Sunday 18 May 2008 at 4:56 pm
Amazing watches -
multiple face watches. The Meccaniche Veloci looks awesome if a little chunky.
Coming from the 'Bah Humbug' generation of IT, talk of pandering to the
Thumb Generation just seems pointless when most IT shops are still struggling with a raft of other fundemental problems.
Interesting -
Pros & Cons of SharePoint. Interesting to read some of the side-bar items too - I wonder if people would buy a Facebook appliance to allow people to create intranets ?
A clock that tells the time typographically -
Analogy. Nifty.
A couple of useful geek tools - put
Fedora 9 on a USB drive and a whole site dedicated to putting
Linux distros on a USB stick.
Personally I just can't get into it but I can see the appeal given theres so little sci-fi/space-opera on tv -
The Science of Battlestar Galactica does what it says on the tin. Explore some of the hard-science behind the BSG universe.
Wonderful -
Real Life Hobbit House. Not sure if it would be code compliant in NZ.
More wonderful -
figures made from flowers.
Another plant box variation -
Rainwater Harvesting Vertical Garden.
Via
PenQuest comes an interesting story
Fountain Pens boost self-esteem.
Nice -
Fractal storage box.
Interesting staff-retention technique -
Zappo pays new employees to leave.
Nice -
pretty awesome 78rpm record sleeve art.
Interesting reading -
Why Iceland has the happiest people on earth.
Funky idea for your laptop lid -
turn it into a blackboard.
Wednesday 07 May 2008 at 3:29 pm
Awesome art and a wonderful homage to the daily grind -
Daily Life of Lois.
Useful beginners guide to learning Cocoa -
Masters of the Void. For all those budding iPhone programmers. Remember if you can
program the iPhone you're
going to be in demand.
So it turns out all those
UK security cameras don't help solve or reduce crime. So what do they get used for ?
Catching crapping dogs apparently.
If you're an amateur gardener this makes for interesting reading -
The Three Sisters and again
The Three Sisters. The perfect complementary selection of veges.
An oldy but a goody -
'hello world' in multiple computer languages. If you install compilers or dev software and need to make sure the basics work then you could do a lot worse than running a quick 'hello world' test before going any further. And as an added bonus people might actually think you know what you're doing.
Another nice piece -
Phone Cord Sheep.
More technology related 'art' -
Birth Clock. The clock only starts when you break the glass. The idea is that when you're done pondering you can 'break' the sculpture which both brings it to 'life' and starts a timer to tell you how long its been since you came to your momentous decision. Reminds me of Enos
Oblique Strategy Cards to help you get out of a dead-end.
If you only write the occassional web page but balk at using a text-editor or paying for an over complicated HTML authoring tool then take a look at the multi-platform
Kompozer which is an unofficial evolution of
NVu. These both trace their roots back to the ancient
Netscape Composer.
Interesting -
Cloud Computing. This is actually pretty awesome - we're implementing new systems and none of them seem to take on board the benefits to be had from abstraction.
Genius -
Convert those CD's to 45's.
Fascinating -
fixing a 20 year old BSD bug.
Rebuttal -
NAND Engineers Perspective on why SSD's will eventually replace HDD's in computers.
Insane -
Guy builds his own film manufacturing system. 'Film' as in pre-digital analog media for cameras that really go 'click'.
Nice -
PowerPoint Test Card. Useful eyecandy before you kick into your presentation.
Wednesday 30 April 2008 at 4:32 pm
Fascinating -
Micro-origami for drug delivery.
I am a self confessed master but this takes it to another level entirely -
Structured Procrastination.
Interesting insight into
why the F117 Stealth Fighter is being prematurely retired.
Useful marketing too -
CampaignMonitor, Lets you simulate how a marketing email will look in multiple mail clients and also how it will be rated by spam checkers. We recently sent out automated receipts to people we provided funding to; many of these emails were wrongly classified as junk mail.
Useful -
21 ways to shoot better photographs.
Awesome - DIY Chocolate -
Beans to bars.
Online dictation service -
Jott. I wonder if this will become more common - leveraging cheap skilled labour online. Remember the
online personal assistant ?
Interesting reading -
NoteBook SSD Market. Discusses wether or not the Laptop SSD market is worthwhile persuing given the minimal benefit to be had at vast expense.
Cool -
MiT Re-invents the post-it note.
Set aside an hour to watch this
Francis Bacon Doco.
Nifty -
Synchronise five metronomes. Something similar is discussed in the opening chapters of
Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order.
Slightly surreal -
Droogs Do Hit Chair. A steel box you bash into whatever shape you like. Watch the video.
Wednesday 23 April 2008 at 7:26 pm
Interesting -
A recent study of 740 first-time pregnant mothers in the UK shows that a mother's diet at conception can affect the gender of the baby.
Nifty idea -
Calendar Wallpaper.
Sci-fi is starting to come true -
Holographic storage debuts. No magic storage crystals though, just 300Gb on a single CD(!)
Will it be any good ? The definitive British Space Opera -
Blakes 7 to be remade.
Useful tools for a web developer -
Tools for Evaluating Web Design. The 'heat maps' look pretty nifty.
