy of the twelve-step guide to quitting World of Warcraft, and while I may pass on Mr Denton’s definitive history of weblogs, I’ll definitely pause briefly to see if I made the index.
Let me be clear – I’ve met Robert Scoble and he’s a decent man, and I think the impact of his weblog on the public perception of Microsoft has been significant, surprising and actually pretty important. But this front-page of the BBC News Technology section is simply ludicrous. It’s absurd. I’m fairly sure that Robert knows it and would be embarrassed by the way it’s being represented, but really the people who ought to be more embarrassed are BBC News, who do a hell of a lot of good in the world, but have really plumbed a new low here:
I somehow doubt that Bill Gates is going to be bleeding internally at this news, and suggesting he would completely distorts the story. Readers are supposed to be able to trust their media sources to help them determine what’s really important in the world. Or at least that’s the BBC’s job, surely? Very disappointing.
More generally, good luck to Robert and I hope the new job is as interesting and rewarding as it seems his last one was. Couldn’t happen to a nicer chap.
- The Simpson’s parody / homage to Factors of Ten, as spotted by Kottke Lovely piece of work – really solid and clueful and probably one of the most expensive bits of the whole episode.
- Another bit of classy video – a Beluga whale blowing beautiful bubble rings It’s worth seeing all the way to the end. These whales are extraordinarily smart and fascinating. It’s difficult to get a sense of what’s going on in their heads – but they seem more than animals…
- Coca-Cola in China is doing a joint promotion with World of Warcraft, and Google Video has a no-doubt illicit copy of it… It’s a bloody entertaining thirty seconds. I always wonder about the UK and why they don’t seem to do these things. I suspect it’s because they just don’t believe these games can have widespread appeal. Not sure…
- Watch a kitten on a MacBook Pro reacting to Front Row And then, once you’ve writhed around in geek ecstasy for ten minutes or so, maybe you could watch it again!
- Billy Bragg vs. MySpace “Once an artist posts up any content (including songs), it then belongs to My Space (AKA Rupert Murdoch) and they can do what they want with it, throughout the world without paying the artist”
- Akismet purports to be a very good spam blocker for MT I tried renaming the MT-comments.cgi script and I have to say it had no effect whatsoever as far as I could tell. I’ll try this plugin that I’ve been recommended before I give up completely…
Categories
Why Post Office Boxes are a waste of time…
Barbelith has had a long-term troll. I say long-term, when I mean seven years or so of aggravation. This aggravation has included sending things to my home address, determined through registration logs for my domain names. It has also included demands for me to confirm my home address on the pretext that he’d like to send me legal correspondence. As I’m sure people can imagine, I’m not enormously comfortable about this.
So I started looking into UK Post Office boxes. I thought these might be an answer – an address that I can use for correspondence that’s just a little more secure. But the more I’ve looked into them, the more stupid they are. And now I’m really looking for an alternative that makes more sense. If any of you have any ideas, I’d really appreciate hearing them.
Here’s the first problem with them – the cost. They’re not exhorbitant by any means – if you want them to redirect the post to your home, they only cost about ¬£110 a year. But if you cancel them at any time you get no reimbursement whatsoever. And this get even more annoying when you consider that when you move you can’t necessarily take them with you. I had this sense of PO Boxes as being kind of like e-mail aliases or something but it turns out they’re just physical boxes in particular Post Offices. If you move to an area covered by another Post Office, you have to give them a month’s notice to cancel your current Post Office, then set up another one in your new area. I can’t imagine how aggravating that must be for some businesses. I really would have thought that they’d be able to manage the idea of a unique UK address, which could be set up to redirect to a number of different places over time. But no. If you move, you lose the address. Stupid.
But worst of all is that you actually have almost no privacy protections at all either! Although you can give people your PO Box rather than your home address, they’ll give out your home address to all and sundry unless you can get written confirmation that you’re ‘at risk’ from the police or the military or something. For my purposes, then, this service is just about totally useless. Extraordinarily useless, in fact. To rely on the idea that someone just wouldn’t think to ask is extraordinary. And it’s got to be one reason that people consider taking up PO Boxes – because they don’t want their home address to be visible to everyone. Obviously, the police should be able to request this information at any time. Perhaps you even give powers to the courts or to select agencies, but to anyone!? It’s bizarre!
