Category: Random

• There are seven words you’re not allowed to say in kindergarten In which Nat Torkington encourages his children to rise up and defy the lunacy of American school restrictions
• 37 signals on Frank Gehry’s proposed Brooklyn development So you see this confirms my theory – first you start off with real things, then you get ironic treatments of real things, then the ironic treatments become the real things – those skyscrapers look like a theme park to me…
• la Pate a Son – Flash music generation game or interface It has its own fiddly rule set and you learn by playing which is interesting. Weirdly fascinating…
• Planarity Interesting little Flash game in which you try to stop any of the lines crossing over. Strangely fascinating.
• Mr Kerry Bailey writes the funniest thing I have ever read about the Cruise / Holmes relationship “‘You adore him,’ Rodriguez told Holmes when the actress was at a loss for words to describe her love.” “I adore him,” Katy responded, then followed with, “ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD.”

• Infosthetics weblog on information visualisation and aesthetics Oh this is so my new favourite site. Beautiful interesting interfaces to explore and play with. Ideas everywhere. Awesome stuff…
• Colin Farrell Joins The Sex Tape Elite You have to wonder sometimes if they want this stuff to get out into public. Not that anyone would be interested in such a thing, of course.
• Spin magazine recognise the most important albums of the last twenty years Radiohead’s at number one, depressingly. But the Pixies’ place at number six with their best album has cheered me up enormously…
• The Optimus keyboard has a tiny screen under each key, so that you can remap it easily to any combination Mr Webb informs me that each button costs tens of dollars at the moment, and as such it doesn’t look likely to go on the market any time soon – but it rocks and I want one…

• Sharp to Mass Produce an LCD with Switchable Viewing Angle Oh this is so ’24’ it’s awesome. Also I love that they’re turning one of the traditional problems with LCD screens (narrow viewing angles) into a feature. That’s so neat!
• Television took 30 years to reach a mass audience – broadband has taken three “Ofcom predicted that virtually all British homes – 99.6% – would have access to a broadband connection by the end of this year. By 2010, it suggested that more people could be watching television over the internet than via analogue sets.”
• Glowing temperature-sensitive sink-fixtures Loving this – visual feedback on how hot the water is from the tap. How useful would that be!

We walk out of the building onto Portland Place and there are people everywhere. Milling around every door of all the nearby offices are people chatting and smiling. A bus pulls up besides us and stops. The driver tells the people inside that they’re stopping for two minutes of silence. Around us the noise-level raises slightly and then almost instantaneously – without any warning – stops. Without any apparent signal everyone goes quiet and stands still. All around me are people standing quietly. No one makes eye contact. A motorcycle slows and stops. A couple of cars go past until they can find somewhere to pause for a moment. The noise of traffic disappears. The building work from around the corner gets quieter. Someone is whistling. Then they stop. London is full of mannequins. There’s no noise. There’s no movement. It’s eerie. And then just as suddenly, just as randomly – as if someone unpaused the city – everything’s back to normal. Which is exactly how it should be.

• The BBC launch their Open Source site Containing the software that the public sector broadcaster wishes to open to the world. Good stuff this.
• A photo of a crop circle from Telegraph Hill in Hampshire, 2005 Now come on – I mean it’s obviously aliens, but now they’re taking the piss…
• There’s a Slashdot article about the music industry’s reaction to the BBC’s downloads of Beethoven symphonies Interesting coverage and discussion here, from a whole range of different perspectives – although I think there’s some confusion about the remit of the BBC

So I had this whole post written about Mr Biddulph leaving the BBC, but I threw it away because it was a bit too arch and tried to be a bit too clever. Basically, what I’d like to say instead is that I’ve worked with Matt for a couple of years on and off, that the stuff we worked on together is some of the work that I’m most proud of, and that the other stuff he’s made with the rest of his team has pretty regularly blown my head off. I’m urging anyone and everyone who seriously thinks about future applications around video, radio, interactive television or the internet to head straight in his direction and throw money and glory at him until he agrees to work with you. You won’t regret it.