Can you really make a living from the '
long tail' ? An interesting insight into
The Reality of Depending on True Fans
Some nice stuff here -
collection of data-visualisation blogs. For example -
Obama/Clinton divide as a decision tree,
Starbucks/Wal-Marts by US State,
Word 'soup' for the first 10 books of the old testament,
Visualizing the wikipedia power struggle. And lastly becuase I really like maps -
Making Maps: DIY Cartography.
Interesting series -
A Windows developer switches to OS X. He essentially gets fed up with the hoops he has to jump through due to an archaic API and a real lack of quality applications (ie most Windows apps lack the elegance of OS X apps because there really is no incentive to do otherwise).
On a vaguely related note - Mike Lee - self confessed 'worlds toughest programmer' writes about leaving
Delicious Monster to form his own company
United Lemur. He reckons that the
iPhone will drive a frenzy of development activity on a hitherto unseen scale. With only 3000 Cocoa programmers already gainfully employed writing for the Mac - every man and his dog will be after Cocoa devs so its time to cash-in.
Check out
Pulp Shakespeare. A
blog-post joke turned into a collaborative wiki to rewrite Pulp Fiction in the style of William Shakespeare:
ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter JULES and VINCENT, murderers.
V: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie?
J: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
V: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
J: What say they then, pray?
V: Hachis Parmentier.
J: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
V: Cream is but cream, only they say la crme.
J: What do they name black pudding?
V: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.
Thursday 17 April 2008 at 9:29 pm
A couple of posts on spotting photographic tampering - first
code to spot copy-move forgery and a guide to
photo fakery.
Cool - a free online
Font 'forge'. Create your own fonts online.
A bunch of
free 'grunge' fonts for that distressed look. Use it in PowerPoint after you've had a bad sales quarter . . .
Nifty - print out a bunch and stick them up over billboards -
"You don't need it" stickers.
Useful -
Mac OSX Security Primer. Remember at a recent hacking competition the OS X box was compromised first.
Peeks into the turbulent development process -
Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Seems a shame it never got past early 'alpha' stage.
Amusing -
interview with the developer of the worlds biggest time-waster: Solitaire.
Know your ordinal from your interpunct and prime -
Typographic Mistakes. On the same site - this is pretty funny -
Software piracy: its a crime.
Fantastic and pointless -
Bicycle wears shoes to get you to work. Be sure to watch the brief video clip.
Nifty -
Interview with a book-cutter. Amazing art.
Interesting -
The World has $54.31 trillion of external debt: exactly who is the World indebted to? NZ is in tin-pot territory. Actually, quite a few so called third-world countries have far less debt than I would have thought. I guess they just don't consume enough junk (ref 'You don't need it' stickers above!).
A must-read for IT professionals -
Six Dumbest Security Ideas. Although it might be a bean-counter concept they do fail to mention the careful balancing act of security, cost, usability and risk.
Umberto Eco on
Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt. Additional
writings by Eco are collected here too.
Battery life appears to suffer -
AnandTech reviews the MacBook Air with a 128Gb SSD. The drive is worth more than the laptop. In fact the drive is probably worth more than the same weight in gold or platinum.
Brilliant -
Interiors: Rooms that lose none of their shelf life. Byline "In this digital age, it may surprise you to read that more people want libraries than cinemas in their homes". I suspect they're not talking to the right generation; having said that a study or reading room would be an excellent addition to any home. Nice to see books have insulation properties as well.
I'm finally getting the blog back to the way it used to look - between resolving odd formatting issues and zapping comment spam its taken longer than I thought. The next step will be to try the new
PivotX Beta 1. I still can't believe they doing such awesome work without needing a SQL backend (althought they do support it if you'd prefer not to use flat-files).
Tuesday 08 April 2008 at 5:51 pm
Nifty -
Chillifire Wireless Hotspot with Paypal. Essentially you load in custom firmware to your wireless-router and have it behave as an internet cafe hotspot. If you have a cafe, business, hotel/motel or anywhere else people hang-out you can easily provide wifi services without them touching your internal network (and generate some revenue).
Interesting -
10Gb Ethernet. Looks like networking is in for a pretty good speed bump in the next few years.
Nice -
Free Online File Conversion via ZamZar.
Be sure to play the video -
Sideways Wheel Chair. Thats awesome.
Some nice graphic design ideas -
Cool Business Cards.
An excellent bit of website design -
HEMA. Load the page and wait about 10 seconds for the entertainment to begin.
The Telegraph lists its
110 Best Books.
This looks fascinating -
How to use Amazons EC2. I didn't realise you could use it to provision virtualised horsepower on-demand like this.
On a similar tack
Google is offering hosted application environments and other Web 2.0 companies seem to be following suit -
Joyent 'Garden of Eden'. More info on the
GoogleApp Engine.
Wednesday 02 April 2008 at 9:29 pm
A nice Economist article on
Anglo-Saxon attitudes. Compares and contrasts UK/US attitudes to religion, ideology, values, military action, national interest and climate change. Americans (even Democrats) are considerably more conservative than their UK counterparts. Surprise surprise.
