rb.log

Wise advice for eating well from this New York Times article.
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

DIY coffee roasting - Lifehacker. 'You'll bask in DIY satisfaction AND you'll save a bloomin' bunch. As for the 'specialized' coffee roasting equipment, try these two economical options: an air-pop popcorn popper or a cast iron skillet.'

Another thing to add to my list of hobbies I'd love to take up.

What Does 200 Calories Look Like?.

Some great efforts in the Celebrity Mii Contest (a Mii being a personal little avatar that you can design on the Nintendo Wii). My personal favorite is this one of Jack Black:

I happened to be in Trafalgar Square this evening when some protestors passed through, closely followed by police and riot vans. I THINK the protest was something to do with elections in the Congo, against the posibility of Joseph Kabila becoming president.

Everyone was madly taking photos with their phones, although it felt like one of those situations that COULD turn ugly. Didn't while I was there, fortunately.

Wedding procession led by flower girl in Vader helmet. 'the procession was led by a little girl in a Darth Vader helmet while a "hipster-country" version of the Imperial March played.'

Some people are just so damn creative.
Goggles :: The Google Maps flight sim

Geologists have ringside seats for an ocean's birth | The Register. "A rift that opened in Africa after a massive earthquake last September could be the beginning of a new Ocean, scientists say. The crack in the ground appeared along a fault line in the Afar desert in Ethiopia.
The crack is heading for the Red Sea. If it makes it that far, it would carve a new ocean that would separate Eritrea and part of Ethiopia (both of which lie on the Arabian plate) from the rest of the continent, creating a new island."

In one month it was already 8 metres wide in some places. Pretty wild, the thought of Ethipia as an island.

Scale models of Hiroshima. Before and After.

There's something very beautiful about these melting, ceramic bat -people.

Pee Goal

In my continued test of Word 2007's new blogging feature, I'm having a go at inserting a picture that points to a URL. It's a little odd that here in Word it just shows up as a small 100x100 image. Here's hoping it scales up to "real size" once it posts.

And on the subject of "here's hoping" it would be great to be able to assign my blog categories from here in Word. I can't find a way if there is one. But I guess that's the beginning of the slippery slope of throwing everything in. I should be happy that the feature has got this far. It's pretty cool having the familiarity of Word to do this.

<Update: Well, I tried two methods of inserting an image tag that points to an image on Flickr, both of which failed. The first one looked like it had worked, but I was deceived. I went to the Insert tab in Word 2007, hit Picture, and typed in the URL to the image I wanted in the File Name field. Word did go off and fetch the image, but it made a duplicate of it locally, which meant that I had to publish that embedded image somewhere when I tried to post. And publishing images seems to be broken. The other method I tried was just typing in the <img> tag with an href to the photo. Looks like Word replace the less then and greater then signs with lt; and gt; respectively. Hopefully this is a bug. >

Word 2007 can apparently post to a Blog. This is a test of that claim. Hopefully this text will make it from this page in Word to my blog relatively unscathed. It looks like I should expect a few weird bugs since this is beta code, but here goes anyway.

< Update: As Joe points out in his blog entry, some text encoding still isn't happening correctly. So I had to get rid of the "smart" apostrophe from the title by turning off an option in the Autocorrect dialog box. It was showing some weird characters that included the symbol for the Euro. Very strange. Now I'm using dumb apostrophes only. >

SUV Bicycle - The Green Hummer Project. "There are no black tinted windows to hide us from view. No air conditioning to further isolate us from the outside. No gas tank to fill and fill and fill. No greenhouse gasses pouring from the exhaust pipe. No frustration, no yelling, no honking, no road rage."

Following on from my post about the Neverhood, here's another claymation game . This one is a side-scrolling shooter called Platypus

This is quite an amusing video to watch once you understand the context. The BBC needed a technology expert to answer questions on air about the Apple Computer vs. Apple Corp legal case. It looks like they accidentally interviewed a taxi driver, rather then the person they had invited to speak. He does quite a good job, I think.

