Category: Random

• Together in electric dreams: statistical analysis used to determine hit songs
  “From unsigned acts dreaming in their garage, to multinationals such as Sony and Universal, everyone is clandestinely using a new and controversial technology to gain an edge on their competitors.”
• Mind Hacks: Review in The Guardian
  Mr Webb’s book gets a glowing review / regurgitation of the press release in Guardian Review. The book remains highly recommended!

• All of the net, all of the time… Warning – I’m about to be really scathing about this…
  Could this article on wifi access in bars and cafes be the most tedious article ever written by a human being?

• Pitchfork’s had an interesting redesign that pushes it widescreen and almost unbrands itself – pushing enormous amounts of content onto the homepage
  As ever with these things, you wonder if the obscurantism is partly intentional to make the brand zinelike or hipster. Quite beautiful, but maybe more suitable for a weblog layout?
• Foot-based mobile interaction with games
  Intriguing one this, and really up there in the embodied interaction stakes I guess. Putting bits of yourself into the game. Blurring digital and real. Intriguing.
• Creating and Marketing Your Own Podcast in 4 Hours..! What do Heineken and the BBC know that you might not?
  Really funny! Found via an Adword on Google. Now you too can set up your own podcast with help from our free video and opt-in newsletter! Or – I guess – you could read the page on Wikipedia instead…
• Big news of the day is Technorati’s new implementation of tags and hooks into del.icio.us and Flickr
  Don’t know what I think about this one yet – haven’t quite digested it. I think its success basically depends on SixApart moving towards something like a default tagging rather than categories interface for MT…
• Body-drawing communicator for distant partners
  And my point is: if this is the kind of thing that Media Lab Europe spent all their time on, is it really any wonder that they’ve had to shut down…
• Media Lab Europe to close
  “I imagine it’s similar to the atomosphere that the MIT Media Lab had at its inception: tons of space, enthusiastic students and an experimental attidude that assumes nothing is impossible.”
• The Independent pisses me off in two ways, first by writing something dumb about weblogs as online journals and secondly by suggesting I pay to read it…
  Twits. Anyway, I’ll say this again – a weblog is not publishing. Or at least, publishing and journal writing may be loss-leader, but the end result is weblog as communicative medium in public space…
• Composite image of the surface of Titan from Huygens’ descent to the moon
  At first glance it really does look like a coastline and some form of liquid sea. I love this stuff. I was gutted when the Beagle 2 failed. Totally gutted.
• A coloured image of the surface of Titan
  I don’t really understand this stuff – I don’t really see why you couldn’t take a colour photo. Surely people on earth want to see what it would be like to experience Titan directly?
• Paul Mison on the iPod Shuffle’s apparent disregard for podcasting
  Highly entertaining rant which I thoroughly agree with (except for the characterisation of amateur media as always shit)

• Clearing up confusion about the Mac mini…
  “Yes, it will boot headless, meaning with no display or video device connected, enabling you to have what I like to call an iServe.”
  (categories: mac apple macmini design computer computing server desktop commercial business technology)
• Apple’s Tipping Point: Macs for the Masses
  “The Sweet Spot. Until January 2005, Apple had no iPod or PC products that served the mass market. With the launch of iPod Shuffle and Mac mini they have finally converged two product paths with the mass market in mind. This will not only drive more iPod
  (categories: apple product productdesign marketing market business sweetspot infographics design elegant technology computers computer desktop small macmini)

I’ve been getting more hassle online for being gay in the last month or so than I think I’ve had in the preceeding couple of years. Mostly I’m deleting the nasty ones, arguing with the clumsy ones and ridiculing the stupid ones, but it’s starting to get me down a bit. Core problem spot at the moment is some idiot whose IP originates inside Manchester City Council who has been posting on this post: On Belle de Jour (he really should check out his employers discrimination guidelines). But also I’ve had the arguments about my hypothetical business card, been called a faggot a lot by American teenagers and just this morning found another happy little deposit from some idiot on my last Supplementary links post. It’s all so bloody depressing… I thought we’d started to move on from this…

• Awesome bizarre beautiful Java animation that you need to watch immediately (thanks Mr Webb)
  The rules are simple, each time a ball reaches a branching point it divides. When the paths converge and two balls hit, they cancel each other out…
• Harry says sorry for Nazi costume
  Oh Jesus Christ… As if people weren’t nervous enough about ultra-rich establishment types being a bit on the right-wing side…
• Awesome piece of iPod-related black surrealist British comedy by Arnando Ianucci
  Excepting the new series of Monkey Dust which sucks a bit, British comedy seems to have recently taken a real turn for the better. If by better you mean awesomely weird…
• Alice reposts some intriguing stats about users of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games
  Basically everyone gives up telly and hangs around online with their mates (quite right)…

• So yeah the Mac Mini is nice and all, but have you seen the size of the power supply!?
  I want a Mac Mini. It would make emigrating much much easier in the future…
• Vote for me as Best British Poof in the whole fucking world
  Because I am, you know. I’m a god. I’m a golden god.
• Blogger sacked for sounding off
  For God’s sake of course you get fired if you publically refer to your employer as “Bastardstones” and write rude things about your boss all the bloody time… You have to learn to sublimate your rage! Duh!

