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Weekly viewing figures 2002-2007

Weekly viewing figures 2002-2007
Originally uploaded by hobart65.

Must admit I'm a bit surprised by this chart, given my dinner party chatter of "...oh, I completely stopped watching TV". According to BARB roughly the same amount of people are watching, for the same amount of time, they're just dividing their attention. Is it sacrilegious to doubt BARB?

http://www.barb.co.uk/viewingsummary/trendreports.cfm?report=hours&flag=viewingsummary

Passion Pictures: Bravia: colour like.no.other

Passion Picture: Bravia: colour like.no.other Originally uploaded by hobart65.

Take a look at the site for the much anticipated Sony Bravia ad. The hype machine is in full motion, but rumor has it that this one another classic along side paint and balls. colourlikenoother.com

Visual tool for your HD

WinDirStat. I keep using this. It's great. And I don't want to forget about it so thought I'd make a note. The original post was from Gareth Bowen (ex-Dare and Xbox fiend): Nice visual tool to show where all your disk space has gone. Have used a number of similar tools, but I particularly like the way this does things.

Awesome game

A rather addictive puzzle game with a simple and original idea. http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/bloxorz

Image display and networking

Bit old now (ho ho) but this is an amazing TED presentation of some Microsoft projects (inherited by acquisition it seems).

The first is a way of managing the display of enormous amounts of visual data simultaneously (think Picasa) but without any slow-down in performance.
Why should it slow down when it's the same number of pixels in use?

The second is a new presentation showing Seadragon but in much greater details than I've seen before. It's now linking enormous numbers of pictures of Notre Dame Cathedral (including representations within a photo such as a poster) and has had quite a bit of work done on the interface.

You've got to watch both of these.
The audience are astounded.

Digital Fire Extinguisher Training

Rarely do I display an opinion about posts, but I think this is great. There are a number of things that we may be called to do during our lives that saves the lives of others; a) first aid and b) fighting fire. I hope this helps the latter. Digital comes good. Source: The Raw Feed

No A’s, no Halo 3

Brandon Scott, manager of GameStop in southern Dallas, will only sell games to children who are doing well at school. And aren’t showing their underwear.

Link

Source: Gaming Today

Play with Paper!

These free templates from Readymech are simple and sweet - just print, cut up and stick together.

GPS made easy-ish

GPS integrated into a USB stick from Trackstick. Just carry it around to track your route. Then plug in and plot using Google Earth.


The site tells us that it "comes equipped with the highest technological features available on the market today". This includes a "detachable magnetic mount and belt clip".
Blimey.

Groovy apple catalog

Groovy apple catalog
Originally uploaded by hobart65.

Yes, all brands need to evolve. Given Apple's position as the touch stone for product and branding, it comforting that their early advertising proves to be such an endless source of mirth

No smile, no picture.

Sony release a camera that will only take a picture if everyone is smiling.




Source: gadgetell via The Raw Feed

Tron 2.0

They're making a sequel to Tron... Hollywood Repoter via BoingBoing.

Is this an incentive to cheer up?

Innovative use of voice recognition/analysis.
The sadder you are, the more ice-cream you get.

Source: boingboing

Mouse wheel icon branding!

I was just perusing our lovely aegon.co.uk and noticed that when you click the middle mouse wheel to scroll around the page they have replaced the usual icon with their own branded scroll icon complete with aegon favicon style logo.

Content-Aware Image Sizing

I'm going to do a terrible job of explaining this so I'd recommend watching this video. But here's a go. This technique/application allows the user when rescaling an image to prioritise the content within the image. Therefore all elements within the image are not uniformly rescaled but the less important stuff, often something like sky, will be scaled to a greater extent. This is known as retargeting. Hmm. Reread that. Not brilliant. Watch the video. You can see scary implications if this was in the hands of the paparazzi. Found by: Rob

Flash is going hi-def

"Adobe, the San Jose software maker, will announce that it is integrating a standard format for high definition video into the newest version of its immensely popular Flash video player."

