Category: Random

• The Mac Mini’s specs have now been bumped – £429 for 1.4 Ghz G4, 512 Mb RAM, combo drive AND airport extreme AND bluetooth Now that’s a decent specced little machine that’s totally usable directly out of the box. Interesting…

• Ryan Carson writes about his experience of start-ups in the UK (and his theories on the class system) I don’t quite buy the class thing – I think it’s just that the British don’t like anyone whatsoever to stick their head up above the parapet. You only have to look at the tabloid press to see that…
• Yahoo! buy Konfabulator and release it as a free download It’s kind of a fascinating – if slightly peculiar – move. I don’t quite know what to make of it. I guess it’s probably a way to get people using their web services more…
• Cory gets a comic for his birthday: “Doctor O, a notional comic of which I am the hero” Possibly the best present for a geek I’ve ever seen in my life – but probably dependent on having an exotic name to really carry it off…
• FogBugz 4.0 looks amazingly useful and clean and clear and I really want to have more of a play with it But I can’t get past the fact that it’s really expensive for a few people making web apps for fun outside work…
• A beautiful intriguing gadget on the Apple Store: EyeTV for Digital Terrestrial TV. Currently quite wanting one of these… “EyeTV for DTT allows you to watch, record, pause and rewind free-to-air Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) on your Macintosh in crystal clear digital quality.”
• Top 10 Web fads Love it – banal memes from the last ten years collected together. This is the media history of our times.
• The Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games “The Playstation era has, in fact, produced the most non-violent kids ever. But I thought video games were training children to kill? I’m sure I read something like that”

There’s an advert on British television at the moment featuring two animated clouds looking for additives. One asks the other if he’s seen any additives, the other says he’s seen something that might be an additive. It looks like a cloud with legs. The other cow suggests perhaps it’s a sheep.

And it occurs to me that sheep do not look like clouds. But simplified pictures of sheep drawn by children look like pictures of clouds. We abstract them in the same way – but it’s only in this second order, in these abstracted images, that a connection is made. I find the advert troubling because it implies a whole culture of drawing cows performing complex mental transformations and yet being too stupid to understand what they’re doing. Stupid, confused man-cows roaming the countryside getting confused by their own reasoning processes. Freaks me out. Maybe if it was funny…

• Ancient phallus unearthed in cave “The 20cm-long, 3cm-wide stone object, which is dated to be about 28,000 years old, was buried in the famous Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm in the Swabian Jura.”
• Pictures of David Tennant in his new Doctor Who outfit I really like it – it wouldn’t look completely out of place in any decade since the forties and the trenchcoat is absurdly dramatic and cool
• If you only do one thing today… ‘I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK’

• Windows Vista is the new name for Longhorn Presumably there are a whole load of jokes I could make about seeing things from a way off, but I just can’t be arsed…
• A Quick Peek at Longhorn Screenshots of the new Windows operating system do little to excite, I’m afraid…

Busy weekend. Friday morning is frantic cleaning, followed by a work away-day that runs directly into my brother’s arrival in town. Saturday is Open Tech (and fights with London Underground, and expensive taxi rides, and brief hanging outs and Blood Shot Surfers with Hammersley, Doctorow, Webb, Alice, Danny and about a million other neat people). Sunday is little brother and the Apple Store and interesting twists on English breakfasts at Leon on Carnaby Street. And now I’ve got about a ton of work to do before an early morning meeting which means that I have no real time for all the write-ups and thinking and digesting and catching-up with stuff that I really need – and want – to do. You have had more direct commentary from Open Tech if I’d managed to get the bloody wifi working. In the meantime, here are my photos from the day.

Something new and bad is happening around London right now – apparently incidents have closed three tube stations, and Sky News has something about a guy with a rucksack that exploded, although there are no casualties currently reported. The standard attempt to get to in contact with friends and colleagues isn’t working because the mobile network is down for some reason. Keep getting pings from people on IM though.

I’d just like to say ‘Thank You’ to all the lovely people who came to celebrate my 33rd birthday with me last night at the awesome Back to Basics Seafood Restaurant in Fitzrovia last night. I had a lovely time and you’re all charming people and I look forward to seeing you all soon. Thanks again!

Funny weekend. Not what I was expecting. My list of things to do had some things struck off it, but none of them were really terribly exciting. The bits of writing I’d meant to do did not get done – the things I have nearly completed remain nearly completed. Ah but the tiny victories: The bathroom is clean! The kitchen is clean! I have installed Tiger on my desktop Mac! I have done some shopping!

These are the wonders that keep me from doing useful things in the world and thinking about the web and computers and navigation and media distribution. There are dark, dark times when I think we should all learn from the great lessons that The Sims taught a generation – the way to success is to start with a small flat, regular delivery pizza and a maid.

The one vaguely web-related thing that I have done over the weekend has caused me a little angst as well. I’ve put Adwords on Barbelith. I never thought I’d do that, but I have to find some way of maintaining the site in the longer term. It’s only unregistered users who see them – mainly people referred from Google, and as such I don’t feel too guilty about it. But it doesn’t sit well. They’ve been up a day and so far they’ve brought in $6. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

• Springtails – musical game, music-learning tool or musical instrument? Certainly it’s a nice bit of Flash. You can imagine artists of emergence learning a new vocabulary of music where you set up patterns and let them roll against one another..
• An interview with the people who designed the Optimus keyboard with the little displays under every key They’re positing a price point in excess of $200-$300. If it’s not a lot more than that, it’s really practical…