- The Efficient Mac User suggests 11 ways to clean up your computer… None of them are as world transforming as the one about Mail from a while back, but they have their uses…
Year: 2007
- Blisterpack packaging allows you to create your own flavours of fizzy drink. And add caffeine if you want… Saw this and thought of Webb immediately. What a lovely / strange / pretty idea.
- The segway of skateboards? Lovely piece of video of a Segway-like motorised skateboard that someone from my home town of Norwich has developed. Very interesting indeed.
- Darth Vader expresses today’s mood very very well indeed… There’s a whole series of Star Wars characters on Twitter. Chewbacca’s my favourite. Thanks to Paul for pointing it all out…
- Biggest thing in 3D social spaces? The new Playstation 3 will come preinstalled with ‘Home’ for game matchmaking and socialising… Looks like it’s a hybrid of Second Life, Looking for Group functionality on World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel and a number of other things. I suspect it’s going to be huge and probably the main reason I’ll end up buying a PS3…
- Gamespot at GDC talk through some of the more complex features of ‘Home’ This is going to be enormously huge and pretty transformative. The X-Box socialising environment which I’ve heard so much about seems pretty primitive in comparison now…
- Sunshinethe new Danny Boyle film about a bunch of people having to reignite the sunhas an interesting site dedicated to it I suspect there’s a whole range of things going on around movies in terms of word of mouth marketing and online activity. Not sure what I think about it. Probably a fact of life now…
- Wikileaks.org is a site dedicated to the apparently untraceable leaking and analysis of documents from oppressive regimes.. I’m sort of fascinated by this for a number of reasons. You have to wonder how secure they really are and if they’ve had this stuff carefully checked by professionals. And I wonder how western governments will react to leaks. Curious.
- Camouflage Lovely little gadget here that I think might make me feel a little less stressed. Hides all the icons on your Apple computer’s desktop. Nice.
- I’m a bit annoyed by this article on ‘technology addiction’ Are people addicted to the alphabet? The plough? Paper-making? Light bulbs? Technology addiction is such a lazy and reactionary phrase. The thing to be concerned about is human data processing and attention, if anything…
- There’s a lovely piece on YouTube asking some of the questions that should be asked about the House of Lords, but with puppets! This is the kind of thing that you’d hope YouTube would be full of, but unfortunately since the copyrighted stuff started to disappear the really creative stuff hasn’t really taken up the slack…
- Moo cards extend their social media card hegemony to Second Life and Habbo Hotel… The Habbo cards look totally beautiful, but it’s the Second Life cards that seem the most fun. You just take pictures of things you’ve seen in Second Life and e-mail them to MOO, then go in and choose the best ones to make cards from. Neat.
- I’m totally weirded out by gaybuntu… Which is to say that I love the idea of gay geek spaces online, but I’m also completely weirded out by why gay people would have any particular love or desire to use Ubuntu. Maybe I’m missing something?
- The Internet Walk is a weird / crappy (or perhaps just broken on my Mac) advert for the N800, which is a toy I want… For me it just keeps saying, “Loading the Internet, Loading the Internet” in a rich American TV voice. Makes Nokia seem kind of super dumb. Maybe it’s just my computer…
- Now you can use your WordPress ID as an OpenID. This is a cool thing. Bloody typical of that Willison chap to be behind it as well. Come back to work, Simon. I’m really bored and I miss you.
- Matt Webb in early 2005 was trying to work out what to do next with his life, and I’m guessing in retrospect feels good about his decision… I wonder whether I’ll be the same.
- Stop bitching. Make it better… Something I wrote in 2003 that I still agree with. Nick Carr please take note.
- Whatever happened to Jenny Everywhere, open source superhero? The Barbelith crew were partly behind Jenny Everywhere, and there seemed to be all kinds of activity around her before eventually it all fell apart and disappeared. Quite disappointing…
- What is the origin of the phrase, “Carving nature by its joints”? If anyone knows the answer, I’d really like to know it…
- The BBC’s religion site includes a section on the religion of ‘atheism’… The best response I’ve seen was featured on cloudsoup.com, “If atheism is a religion then not collecting stamps is a hobby…”
Categories
A quick apology to long-term readers…
Having to explore my weblog to try and scrabble together evidence of visits to the US over the last six years has really brought home to me exactly how quiet this site has been over the last six months to a year, and how I really need to do something about that. I don’t know that I can really go into the reasons for it in enormous detail – there’s a chunk of work-related stresses associated with doing Trans-Atlantic work massively distant from your employer, and another chunk of stresses relating to important life-decisions and the idea of moving halfway across the world. All I can really say at the moment is that I’m terribly sorry to any long-term reader who misses the good old days when I used to write interesting things about the industry. I miss them too and am doing my best to get myself into a position where I can start doing them again. This is not exactly where I expected myself to be…
- Chris Lightfoot 1978-2007 Chris worked on a number of MySociety projects that have had a significant and positive impact on the UK
- I’m thinking about getting myself one of the new Aiport Extremes and hiding it in a cupboard somewhere attached to a bunch of hard disks Does anyone have any sense about whether this is a good idea or not?
- Last.fm has a page listing their top downloads of free MP3s. There’s a lot of crap, and a bunch of non-crap too… Surprised to see that you can download The Carpenters for free. Very weird / interesting selection. I suspect there’s some spamming going on right there…
- I’m playing a bit with widgets for getting access to Basecamp on Dashboard… Obvious really – store data in the cloud and access is locally with one keystroke. Very interested in dashboard widgets as lightweight interfaces to online storage of data…
- A guy uses a bunch of items of clothing and sleeping bags to make himself look like sundry animals I need Simon Willison to do the one on the bottom right. Too funny.
- I have no idea how or why this Mail.app speed-up tip works, but work it does… I’ll probably discover that I’ve deleted all my mail from the last ten years. I’ll take no responsibility if you destroy your computer. In the meantime though, this had an amazing effect on my machine…
- It’s not every day you see a brand new sort of interface on the web, but that’s what you get at oreseg.com It’s an online video portal with a difference. Not sure what I think about it, but the interface is certainly thought-provoking…
- The d.Construct 2007 User Experience Design Conference has a pretty nice holding page Good odds I’m going to be talking at d.Construct this year. Not certain by any means, but good odds.