- Hot Fuzz was probably the most fun movie I’ve seen in a long time and I can’t really recommend it enough… Go and see it. It rocks. The big question is which of the main characters you most identify with and why.
- Happy Cog Studios have redesigned their site, and it’s a classy and simple typographic success… Very nice. Textural, evocative and with those nice bits where there’s a big strip at the top with text in it that explains what the site is and which also works as navigation…
- There’s an interesting article on BBC News about music executives and their frustration with DRM systems It’s an encouraging sign when people who work for record companies believe that DRM (at least in its current forms) is getting in the way of people buying music rather than saving their industries…
Category: Links
- Vitamin has a feature on ‘How To Name Your Company’ which I’ve found relatively entertaining… Been trying to come up with some good names for products recently without an enormous amount of luck. Tricky process.
- Core Duo chips are going to look rather stupid compared to the 80 core chips of the future that Intel has been talking about… Massive parallelism is the word, apparently. Fascinating stuff.
- Slashdot’s reporting on Bill Gates declaring Microsoft’s support for OpenID I’m hearing rumours all over the shop, from AOL and several other large organisations that this is going to be the year that OpenID goes insanely mainstream. Time to start thinking about how this affects social software…
- Apple and The Beatles finally come to some kind of agreement over the Apple brand w/r/t music Good news. Not completely astonishing news. Would have to happen eventually. Probably Paul McCartney’s even richer now, which I suppose is a good thing.
- Delettering the Public Space was a project in which all signage was replaced with flat yellow blocks It’s weirdly decompressing to see these great expanses of yellow replacing sign after sign. Very beautiful. Very strange.
- Last week Flickr proposed limiting tags to 75 per photo and contacts to 3000, and there was a bit of an outcry… Personally, I thought the move was reasonable. You don’t optimise your service for 300 users at the expense of millions of others. However, they’ve found a better solution now, with limits only applying to non-reciprocal contacts.
- TechCrunch’s social music overview is pretty light, but interesting nonetheless… There’s a few names here I haven’t heard of. iLike is a nice little plugin I’ve been using for a while but which has very little traction in my communities. Last.fm remains my staple music community…
- Finetune is an interesting social music experience, which breaks my personal web rules, so I’m not going to play with it… i’m totally uninterested in sites that don’t let me link to things easily and which break the model of the web. I don’t have time for it. Good night!
- Useless Account is the best Web 2.0 site on the internet at the moment It’s genius! You get to sign up! Then you can edit your profile! That’s it! No more! Simple, clean and efficient and really well-designed too.
- I’m having some fun playing with IMified, a range of IM bots that perform productivity tasks for you… I can’t help but miss Matt Webb’s Googlebot IM search interface. That was really nice. I’ve rather missed that.
- John Gruber writes about Bill Gates’ recent irritable comments about Macs, security and feature-development on OSX He actually goes so far as to say that Gates is just downright lying, or at the very least highlyworryinglymistaken. I’m not sure which it is, but I suspect it’s something in that territory…
- Joy of Tech on Gates on Apple parodies the Mac/PC Apple ads in spiralling in-joke reference apocalypse I wonder how many things you’d have to explain to a total newbie before they’d get these jokes. I wonder how many things I’m missing. There’s this guy called Bill Gates, right….?
- Live from the Flickr offices, George Oates and Heather Champ goof around… It looks like frivolous play, but normally George can’t get any work done at all unless that thing is being whisked around her head. It’s Heather’s main job…
- Charlie Brooker talks about the Mitchell and Webb Apple adverts And while of course I love my Mac and am comfortable that its *nix underbelly is fully nerdcore and not merely design wankery, I have to admit that I agree that Mitchell and Webb are sort of the wrong way around…
- Plazes has just raised ‚Ǩ2.7 million to extend and develop itself… I’m a bit of a fan of Plazes. I’m not sure quite what it’s useful for yet, but it’s certainly on the way to something…
- The BBC Trust is asking for people’s opinions about the BBC’s proposed on-demand services If you have a strong opinion either way, you should probably express it to them.
- Oooh. Shiny. Apple have just announced they’re selling lots of multicoloured versions of the iPod Shuffle I mean, I know I’ll link to anything that Apple do, but still. Pretty. I wonder if I need another iPod.
- Beautiful credits and typography for the movie Thank You For Smoking, as made by Shadowplay Dan Hill of CityOfSound.com found this. Bloody lovely bit of work – really nice combinations of old cigarette packaging and animated typography.
- Simon Willison has pulled out another OpenID wonder from his hat – idproxy allows you to login to any OpenID supporting site using your Yahoo ID Really nice this one. As I understand it, it uses the BBAuth stuff and packages it up and translates it into the mechanisms of OpenID. What’s so good about this? In a nutshell it means that there are now millions of registered OpenID users in the world…