New York Times article, via kurzweilai.net

Download beta Flash player update here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

Some demos here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/fullscreendemo/

http://marcelfahle.com/2007/08/21/first-h264-demo-in-flash-player-9

http://www.ericd.net/2007/08/h264-playing-in-flash-player.html

Very reasonably priced rack (flight) cases

Flightcase Warehouse.
Found and purchased by: Martin Roche

Musika - game for the 5th gen iPod

Paul downloaded it. Worth a play.
Created by the maker of PaRappa the Rapper.



Paul found it a bit easy. I enjoyed the letter-build effects.
Could have done with some more 'special' characters.
Would have liked to have moved on to the next letter when I'd got it right (hence forming an extra penalty for guessing too soon).
Would also have liked it to speed up as the song progressed.

Story on webware.

Brilliant site tours

Here's one for Flickr:

Made by Common Craft.

The Onion

Now available on MySpace.
Video not so hot but Top Story deliver laughs.

From the press release:
"The news business is like the tobacco business: you want to reach new readers at as young and impressionable an age as possible," Sean Mills, president of The Onion, is quoted as saying. "MySpace was, of course, a natural partner in that regard."

Music video using Flickr

This music video pulls in photos from Flickr to represent the words in the song. Changes every time because it randomizes the search. A really nice idea.

http://www.avoision.com/experiments/astronaut/

via Infosthetics

Build your own 3D printer

RepRap is an open-source, low-cost rapid-prototyping machine. Version 1.0 is currently in development, but once it's finalised, will become a blueprint that will allow people to build their own machines themselves, with the parts costing about $400.
Many of the parts of the machine can actually be 'printed' by the machine itself, and the goal is (eventually) to make the machine completely self-replicating.
You can listen to a talk about the project here, or visit the site here.

BBC iPlayer

The mythical iPlayer (that's been talked up for a good couple of years now) is the BBC's video-on-demand service. It lets you download most BBC programmes from the last 7 days and watch them back on your PC. As it's not Mac-friendly, I can't vouch for the quality of the video, but you can sign up for the beta testing phase now at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayerbeta/, and find out for yourselves...

Lightbox 2 - just out

We liked the first release of this.
And now comes Lightbox 2.

May come in handy sometime.

Liking the ability to use left/right arrows to navigate.

Found by: Conor

New Release

Congratulations from everyone to Chantel and Conor on the arrival of their son, Cillian.
All are well.

Conor also took a moment in his email announcement to tell us about the new Google Maps direction finder (see story below).

Google Maps - "raising the bar" with some super AJAX

Customisable driving directions. Great interface and integration with live traffic conditions (US only and selected cities on).
Still, it's pretty excellent.

Published as a video demo.

Conor's review:
"There is only one word for that. Awesome (said with American accent). Probably the best single Ajax feature that I have ever seen."

Found by: Conor

Google vs Microsoft - mapping kit beauty parade

Gizmodo compare the cars used by Microsoft and Google for collecting streetview data. Worth a look for a very brief mention of the sorts of things these machines do.

Business.com sells

for $350m.
Blimey.

Source: Techcrunch

When you absolutely must listen to the Kaiser Chiefs.

Waterproof headphones.
iPod underwater case.

Rather than be happy with that pesky ambient noise.

This is not an endorsement.

Poke a hole through a picture of Steve Ballmer. Source: digg

Man + deckchair + helium balloons

But no personal record. Doh! Man 'flies' in his deckchair video . Source: BBC News

Pop-up club in Barcelona

Kubik Barcelona is an offshoot of the UK Creamfields event.
Made from recycled water tanks.




Source: Springwise

AIR vs Silverlight

Internet app to desktop exposure is fast increasing. Livestation and Silverlight. (Microsoft). Posted July 6. Pownce with AIR (Adobe) All we need now is a suitable project.

iPhone - a very full review

Lots of photos and balanced opinions from ars technica.
Well worth a look.

Obligatory photo here. Shows the 'conversation' view for SMS:



I really really hate to say this but it left me wanting one mostly for the web browsing and SMS handling. Although I may find text entry frustrating after Windows Mobile and the stylus. Will reserve judgement.