Can anyone tell me why Europeans keep on getting screwed on the price of technology? Sony just announced the pricing for the new Playstation 3, due out in November. The model with the 20Gb hard drive will be 499 US dollars in North America and 499 Euros in Europe. According to Google, at the current exchange rate 499 dollars is 392 Euros. So in Europe we're paying a premium of 107 Euros, or 136 dollars. Is this one of those weird tax things, where it's more costly for Sony to do business in Europe? Is it the cost of localizing all the content for multiple European languages? Or is it just a blatant rip off which they know Europeans can only grumble about?

The Neverhood is the last really great adventure game that I actually completed. Built using claymation, like Wallace & Gromitt , it was colorful and imaginative. Part of a really creative period for LucasArts, before it got bogged down in bad Star Wars games. Still available on eBay...

Have a read of Desktop Zen - Reducing Visual Clutter on your Desktop by AJ and see if you think your desktop can really go from this:

to this:

I'm a little sceptical, myself, that this will work for everyone. Some people seem to NEED clutter to function.

Ok, this street luge suit, which is covered in rollerblade wheels, is pretty whacked.

Shannon bought me all six Cubees. I blogged about my desire for these earlier this year. She has a good memory.

These are little block "animals" that play alone or sing in harmony. Sort of. If you can call a pig noise and a duck noise "harmony". They have been quite a conversation piece this holiday.

Erg. Brian caught some great shots of a collision between the two monorail trains in downtown Seattle. Not sure how this was possible...

The Blue Ball Machine...

I found this list of unintentionally racy links rather amusing. Particularly liked:

Power-Gen Italia - Italian power company
http://www.powergenitalia.com/

I'm on the verge of home composting. More guilt about stuff we throw away. But we're worried about the questionable smell it might produce.

This thing would be an expensive but cool solution. Although I doubt it's available in the UK. Produces delicious mulch every 10 days.

NatureMill Indoor Composter - Controlled Decay - Gizmodo

"It’s an in-home composter that takes trash in one end and produces a delicious organic humus out the other—that’s humus not hummus. One is is a tasty chickpea dish, the other is a muddy conglomeration of nitrates, carbon, and grossness."

I found this article about one girl's experience playing games online pretty depressing. From the look of it, it's best not to admit that you're a girl in a game environment, and if you do you'd better expect to have a photo handy to prove it. Sad.

OMG Girlz Don't Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1

"I've been watching and observing the internet for quite some time now. It's like a science project with the usual control and variables. The control is: I am a girl. The variables are the medium through which this fact is expressed. The results all point to the same paradoxical conclusion: I am a girl, but girls do not exist on the internet."

TV Cream's Top 100 Toys of the 70s and 80s is awesome. I recognize nearly everything here. Not sure if this is a UK centric list, though. I suspect so.

I was telling Shannon about Toasted Soldiers just the other day. Is this just a peculiarly English thing. Anyway, some obsessive has done the decent thing and developed a toastie soldier cutting machine. Perfect perferations every time.

So, to recap. 1,000 people died in New Orleans, not 10,000. The looting and violence was no worse then normal. And now the we get this: floodwaters not as toxic to humans as previously thought, study says.
This lack of accurate reporting at the time is a little disconcerting.

The Million Dollar Homepage is just plain weird/wild. A 1000x1000 pixel page is being auctioned off at $1 a pixel (minimum purchase of 10x10 pixels) to do with as you will. So far the site has made $323,200. I'd be tempted, except $100 is too high a minimum for my tastes.

I'm not that opposed to in-game advertising, although this shot of a 40s era Godfather game with a street-corner Starbucks is a little too revisionist for my taste. Wonder if that's a drive-through.

I like this "interactive advertising" from Sony.

If any proof were needed of how rich a regular webpage with Javascript can be, here's Super Mario Brothers implemented in Javascript.

Whenever Shannon and I work out of the Soho office in central London I spot someone "famous". Soho has a large pool of media-related businesses, so there are often actors coming and going.
Today's subject was John Hurt, an excellent actor of stage and screen, famous for having an alien burst our of his stomach, in space, where no one can hear you scream.

A couple of times a year Bill Gates makes a humorous video, usually a take off of a movie or advertisment, used to lighten up his talks at different professional conferences. These are not distributed, because the content tends to be proprietory, but just for a change someone managed to take a shot of a frame from the one shown at the Professional Developers Conference.

