Category: Links

God, will you look at these Microsoft TV adverts from the last ten thousand years.

Some of them are so painful, I can’t watch them all the way through.

I wish I could be in Brighton for dConstruct 2008 – it looks like it’s going to be great fun

Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones, Burka, Tantek and all on stage with the awesome and extraordinarily nice Steven Johnson. Can’t go wrong really, can you. Very happy making.

“Erik Huggers made BBC new media boss”

I don’t know the man at all. There was clearly some succession planning going on here, though, which doesn’t entirely fill me with joy. Sigh.

All electronic music fans need to listen to Delia Derbyshire’s “Experimental Dance Track” from the late sixties on this BBC News story

Extraordinary. Unbelievable how contemporary it sounds.

The Online Shoppe of Christopher David Ryan includes some lovely bits of design involving Apple Shortcuts

Pretty much as design nerdy as you get without actually replacing your limbs with anglepoise lamps and Eames chairs.

How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?

Apparently I could take eighteen.

Domestic sell all kinds of weird and awesome vynil stickers and stuff to put on walls

I think we’re going to try and get some of these for the Brickhouse office to design it up a bit. The more it feels like a teenager’s bedroom, the more creative we’ll be.

Plazes has added support for Fire Eagle!

And this blog post explains all the value that they’re getting out of being involved. Very excited to have them with us!

Jeremy Paxman’s position on ‘User Generated Content’ should now be clear

And truth be told, he’s right. The last few years have seen a decent number of fairly feeble attempts to harness the wisdom of the crowds that do indeed end up schlocky and amateurish. People will get better at it in time.

There’s a fun argument in progress over at 37 signals about whether urgency and long working hours are ever a good thing.

People always generalise from their own experience. You get several incredibly bright, diligent self-starting friends in a room and–shock–they’re naturally productive and find their own equilibrium.

Young Marshall’s Django Fire Eagle package…

“The django_fireeagle package contains code to handle the Fire Eagle authorisation process within Django. You can use it to manage connections between Django users and their respective Fire Eagle access tokens.”

Phil Pearson’s Fire Eagle C# library

Should you want to cut down the time it takes to develop Fire Eagle related goodies using C#.

Art of the Title Sequence

Lovely site full of video clips of sexy TV and film title sequences.

here.unlike is a mash-up of berlin.unlike and Fire Eagle

It is gorgeous and unfortunately I guess only works if you’re in Berlin. If you are in Berlin and you have a Fire Eagle invitation, then you should totally have a play.

I’m a significant fan of Flora Grubb Gardens

San Francisco sometimes weirds me out a bit. I’ve not really come across anything like a UK Garden Centre, although I’m sure they exist. There are however, these amazing little boutique places. S’weird.

Even the ludicrous hagiography from the BBC can’t dull my joy at Highfield finally leaving the BBC

Okay. I’m lying. It pisses me off. My personal belief is that you’ll see his name in biographies in twenty years time as the man whose lack of clue resulted in the BBC’s inability to adapt to the digital age.

I’ve got a bit of a lust on for the DC18 Dyson Slim All Floors Vacuum Cleaner

What can I say. It looks gorgeous. It’s full of future technology stuff. I have to kit out my apartment from scratch. I will probably not buy it. I’ll probably have spent the money on something else ridiculous.

Twinkle is an iPhone app that allows you to geocode Twitter messages (although the geo stuff can only be used in Twinkle)

I know I’ve been going on a bit recently, but this is precisely the problem we’ve been trying to fix. What you want to do is capture someone’s location in one place and use it everywhere.

The Breeders’ Mountain Battles as seen by Metacritic

It’s a good album. There are a few songs that have stuck with me, which in my album-less digestathon of iPod smart playlists and ratings is my indicator that it’s a great record.

Dan Hill’s written his thoughts on the design process and success of the Monocle website

In the end, I think I’m most fascinated by this piece because of all the things I wouldn’t have done and the decisions I don’t really understand. Gripping combination of mental exfoliant and moisturiser.

Metacritic reviews The Sarah Jane Adventures

Seriously, it’s worth sticking with. A few of the later episodes are are better than many of the Doctor Whos of the last couple of seasons. You know, for kids. Also occasionally K9!

Best picture on the Internets secretly plays out the epic battles of large multi-national web companies…

The lightning represents innovation.