• I wrote an overview of Supernova for the O’Reilly Network I think it’s a reasonably fair summary of some of the core papers and a few recurrent themes, but I’m not terribly impressed with how well it’s written. I think I had trouble finding the right voice. Anyway, I hope people derive some value from it.

• The Ruby on Rails introductory video makes a complete weblog engine in a few minutes It’s all terribly impressive and perfect – I suspect – for small at-home developers who want to build things rapidly to test with…
• An interesting / disturbing take on how much you reveal about yourself on your weblog and what impact that might have on job interviews Search seems to be the main problem – in that if someone looks for negative connotations in your posts, then they’ll have them delivered to them…
• Del.icio.us start experimenting with the ability for someone to tag things for other people using a kind of for: tag My first reaction is that we should stop designing systems that will be spammed if they’re useful, but I might be being unfair…
• The power of smell and the smell of power – women apparently find ‘dominant’ men more attractive only if they’re already in a relationship and are in the most fertile part of their cycle It must be so weird for you people trapped into animal patterns by your primal sense of smell. Those of us without a sense of smell are clearly (by nature) more civilised!

I’m in the middle of writing a much longer post on the subject, but in the meantime I thought I’d just point people towards Odeo which launched yesterday. If you’re interested in podcasting in any way but have found it intimidating up until this point, then I can heartily recommend Odeo – if only because (unlike iTunes) it has lots of nice web-like affordances, like being able to link through to feeds (or shows) directly like: IT Conversations, Radio Free SubPop, SETI podcast and many others. There is, of course, already a whole bunch of BBC stuff listed on the service – most of which you can find via the tag bbc. It’s a shame that the ‘create’ functionality isn’t in place at this stage, because that bloody rocks, but in the meantime I’d still check it out…

• Why would you need Search Engine Optimisers when Google has a whole page on what you should do? Google’s information for Webmasters page pretty much contains all the basic stuff that you need to make your site work well in search engines. Stick with that. Fire SEOs.
• A place where it rains, but not on you “A circular room made of iron clad in green leaves. It is raining inside the room, excpet where you’re standing. No matter where you go in the rain, it will stop falling right above your head”
• Special keycases that only let people who are excited about driving get access to the keys Uses galvanic skin response sensors. Which rocks. Except it’s for the Vauxhall Astra, which makes you wonder if anyone will ever get to drive the thing..
• A step-by-step guide to charisma “Scientists claim to have found the secret to that magical quality, charisma, and they say it can be learnt. But before you enrol for classes, don’t think it will get you the job of your dreams.”
• The BBC Listen Live is now available on the Apple Dashboard downloads site Remember, this is the only official BBC widget – and we need your feedback to make it better…
• Andrew Otwell’s thoughts on Dashboard mirror a lot of the things that I’ve been thinking about (and talking about to Adam Greenfield) It’s a perfect environment for prototyping ambient informational devices around the home – like the orb that we were playing with a while back…
• Delivr Digital Postcards Built using the Flickr API, you can send any of the creative commons licensed photos to your friend as a postcard
• Harold Rheingold’s visualisation of technologies of cooperation I don’t feel I’ve been able to interrogate this enough yet to present an opinion on it, even though it’s been available for weeks…
• New Scientist on “Entering a dark age of innovation” Seems like a pretty stupid and unfocused argument – lots more people in the world but we’re not producing as many discrete units of innovation per person as we once did… Is that it?
• About Google Video “Our mission is to organise the world’s information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day”
• The Madonna Code – Searching for the perfect music recommendation system (including an awesome one that correlates music with cultural traits) “Thus, we can see that a high-energy vocal style correlates with the presence of dairy in a society’s diet; a high degree of rhythmic blending between vocalists signals a high degree of social solidarity;”
• Podcasting Juice – a Japanese podcasting portal It’s more interesting to me because of the beautiful Aqua-style effects than for the functionality. I must steal it.
• Are Brits the world’s worst lovers? It seems a little unfair to be honest. Just a little. Well, maybe not. Well okay then.