I'm afraid I sympathize with this article entitled "A gadget bag is the new man purse" a little TOO much. I'm a bag elitist. I'm finding it hard to move much beyond my Crumpler Farmer's Double, which is ideal for my two big-ticket items, my laptop and SLR. These bags from Chrome are still getting my attention, though.

Birds in urban areas of Germany have apparently started mimicing ringtones.

Ok, the title of this product is a bit of meglomania, but Google Earth is pretty stunning none the less. It's a 3D earth viewer that allows you to zoom in and out of a model of the earth that's mapped with satelite imagery. Try adding your own tags with sets like "places I've lived" or "places I want to visit".

I'd like to do this tree planting dedication through the Woodland Trust. 50 pounds gets you 10 trees in one of 20 woods across the UK.

Dolphins teach their children to use sponges
This is amazing. But, then again, why should it be? Humans are pretty arrogant to think that they're so far advanced that there isn't even one reasonably smart creature out there.
"Dolphins in Australia have been observed using tools, and they seem to pass on their specialist knowledge to others. This is the first time cultural transmission has been confirmed in a marine mammal.
"Lacking hands, dolphins are limited in what they can do with a tool, but some bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia, have devised a way to break marine sponges off the seafloor and wear them over their snouts when foraging."

This is just down the road from us.
Whispers in the maze
"Since May 6, visitors to the oldest maze in the world, Hampton Court Palace Maze can hear cymbals, a dog barking, a child laughing, the rustle of silk skirts, a tune from a music box, and the murmurs and sighs of three centuries of chatter at the palace. The sounds float around the maze so subtly that it is hard to distinguish them from real-life ones."

Another potential classic, quirky game coming to the GameCube. Nintendo does this stuff so well.
E3: Odama turns strategy on its head"The enemy troops are trying to push a marker down the screen and into your territory. You need to do everything you can to stop them. Use the flippers to roll the ball over them (but be careful of your own troops) or use your forces (at strategic times) to outfight the bad guys. You get a mic for the controller that allows you to bark orders like "March!" or "Stop!" and the troops will dutifully follow them."

Get the Manga look with Manga Head. A new gell from Garnier lets you have REAL control.

Takara Cubee: Singing Animal Blocks. "Takara is selling these in the US, and they sing. Just stupid nursery rhymes, right, but if you stack them up on top of each other and press the button, the others will sing backup. These are amazingly annoying and awesome."

Sand-sculpture photos - "mind-blowing"

784 gone since 1500, but one's come back.
'Extinct' woodpecker found alive

It does feel...sort of good.
VirtualStapler.com

Spoof ads for what each of the political parties in the UK would really like to say. Awesome.

There's quite a revolution taking place in the UK school dinners system, since Jamie Oliver (the Naked Chef) revealed that most kids main meal of the day consisted primarily of deep fried, reconstituted chicken, shaped like zoo animals (with chips).
Looks like this has hit a legal hiccup.
"The Guardian has learned that new schools locked into 25-year contracts through private finance initiatives are finding that they cannot rid their menus of junk food despite the government's pledge."

If this Wireless Range Extender works as promised I can finally fill in some of the dead spots in the house. It's supposed to work with any network, which is what makes it unique. Assuming it does as advertised.

Randomly Generated Paper Accepted to Conference. "SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. What's amazing is that one of [the MIT student's] randomly generated paper was accepted to WMSCI 2005. Now they are accepting donation to fund their trip to the conference and give a randomly generated talk."

A pretty useful article from ExtremeTech on how to get different types of media onto a PSP. Includes a decent list of 3rd party tools to help out.

A new trend in Japan is modifying a Suzuki van to look like a VW van, to create a Minibasu. I thought these looked great.

Lab fireball 'may be black hole'. "A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said."

Michael Zulli, a graphic artist who's done a lot of work on Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, is documenting the process of painting his "last" Sandman picture, The Last Morpheus. It's interesting to see him start from basic sketches and move to painting on a 4 foot by 2 foot canvas.

These are great recreations of classic UK TV channel clocks, done in Flash.

