Category: Random

• Matt Locke does some black & white portraits of the usual suspects (plus Ted Nelson) at this year’s Open Tech Webb comes off looking best, as usual. I look like a dribbling freak…
• The Dutch version of Big Brother is proposing to have a pregnant woman give birth on the show… I suppose we haven’t quite got to those extremes yet. The woman apparently believe the child will be proud of their on-screen birth later in life…
• More4 – the new channel from Channel4 – is commissioning new shows at the moment Apparently it will launch later in the year on Satellite, Freeview and Cable and will feature The Daily Show, West Wing and new drama / documentaries…
• Some users of Flickr are more than a little pissed at the Yahoo acquisition. The whole thing is very interesting. Don’t know what I think about it quite yet… “A splinter faction of Flickr photo-sharing community members is threatening a symbolic “mass suicide” to protest closer integration with the website’s new owner, Yahoo”
• An interesting block of feedback on getting a computer-naive parent to switch to a Mac I’m particularly fascinated by this one as I’m trying to get my family to convert to an iBook at the moment. I wonder if they’ll be able to do it…

A much more exciting title than post, I’m afraid. I’ve spent most of the afternoon battling through an installation of MT 3.2 that has thrown up more unexpected pitfalls and collapses than a solo walk to the North Pole. But I’m now past the horror and what do I find? A little option revealing all the posts I have left stashed in the archives half-finished and unpublished. There are – count them – seventeen of the little buggers. Each one is pretty long, because they’re the ones that I tend to abandon half-finished. I have an evening at home to look forward to, so I’m going to try and polish off a few of them and get them out in public before I lose the drive. More later, hopefully…

• How to configure iChat for Google Talk Interesting question – everyone talks about how Google represent a challenge to Microsoft, but I wonder what effect they’ll have on Apple…
• BBC plans to put BBC One or BBC Two out on the net within the next year Infrequently mentioned: to go alongside the ten national radio stations (among others) that it already simulcasts online…
• I’ve just started using Addison Lee for all my cabbing needs, and they’re bloody awesome… I know this sounds like an advert. I don’t care. They make me feel special inside…

• Pastafarianism makes it into the Times (London not New York) Thanks to Mr Jones for finding and Flickring it…

• A Flickr API version of UK-obsession Sudoku done with any tagged pictures – this has got to have been absolutely everywhere One of the best uses I’ve seen for the API yet – which pushes the whole concept of what you might do with Flickr photos in an entirely new direction. Lovely, funny job… (Thanks Siobhan!)
• The Electrolux ZA1 Trilobite – The automatic vacuum cleaner After seeing (and playing with) Cal’s amazing Roomba, I now have a craving for this ¬£900 sonar-based robotic hoover…

• From the sublime to the ridiculous – recording background noise from BarCamp and distributing it over the internet… When Podcasts Go Wrong! – this evening on Slightly Bitchy And Feeling A Bit Guilty TV!
• Leonard has some video of a rave being broken up (and people being beaten) in Utah Extraordinary imagery – feels like something out of a movie.

I just thought I’d share this with the world, because it might be the coolest dinner invitation I’ve ever received in my entire life. Thanks to Ms Champ and hopefully I’ll see you this evening!

• Boing Boing’s $750,000 Intelligent Design challenge for the non-Pastafarian “This brings the total purse for anyone capable of proving that Jesus is not the son of Flying Spaghetti Monster to $750,000.”
• Interview with John Gruber in which he discusses the Mac OSX interface Interesting stuff, although I’d be more interested in asking him which UI elements from non-Apple systems they should incorporate. I’m currently loving the palettes in the new betas of OmniGraffle for example…

• On last year’s FooCamp: When geeks go camping, ideas hatch Not sure what I think about the media-take on these things. Certainly the event has a reputation…
• There’s a rumour that a major US player is about to buy Technorati Seems to me that they really need someone with a huge and solid architecture to deal with the scale of the searchable space – if true this is probably a good move…
• Randomly, the weekend of FooCamp is also the weekend of the Harrison festival for hairy gay men… I wonder – is there really no intersection at all between the two events / communities?
• A transcription of Brewster Kahle’s piece at NotCon 2004 on the Universal access to all human knowledge Really interesting piece that estimates some of the stuff that’s available or could be available in the future and how hard it would be to make it available to everyone…
• In which Jason Kottke makes a mockery of my gorgeous hat experience in the Flickr offices I’m going to get you Kottke. Watch your back and don’t put any funny hats on. That’s all I’m saying…
• Jason Kottke takes the Technorati crew to task for being, well, a bit rubbish Don’t know what I think about this – there’s no denying the service is flaky, but then again the problem grows pretty quickly and it must be an enormous struggle to keep up with it…

So I’ve already got a parking ticket – and paid it – which reminds me exactly how fast-moving America is. I’ll have kids and a wife by the end of next week, and maybe my descendents will come to Foo Camp next year, telling tales of their great-great-gayfather and his weird ideas about annotatable media. I have to say, I’m very impressed by the way I managed to pay the whole thing online in about five minutes. I’d say it represented a cultural difference where the British favour forcing rule-breakers to suffer inconvenience where Americans thought the money was punishment enough, except I have no idea whether or not you can pay parking tickets online in the UK. Also, I got charged a $2.75 ‘Convenience Charge’. No idea what that’s about. Here is a picture of my parking ticket receipt. Don’t say I don’t give you any sexy personal content…