I’m now looking for alternatives – can anyone think of one? It’s not for large amounts of mail – just for those odds and ends of things where you have to put your address out in public where lunatics can get hold of it. That means that it’s not really practical to have to go and pick up mail from it – because there wouldn’t be any for months at a time, but if there was some (a cease and desist or something) you’d need to know about it quickly. You’ll have to e-mail me, because unfortunately, the comment spam got too much for me to deal with again… tom at the name of this website, as normal…
- Vote Zod in 2008! “Instead of hidden agendas and waffling policies, I offer you direct candor and brutal certainty. I only ask for your tribute, your lives, and your vote.”
- Adrian Holovaty talks about programming and computer-assisted journalism “If you want innovation, hire people who are capable of it. Hire people who know what’s possible. And once you hire the programmers, give them an environment in which they can be creative. Treat them as bona fide members of the journalism team”
- The new version of Yahoo! My Web launched a couple of days ago I know some of the people who worked on this, and they’re really awesome – and this is an enormous step forward in My Web functionality…
- London Underground are experimenting with water-cooling and heat-exchange to chill the Underground Air conditioning the Underground has proven impractical – the tunnels are so far underground…
- Vitamin has a feature on how to design and code HTML e-mails I had to do some of these a few years back and it was a miserable process. Wish I’d had this article then…
- Lost-theories.com – an astonishingly well made repository of information and theories about the TV series It’s a beautiful and solid piece of design, and I believe was built using my colleague’s Django framework. Very nice indeed.
- The Political Compass goes beyond simplistic the simplistic left-right dichotomy I’m sure I’ve linked to this before, but it’s still pretty solid and interesting. I remain economically slightly to the left of centre and way down towards the libertarian end of the spectrum
- Def Leppard are on the comeback trail The Guardian’s got a fairly loving article about the old rockers who became old-fashioned overnight when grunge came along
- A revolutionary new drug for HIV apparently leaves the virus defenseless “A small human trial of the drug, reported last August, showed that when given on its own it rapidly clears most HIV from the blood, driving down the levels tenfold in a matter of hours.”
- Jointcrackers.com – the web’s best knuckles, toes, ankles, neck and spine joint cracking community… I’m upsetting Paul in the office pretty regularly by the number and regularity of crunchy noises my body makes during the day. Sorry Paul!
- The US senate has been intelligent enough to reject a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Take that, George Bush. Take that and shove it up your tail-pipe you horrible malevolent little man…
- Kris Krug mounts the Great Wall You can almost see all the Chinese people standing around him, looking horrified, quietly thinking, “Soon we shall destroy America and their foolish naked geeks…”
Categories
Answering your Odeo questions…
About six weeks ago, I asked a bunch of you to record little voicemail messages for me using the little Odeo Voicemail-a-like feature. You can still send me these things if you want to: Send me an Odeo. Specifically I asked, If you could ask me one question what would it be? I was sort of expecting all manner of crappy insults from some of the people who read this site purely to shout at me about one thing or other, but in fact, the whole thing was extremely good natured, and I very much enjoyed it. The only problem was, I had absolutely no idea what to do next. I recorded replies to a few of them, but felt so self-conscious about the possibility of putting my voice out in public that I pretty much immediately deleted them all again. Turns out I’m much more shy than I expected – almost unfairly shy given how many of you were prepared to expose yourself in public.
What I think I’m going to do is post some of the questions that you’ve sent in with some nice text answers that I can just about deal with. And I’ll have a think in the background about other ways that I could use these widgets around plasticbag.org in neat new ways – and I swear to God some of them will include me speaking. Just not yet. Not now.
Thanks to everyone who sent in some audio – if you’d like to be named or have a link through to your site put next to your question feel free to e-mail me at tom at the name of this website. Thanks a lot everyone for playing. It’s been fun!
Our first comment comes from Gord Fynes and you can hear it below:
I could repeat the question but I think that would pretty much defeat the point of having the audio on the page, now wouldn’t it. So I’ll just jump right in. I think they do it upside down. I’m pretty sure they have molds that they coat lightly with chocolate to form the top half of the bar, which they then fill with goo. And only having done that would they put the base on. That’s my theory, anyway. Mmm. Cadbury’s chocolate.