This was the last t-shirt I received from the K Adorable t-shirt subscription that Shannon bought for me. Now it's come to an end I'm torn between wanting to subscribe again and not wanting to flood my wardrobe with shirts from just one place.

I'm confused. Steve Fossett just "made history", according to CNN, by being the person who "completed the first nonstop flight 'round-the-world without refueling".

When I was in Seattle in February, though, I saw a model hanging from the roof of SeaTac airport of the Voyager aircraft, which, according to Wikipedia, was "the first to fly around the world without stopping or refueling". In 1986. So which is it...?

I don't know why this photo of Bill with his Knighthood looks so weird to me. I guess it's because it makes him look like a bit of a tourist.

Following on from Tiger Woods' hitting a golf ball from the same location, here's the heliport at the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai being used for the Dubai Men's Open. Wild.

The age of Shuffle Personalization has begun.

The Wi-fi coverage in our home sucks. Too many walls, and too inconvenient a location for our transmitter. Call me a geek, but I might try this solution.

Mobile PC's list of The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time. Not sure I agree with their number 1, but it's a good list.

This is pretty funny. Within a few hours they'd already posted my Konstructor attempt (have a look under 21.2.2005).

Konstructor, from m-city.org, is a tool that lets you build your own cities to use as stencils.

I'm just starting to get into my first ever online game, now that the "newbie" friendly World of Warcraft has finally been released in Europe.
This game is huge, and seeing as I'm only a level 5 after a few hours of play I have a long way to go. I'm not actually sure where I'm going, since this world is persistent and pretty much endless. I guess I go until I'm bored.
The World of War fan site includes some good Cartography that should help me get around.

This must be at the extreme end of "customer love", although Apple customers seem to go to these extremes pretty regularly.
This lego figure is designed to mimic Apples sihouette iPod ads.

Navy releases tsunami images - BBC News.

I've tried this, and it's excellent. Like performing a magic trick. It makes laundry fun.

How to fold a shirt. "Stop wasting time folding shirts the normal way! How to Fold a Shirt shows you the latest techniques and tricks to fold t-shirts, sweaters, dress shirts and more; the RIGHT way!"

Simultaneously stupid and admirable.
The iPod photo stereoscope

I enjoyed the bluntness in this article by Stephen King on Everything you Need to Know About Writing Successfully. Try going through it and replacing the career of "writing" with whatever it is you do for a living. I found the advice still worked for what I do. Might be the same for you.

Sometimes when you visit a website you see a small, customized icon appear next to the URL in the address bar.
Here are instructions and a tool for making your own.

Don't know why, but Worldprocessor is just a cool site with over 200 shots of globes, each of which has a different take on the world.

I'd like to make an official plea to the powers that be to release Katamari Damacy in the UK. Why should the Americans and Japanese get all the fun?

I was on the Banksy site when I noticed this bit of graffiti that he's claiming. Shannon and I saw it the other night, on our drive into London. Then again, with 2500 "visitors" per hour, I guess a lot of people saw it too.

Tom sent me a link to this awesome VW Golf advert showing Gene Kelly Breakdancin' in the Rain.
Video (quicktime)
Related ITV article

I don't know how people find the time. This guy is very good, though.
carnets de digestion

A couple of cool sentence builders using photos of the letters of the alphabet, the first from shaved heads called hairfont.

The second based on night writing.

Thanks to Spot and Otherthings.

Some fun stuff on v e c t o r :: s c a n

Not sure if I blogged about these strandbeests before, but they're still cool. Massive "walking" structures that are driven along beachfronts by the wind.

I'm not really sure why Condoleezza Rice feels that naming names really does her any favors.

"To be sure, in our world, there remain outposts of tyranny, and America stands with oppressed people on every continent, in Cuba, and Burma, and North Korea, and Iran, and Belarus, and Zimbabwe," she said.

Huh?: We do stuff..
"Welcome to the world's most dynamic e-business marketing, design and consulting agency. We provide distinct clients with groundbreaking business strategies and cutting-edge designs to aggressively and creatively compete in a changing economy."

I think they're probably imaging the growth in "puritanical USA" aspect of this, since none of the examples given are as bad as the "Janet Jackson" affair, but this article on over the top censoring by US TV networks is pretty scary.