Who’s in the frame for Highfield’s job at the BBC?

A good list of some of the prime candidates for the job. My favourites would be Tony Ageh and Simon Nelson, both of whom I’ve been honoured to work with and who I have significant respect for.

Ashley Highfield is to leave the BBC. It won’t be a shock if I tell you that I think it’s about time.

The only problem is who follows him. There are some particular candidates that I think would do the job well, but I’m afraid I suspect they won’t end up with the job.

Delightful news: Homosexual Geneticists have discovered the cause of Christianity

Pretty funny as politically charged satires on the horrors of anti-gay rhetoric go. It’s not quite as clever as I think it thinks it is. Some of the analogies are a bit forced and hurt their own message. Still, enjoyable.

Really useful article on creating software installer disk images on Panther. Unfortunately I need a similar article for Leopard.

Surprisingly fun making disk images and putting in background images and aliases and stuff. You can see our finished work for Leopard users if you’re a Fire Eagle user when you download the widgets.

Another one for Fire Eagle users – iamnear.net has added megaliths to its nearby pub-tracker

This one could just grow and grow – particularly given all the geocoded information in Wikipedia.

The lovely guys at Skyhook have announced that they’re going to be opening up their mobile clients to update Fire Eagle – which rocks!

Those of you who have Fire Eagle invitations will – with any luck – have already noticed that we’ve started adding some select apps into the gallery. More to come. It’s actually quite overwhelming.

Django auth wrapper for Fire Eagle makes getting your Django app all Eagled-up super easy

Constructed by Steve Marshall.

Andy Baio has redesigned Waxy.org and it looks pretty great.

At some point when the current lunacy is over and my teeth are fixed, I have an apartment, Fire Eagle is completely launched, my taxes are done and Web 2.0 Expo and Where 2.0 are over I shall redesign too.

My tweet cloud reveals my most important and common words to be: going, work, think, bloody, day, people and trying

The next lot are a little less depressing: awesome, eagle, evening, fucking, new, think, totally, want. Top people mentioned: Biddulph, Brother, Cal, God, Jones, Paul, Simon.

Two videos of games for the iPhone that show what can be accomplished in two weeks

Also demonstrates some of the value and fun you can have with accelerometers.

I’ve found an apartment! I get the keys today and move in on Tuesday. Here’s the road on Google Street View!

Very happy about it. Spent quite a lot of yesterday early evening knocking up a quick scale drawing in OmniGraffle 5. I’ll plug in the numbers today when I go around this afternoon.

Design Within Reach’s frame-less hourglass is, “an elegant solution for timing any activity that lasts for 45 minutes”

It’s hard to know how to respond to that, except to say that honestly, how many things last exactly forty-five minutes. I suppose you could time the TV shows you’re watching.

You have a limited amount of willpower which you must spend wisely, although you can train yourself to develop more!

You require willpower to develop willpower. Nasty. To be honest, this connects well with my experience. I’ve managed to make myself more focused, and my flat’s normally a tip.

Creative Review Blog (from a way back) presents pseudo-Google Earth visualisations of key episodes in the Bible

I love the way your brain attempts to rationalise this documentary-style footage of what’s going on with the fantastic, allegorical and occasionally just insane stories from the Bible.

Building a bookcase into a set of stairs is a pretty great idea, as is the way they’ve made some of the steps work better as seats

I can’t help but wonder how easy it is to walk down without killing yourself though.

Gramophone’s recommended recordings gives you a quick and easy way to find out which version of a piece of Classical music you should buy

And then you can go straight over to Amazon MP3 to buy it. If you’re in the US that is.

I think it’s in Swedish – an article about my thing at ETech that I don’t understand in the slightest. Anyone help?

Particularly horrified by the picture, which captures my exhaustion and desire to get into trouble only partly as well as it gets my double chin and my ‘raises handbags’ gesture.

Seems like I’d have posted this Fire Eagle powered pub-finder already, but del.icio.us doesn’t seem to think I have..

Awesome! Everyone likes pubs!

Yay! Bruce Sterling mentioned Fire Eagle in a blog post. Well, he referred to its rhetorical spimeiness. Which is probably a dig. But still. Rock!

He probably hates it. I don’t mind! I still think he’s neat.