Could be interesting -
A Year Of Living Biblically. A guy spends a year living as per the bibles rules as literally as possible. I can't wait for the movie.
Amusing -
disturbing teddy bear bares all.
Doing the rounds -
Face Demo. Pretty neat. Apparently used to assist autistic children recognise different facial expressions.
Geeky and amusing - Using a something like
ELIZA to deal with
Nigerian 419 Scammers.
Now Microsoft are getting into virtualisation VMWare are trying to stay one step ahead with value-add services.
StageManager looks pretty darn useful as does the new
LabManager (ver 1 was apparently pretty useless). The linked clone technology should save a lot of space on expensive SAN's. The new VMWare release in October will apparently also add RAID 1 support for guest VM's - ie run two identical virtual servers on two ESX servers and if one fails the other picks up immediately with zero downtime.
Compare the
nifty new UK coinage and the new US $5 note.
It used to be tricky to find these Mac ROM's but if you're interested in
emulating old Mac's on new PC's or Intel Mac's then look no further.
Two interesting items spotted on
Make magazines site - one is an
art installation made from 1500 hula-hoops and the other is a
vertical indoor plant-box.
Have your interweb connection on standby for the new series of
torrents start to appear ?
Saturday 22 March 2008 at 1:38 pm
A friend from the UK (
'hi' Stuart) sent me this link to
Googles new Swiss Offices - looks like a fun place to work! We have a kitchen cleaning rota, useless aircon and fraying carpet at work - other than that its OK. Here are some pics of other
Google Offices (New York, China & Googleplex).
I prefer cats over dogs - none of these pictures work in quite the same way if you substitute a dog -
icanhascheezeburger ?
I'm always on the hunt for a better Remote Desktop client application - sure you can save your RDP connections with a custom MMC but its kind of painful. Instead try something like
Code4Wards RoyalTS or
VisionApps Remote Desktop. RoyalTS seems to be under more active development and doesn't seem to have some of the clipboard hassle I've had with VisionApps RDP but VisionApp has a couple of compelling extra features - tabbed sessions and the ability to save and re-use authentication details into groups for re-use. Having said that teh clipboard glitches were enough to make me switch to the less feature rich but more reliable RoyalTS.
I make mistakes slooooowly
In todays fast moving world if you're going to screw up do it quickly -
How to Think: Managing brain resources in an age of complexity.
Pretty amusing -
Expelled from Expelled. Already 1000+ comments which is pretty remarkable. The
film in question is here - I guess if it were taken as a comedy it might be pretty funny but as a vehicle for Intelligent Design it looks pretty lame.
Retro DJ's -
ShellacSisters. If you're in the UK and throwing a party this lot seem to have an truly original take on a classic period in vinyl.
Another comic makes it online
Elfquest. Seems pretty rudimentary so far - maybe it gets better later on. It took
Cerebus awhile to get past its Conan-esque origins too.
Nice typeface for presentations -
Nudist. Blurs out the lower half of the type. At different point sizes you get 'censored' signs or fig-leaves.
Handy -
Comprehensive Unix Cheatsheet.
Friday 14 March 2008 at 10:02 am
Amazing - cameras have got to the point where you can hack the firmware to gain extra features. Check out
CHDK for Canon cameras. Via this interesting Metafilter thread -
Things you never thought you could do with your camera.
For grown up Lego fans -
BrickArms Custom Military Minifigs.
I can't remember if I linked to this before or not but -
Warren Ellis has a free online comic with awesome art by Paul Duffield - check out
Freak Angels.
Some great excel tips -
create Excel conditional formatting. Ideas to create dashboards and gant charts within your spreadsheet.
Geek fun -
Phun is a 2-D physics environment which lets you draw and manipulate the objects to see what happens to them.
Nifty -
Bloxes. Create your own interior design with cardboard.
Nice discussion of two sadly under-rated games -
Ico & Shadow of the Colossus.
Nice -
Time related art. Check out the
LifeClock - slowed down 61320 times to reflect your real age. Like a lo-fi version of the old internet
Death Clock. 2044 is going to be a tough year.
Friday 22 February 2008 at 4:24 pm
Nifty -
Nice guide to application virtualisation. I'd seen the
Softgrid demos and it looks like this type of technology has great potential on the desktop.
Interior decorating tips for the space-challenged -
Creative Bookshelf Design.
A new free Marathon scenario
Eternal. Marathon was a Mac FPS thats been released as an open source engine by Bungie.
All over the interweb, but in case you hadn't already seen this -
Recover disk encryption keys from RAM after shutdown. Watch how you can view the contents of a laptop ram after you've actually shut it down.
Nice idea -
Get human dialer.
Some wonderful photos here -
Thirty photos that inspired me to learn photography.
Someones doing some interesting stuff with Linux & Bluetooth -
How to install BlueProximity and more detail about
BlueProximity itself.
Rather artful take on the fps genre -
Love. Will have to try this on my PC.
Brilliantly pointless monster battles in comic form -
Road of Knives. Reminds me of 3rd form text-book doodles.