• Airclick remote control for your stereo-connected iPod, via Mr Webb
  “AirClick USB is a remote for Mac and PC computers. The receiver module attaches to any available USB port (including hubs) and receives signal from up to 60 feet away.”
• North Korea’s equivalent of Big Brother is entitled “Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle”
  The BBC doesn’t really have that many equivalents any more, but the rest of the UK media really does – How Clean is Your House? Too Posh to Wash?
• My first ever post to Usenet, back in June 1995
  This is back when I was trying to plough my way through a doctorate in Classics, before I threw it all away and ran off to the big city to make beautiful web things
• Winners of the “I Look Like My Dog” Contest
  There’s not an awful lot more you can say about this. They do indeed look like their dogs. In turn I think I’m started to look more like my Powerbook.
• ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number)
  “The ISAN identifies works, not publications or broadcasts. The ISAN remains the same for an audiovisual work regardless of the various formats in which the work is distributed (e.g. DVD, video recording) or the uses to which it is put.”

So I got the first block of my thoughts around media hubs out of the way before the Apple keynote, so that’s good. I’m happy about that. For anyone who’s interested, we’re all ‘watching’ it via IRC on irc.apple-x.net and via the low-bandwidth stealth reporter at macrumors.com. Ping me on IM as well if you want to joint the tiny UK coterie of freaky geekniks who are dribbling at the thought of yet another glorious keynote. Vive le Steve!

• The Bastardization of Beta
  “It seems that every new web application now sports a “beta” tagline. Furthermore, it seems to stay that way for an indeterminable amount of time”
  (categories: beta flickr labelling vocabulary drift concept googlenews google productdevelopment)
• Buddy Bugs
  Buddy Bugs is an ambient peripheral physical interface that represents WindowsÆ Instant Messenger contact list, where people are represented by glass bugs on a leaf.
  (categories: im instantmessaging msn msnmessenger windows physicalinterface ambientdevices userinterface ui ambient bugs buddybugs leaf art design)
• A Brief History of Writing Instuments – Ink and Letters
  “From cave paintings to the quill pen — how ink, paper and pens were all were invented”
  (categories: ink writing pencil pen history cave alphabet words language prehistory quill paper cavepaintings painting)
• Pimp My Ride
  So one of the best things about going home for Christmas was introducing my mother – queen of makeover shows – to Pimp my Ride. I don’t know if she’ll watch it after I’ve gone, but she certainly seemed to enjoy it while I was there…
  (categories: mtv pimpmyride car makeover television tv tvshow show programme american america usa)
• On the iPod micro?
  Apparently, “Life is Random”. The iPod in question can apparently take around 240 songs (1 Gb), has no screen and can only be played on random…
  (categories: ipod apple rumours rumors rumor rumour cupertino mac ipodmicro ipodmini speculation moscone photographs)
• ISBNs go 13 digit. After the PIPs project at work I have a bit of a thing about identifiers like ISBNs… Seems really badly designed to me, but hey…
  “The new 13-digit ISBN has been approved and plans are underway to transition to the new number industry-wide, world-wide by January 1, 2007. Find out how the expansion of the ISBN from 10-digits to 13-digits will impact your business and operations.”
  (categories: isbn identifier identifiers books book bookshop uniqueidentifier)
• Old Observer article about Ikea and their satirisation of designers that I think misses the point…
  The article seems to suggest that it’s anti-designer, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s anti pompous designer, it’s anti-artifice and I think it demonstrates enormous respect for the craft of design and the creation of simple, beautiful things…
  (categories: ikea observer satire elitedesigners pomposity designaesthetic aesthetic article newspaper)
• Some kind of meta-BitTorrent Tracker Tracker…
  Keeps looking at BitTorrent sites to see if they’re still there, closed down or consumed by enormous bandwidth costs…
  (categories: bittorrent bittorrenttrackers download downloads tv television)
• Torrez rocks – DIY micropayments with Paypal and Typekey
  I’ve already paid my $1 to read the article in question, and interested in whether or not people will actually start doing this stuff. Big names first, clearly…
  (categories: micropayments typekey paypal diy andretorrez torrez awesome neat weblog content publishing business money)
• Threadless redesigns
  Beautiful, elegant, intelligent site that sells beautiful, elegant and intelligent T-shirts to a small coterie of beautiful, elegant… you get the picture…
  (categories: tshirt t-shirts tshirts clothes ecommerce site design participation participatory socialsoftware rating voting flash html)
• RFC 2838 (rfc2838) – Uniform Resource Identifiers for Television Broadcasts
  I should be gripped by this, but it’s so banally broadcast-oriented that it’s stunning to think that internet people even wrote it. Doesn’t even have identifiers for episodes or shows…
  (categories: pips bbc broadcast identifiers identifier programmeinformationpages television tv uri url uniformresourceidentifiers rfc rfc2838)
• The mouseradio is a fully functioning radio without buttons. The idea was to use the mouse navigation and to implement it in a radio.
  “Moving the radio vertically changes the volume, moving the radio on the horizontal axis changes the frequency. The radio is on, when the black speaker points up in the air.”
  (categories: radio design mouse physicalinteraction interactiondesign embodiedinteraction audio music sound appliance device homeentertainment)
• Belle de Jour Spotted in Waterstones!
  Or at least her book. Nice cover! Very stylish indeed…
  (categories: cover design belledejour book prostitution prostitute sexindustry callgirl memoirs)