"Fox TV has decided to pixelate a bare derriere in a cartoon series, The Family Guy, which was originally broadcast five years ago with no complaints."

I think this kind of thing is pretty cyclical, and we're possibly begining a bit of a slide into over-sensitivity that defined the Victorian era over here in the UK. I hope it doesn't get as prudish as that, obviously.

I would guess that Little Britain will never make it over there then :-)

I'm a big fan of moleskine notebooks, which I seem to have settled on using after 15 years of searching for "the best" way to write/sketch on the go. They're really good quality (especially the sketchbook one, that has great, thick paper), and get a lot of praise for their functionality (little pocket at the back for storing stuff, tough cover, elastic strap to hold it shut, integrated bookmark).

This guy bought a new version that's made up JUST of pockets for storing stuff, and it didn't quite meet his needs, so he hacked it. I like his change, but I hope Moleskine take note of his gripes with the original. If it's not really that useful as it's initially sold it may need a redesign, and I'd hate for them to stop focussing on perfection.

Shannon and I watched Toy Story 2 again last night, so this is a timely Mr Potatohead release.
Darth Tater: Mr Vader Potatohead

This new, airless wheel from Michelin is pretty wild.

This is a quite bizarre video from the BBC of what the world will be like once Steve Jobs has competed his world domination plan.

The Apple Store Of The Future. Quite amusing. I particularly like the Steve Jobs Altar, and iBuprofen. But I'm a sucker for the stupid.

I saw an advert in Giant Robot for The Drawing Club, and wish there was one in London. It's a club that holds drawing sessions every Thursday night with models that are dressed in costume with a specific theme.

The results are pretty stunning. The people who turn up are clearly very good and into quite stylized, graphic drawings.

Here's a gadget that seems cool, but could be crappy. Line 6 GuitarPort lets you plug your electric guitar into your PC through a "retro" looking red box (it's the Retro-ness of this thing that's worrying me). The box can immitate a whole bunch of different classic guitar amp sounds, and also allows you to connect to an online service that gives you the equivalent of guitar karaoke, as well as lessons etc. Anyone have any experience with one of these?

The answer?
Buy as many copies of Do They Know It's Christmas by Band Aid 20 as you can afford.
Destroy them in amusing ways, on camera. Send us the pictures.
Charity. Violence. You know it makes sense."

"Hunters have shot dead the last female brown bear native to the Pyrenees, condemning the species to extinction and causing an "environmental catastrophe" for France, the government said./'

"Baker is described by his hometown paper, The News Tribune, as "a roadside flower salesman with a history of annoying elected officials." Since 1992, he's been booked into the Pierce County Jail 19 times, said Pierce County sheriff's spokesman Detective Ed Troyer. "

And this quote is just great: "We are stuck with him," said Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. "It's somewhat embarrassing. We should have been more thorough in checking him out."
More here.

To me, the iPod is about personal consumption of content. People close themselves into their world of music. The implication of this new product is that people will want to carry all their photos with them at all times in order to share them with other people. I'm not sure I buy that. I'm not sure that other people have the patience to go through more then a few dozen of someone elses photos. And photos have a half-life. I carry a few photos with me on my phone, but it's been a while since I've shown them to anybody. I rarely meet people now who haven't already seen photos of my wedding :-)

Video, though, IS about personal consumption (catching up on your TV shows and movies). The form-factor and storage of this device are right, the lack of video support is a problem.

Next step for me is definitely to do the same thing with my DVDs. I'm fed up with having to sit on the floor at the top of our stairs where the DVD shelf is, trying to remember what we own and then figure out where it is. I want the same flexibility and ease of choice with my movies that I now have with my music.

This article is a step in the right direction in terms of giving me the basics.

George W cards.

Now with 50% less parking space.

London Underground tube art. One in a series. All with pandas.

The guy who posted the question doesn't want to also carry a laptop and SLR camera (weener) so he wouldn't be interested in my current bag of choice, the Crumpler Farmer's Double. I love Crumpler bags. Totally solid and comfortable, and the backpack format doesn't mess with my back like the messenger bags because it's center of gravity is in the right place and it's not pulling on just one shoulder.