- Welcome to Torchwood House… Omigod, after the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who completely and epically sucked the big one, the new one rocked like a motherfucker. Woot!
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Month: April 2006
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Links for 2006-04-20
- Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have given birth to a beautiful baby Scientologist How come it’s taken me this long to find out that the press have christened them TomKat, and the child the TomKitten? This seems like the bullshit trivia that used to colonise my student brain…
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Links for 2006-04-19
- “Ignore bloggers at your peril, say researchers” There’s a story in The Guardian today about the disproportionate influence held by webloggers in which I’m quoted. This may be of interest to some of you. Mum, are you out there? Check it out!
- Ryan Carson’s new project ‘Vitamin’ (A resource for web developers, designers and entrepreneurs) has launched and looks pretty awesome Beautiful bits of design work, some extremely cool people commenting and supporting the venture and cartoons by Hugh McLeod. Altogether a pretty interesting looking site.
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Nngh. Stuff. Crap. Time.
I have an uncharitable theory this evening as I plough through several hundred backlogged e-mails and links and conversations and the theory is this – people who do a lot of punditry on their sites cannot possibly be actually getting anything useful done the rest of the time. The stuff I’d like to write about is massively in excess of the stuff that I have time to write about. Driving me nuts.
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Links for 2006-04-18
- Stowe Boyd is auctioning off his chest for the rest of the year to Web 2.0 start-ups You see at some level this is fun, but at another level it really creeps me out. It’s the same reason I don’t have ads on plasticbag.org – it feels like you’re putting something personal about yourself up for sale. Makes me uncomfortable…
- MySociety is doing another round of proposals like the ones that triggered Pledgebank, TheyWorkForYou and other sites “So, whether you have an idea you’d like to propose, or whether you’d just like to read and comment on other people’s proposals, you’ve come to the right place.”
- Make Me Watch TV – the readers choose which TV show he’ll watch and he dutifully blogs the whole thing Interesting idea! Mostly quite entertaining! Not sure he’ll keep it up very long, though. Worth keeping an eye on. I particularly like the idea that he’ll keep missing episodes of programmes even if he likes them. That’s interesting / cruel.
- USA Today reports that posting to your site can help stop memory loss and Alzheimers… “Research on animals and humans suggests mentally challenging activities such as playing bridge, learning a new language or even blogging might help build new connections in the brain”
I was talking to Kerry Bailey the other day and – on the pretty feeble pretext that “you like maps, right” – he directed me to a fascinating post about Religion in America in which county-by-county maps of the US predeliction for various forms of religious belief have been posted and discussed. It’s such a fascinating piece of work – illuminating clumps of different religious communities around the place (Jews, Muslims, Lutherans, Catholics, Pentecostals etc). My own personal theory – that places with a lot of different religious groups living together tend to be more secular – does not seem to be immediately supported by the evidence. I wonder if there are maps like this for Europe. That would be fascinating.
It’s a little late for Easter, but I thought I should briefly mention a shop that a couple of friends of mine have set up in Islington. It sells the most glorious and award-winning chocolate that I’ve ever had the good luck to wrap my slathering mouth around. I’m not normally one for plugging stuff – too protective of the limited good name that I’ve managed to build up over the last ten thousand years of writing this crap – so please believe me when I say that this little shop is quite extraordinary and well worth a visit. No free chocolate was consumed before this post, other than the stuff that was available to all other passing punters. The shop is Paul A Young Fine Chocolates. It’s in Camden Passage in Islington, and features three chocolates that won prizes (one Gold and two Silvers) at the World Chocolate Awards at the 2005 Chocolate Festival. If that doesn’t whet your appetite, I don’t know what will.
I don’t know how normal this is, but when I visited they were serving little cups of hot chocolate served as the Aztecs used to make it. Here’s some being poured for me by the lovely Paula Le Dieu, who doesn’t work in store, but may be tempted to abandon her successful technology career for a new life as an experimental chocolate-taster. God it was amazing. No milk or cream, but delivering an experience vaguely resembling having the dwarf star equivalent of pure burning chocolate injected directly into your heart. Awesome.
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Links for 2006-04-13
- “Police are trying to locate the owner of a 300-year-old ledger, bound in human skin, found in a Leeds road.” In the 18th & 19th Century, apparently accounts of some murder trials were bound in the skin of the perpetrators. Extraordinary.
- Yahoo’s new improved beta version of Maps is pretty damn nice This version now covers more than North American (albeit in pretty skimpy detail) and has integrated in satellite and hybrid views. The way the satellite views are being stitched and processed is particularly good…
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Links for 2006-04-12
- Westmin.co.uk is a little forum for people who live in and around Westminster in London It’s not a glimpse of the future of technology, but if a few more people were using it, it could become quite a useful resource. I wish UpMyStreet Conversations was still a useful site to do this kind of thing on…
- Kevin Marks has assembled a pretty useful and interesting grid of the various ways you can consume TV at the moment I don’t think he really talks about the problems with BitTorrent in terms of download speeds and how that offsets some of the cost stuff of services like iTunes, but generally this is a pretty solid statement of the pros and cons…
- PistolWimp.com has this insane piece of Google video featuring thousands of insane machines made of books and marbles and magnets and stuff Ludicrously addictive ten minutes of viewing awaits you. Say it with me everyone: pata-kowa-so-ree-chi! I’ve no idea what it means but I can’t get it out of my head.
- An interesting post on ways people game digg.com Basically people are setting up forums where people can trade diggs with one another to get their links onto the homepage. Digg are unsurprisingly not keen on this as an approach. Interesting social dynamic going on there…
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Did I dream this photo scanner?
Like many of you out there, no doubt, I have a pretty substantial box of paper-based photos that I really never get to see for a range of reasons, but mainly because they’re made of paper and paper’s not enormously useful. As it is a large box, flatbed scanning would just take too long and be frankly much too dull to make sure that I did the whole process. But in my mind there is an image of a smallish scanner that you could feed photographs into and they would be scanned and then come out the other side. More like an automated production line. In my head they’re about two-thirds the size of a shoebox. I can’t see any of the damn things online anywhere though so I’m wondering if they’ve just stopped making them or if I have hallucinated the whole thing. Alternatively does anyone know of somewhere I could take a box of photos into and have them scanned for a not extravagantly ludicrous price? Somewhere in Central London – ideally Soho – would be preferred! Thanks web of experts!