Next up – a nice cheery one from an anonymous caller – my death row meal would probably be something really dull like a good roast beef, yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, green beans, carrots and gravy. Probably with Horseradish and followed by my mum’s treacle sponge, or my gran’s treacle tart.
So what this questioner is referring to is a piece I wrote a while back called Social Software for Set-Top Boxes about how you might be able to layer social engagement over TV, work that was inspired by some stuff that Matt Webb and I did at the BBC around Group Listening. The answer to the question ‘whatever happened to this kind of thing’ is that a whole bunch of people have been working around it for a while now – there was some work going on a few years ago which didn’t seem to get anywhere, some guys from PARC turned out to be thinking in similar areas, I’ve seen some people building communications stuff across TV in Israel and I believe that Microsoft put in for a patent about IM + TV earlier in the year. As ever, it’s a rare occurrence to come up with an idea that’s so radical and new that no one’s thought around the territory before. All you can really hope is that you can condense something and make it sharper or contribute in some way. Hopefully the thinking I did might help around that a bit. Who knows?
I recognise this voice! This is O’Reilly’s own Nat Torkington with the incredibly insightful question, “Is there anyone in the TV show Nathan Barley who doesn’t map directly to someone on your blogroll?”
Okay, so I don’t have a blogroll, but the answer is probably er…. maybe. That show was so completely weird for me. I worked very briefly on the edges of a team at emap a few years back that was responsible for B3ta among other things. Cal was a rather more substantial member of the team, along with Denise Wilton and Rob Manuel. A regular mischief maker in the office was Joel Veitch of Rathergood.com who was absolutely lovely and charming. Things I remember a lot from that period in time include Buffy’s Swearing Keyboard, spending a day colouring in this crab mask, the phrase shit is good and an image of a wanking monkey which I swear to god was directly referenced in the first few minutes of Nathan Barley. Let’s just say I was kind of peripheral to that scene, but Nathan Barley was more of a documentary than a comedy show and that Cal is of the opinion that the main reason that the show didn’t get a second series was because only about ten people in the world got half the jokes.
Now this is a bloody good and slightly depressing question which I will spell out: Do you get frustrated that you don’t have the time to just make, create produce like you did in the past?. The answer to this question is incredibly simple – yes. Fundamentally, I worked out my life goals a few years ago and they are to get to a position where I have the freedom to get the things I want to be in the world made. Pretty much everything up until that point is a compromise, although it’s an interesting balancing act – you don’t necessarily have the time or the freedom to make the dream products like proper self-managing community software built around political self-reflexive rulesets, but you do get to explore unexpected areas and solve problems you might not have come into contact with in other ways. There’s a hell of a lot to be said for having to push yourself to find the soul or heart of a problem or a product in a territory that you might not have stumbled upon alone. It’s genuinely exploration. But sure, at some basic level there are things that I want to make and build and write and show and play with, and – like pretty much everyone else – I don’t have the time to explore those things or do these things as much as I’d like.
Finally a nice simple question! I would say that the answer to this is probably the Phoenix or the Halcyon – two birds with very different lifecycles, one that dies in fire to be reborn and one that represents peace and tranquility across the waters.
Here’s an odd one. Someone decided that they should challenge me to name that tune:
I’m afraid that I cannot name this tune. I feel like a failed human being and I apologise humbly from the depths of my soul. No more questions that humiliate me, please!
Anyway, we’re nearly done now. Here’s more of a comment from the lovely Yoz. It’s not really a question as such as it is a little discussion about the Odeo comment facility:
Yoz’s point is an interesting one – that having the facility to record podcasts doesn’t necessarily result in good quality podcasts, and that actually being able to write text is often less intimidating for people than recording their voice. For a start, you can edit what you say much more easily in text than in audio. And then there’s the horror of hearing your own voice and thinking you sound like an idiot. I’m well aware of these constraints, which is why, this time at least you’re not getting anything out of me…
That’s it. You’re done. And I’ll leave you with a comment from a certain Kerry Bailey who asked the question that you were all thinking but didn’t come out and say…