Brand as curator

"Design is so popular today mostly because business sees design as connecting it to the consumer populace in a deep, fundamental and honest way. An honest way. If you are in the myth-making business, you don’t need design. You need a great ad agency. But if you are in the authenticity and integrity business then you have to think design. If you are in the co-creation business today—and you’d better be in this age of social networking—then you have to think of design. Indeed, your brand is increasingly shaped and defined by network communities, not your ad agency. Brand manager? Forget about it. Brand curator maybe."
Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek

Great article picked up Logic and Emotion blog via crackunit

Feed me

Now I know choice is good...

Wearable technologies

ispo Sport & Style 2007 preview on I4U.




A step up from the 'a special pocket in your jeans for your iPod' type of stuff that seems to have passed as wearable technology up till now.
Actually, I spoke too soon. There's an iPod bag thingy.

So someone IS using Silverlight

Microsoft Livestation purports to be Sling without the box. Didn't know that MS had a stake in Skinkers. Makes sense to develop using Silverlight then. Source: Techcrunch

Wiltons Music Hall

Went there last night and saw Handel's Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Truth) by Transition Opera.

I'd urge you to go and see it. Although I think there's probably only one or two performances left.
Very interesting mixture of decaying music hall, baroque period instruments, strong voices and projections (back and live capture from video camera).



As you can read on the Wiltons site, it's the oldest surviving grand music hall from the 1850s. You wouldn't know it's there. Sandwiched between South Smithfields road (busy, polluted), the DLR and some rough estates.

Book Slam

Went to Book Slam once and was worth it - has various authors/poets getting up and doing readings. Irvine Welsh is on tonight which could be interesting, otherwise probably worth looking out for future authors... if you're into books! If not then it's in a bar so you can't lose.

Looks like Flash

Smells like Flash.
But is it Flash?



Microsoft Silverlight.
When are people going to start using it?

Desktop app for Flickr

Nostalgia
Only been quickly looked at but seems to allow viewing, uploading and management of photos on Flickr.
But purely desktop-based.



Found by: Conor

Street installations

Some made of tape.



Source: Shadi's Mum

Twitter 1930's style

Location-based microblogging in the 30s: this “robotic” messenger display aims at “TO AID persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabout“:



Source: pasta and vinegar

Impressive new printer can print very, very fast indeed.

Link: Memjet Technology.

Click on "Montage Video" to see ink being applied to paper at high speeds.

Print your Photo, and leave a copy for our wall

Print your Photo, and leave a copy for our wall
Originally uploaded by jeremiah_owyang.

"While in Singapore, my new friend Bill Claxton took me and some bloggers from The Digital Movement to this wonderful ice cream shop. What’s really interesting is that they encouraged the guests to take pictures (often with their own cameras) print it out and post on the wall."

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/06/27/letting-go-let-your-community-create-with-you-grow-together/

They don't write email spam like they used to

From: "Torey Goguen" <dialsendangers@encoreproductions.net>

Subject:



Hello my friend!



I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (http://everypractice.hk) are bad.



Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..



My dog and I are still alive :)







Received by: ADG

Deskside supercomputers from NVIDIA

"Under the NVIDIA® Tesla™ brand, NVIDIA will offer a family of GPU computing products that will place the power previously available only from supercomputers in the hands of every scientist and engineer. Today's workstations will be transformed into 'personal supercomputers.'

"With multiple deskside systems, a standard PC or workstation is transformed into a personal supercomputer, delivering up to 8 teraflops of computer power to the desktop."


According to Wikipedia, the SETI programme computes data at about 700 teraflops. So presumably, you could double our chances of discovering alien life with a bit of cash and a few of NVIDIAs new systems set up in your spare room.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_43499.html

Benches have never received this much loving attention.

Part of the Touching The City Project.

This is Project 0.1 - benchspace.



The exhibition is at Westbourne Grove Church until 22nd July.

There's also a walk on Saturday 30 June.

Certainly worth dropping in.



Source: ADG

At last - easily record your phone calls

From: Akihabara

Wii sports add-ons

Nerf soft sports accessories (tennis, golf, baseball bat).



And some boxing gloves.

The RCA Great Exhibition

The RCA Great Exhibition
Originally uploaded by alistairh.

The RCA end of year show is one of the best for years, well worth a trip. It's open for the rest of this week until 9pm. This year the more practical stuff is housed in a enormous temporary structure sponsored by the Conran Foundation.

This much larger space really transforms the exhibition. It somehow has a more workshop feel. Each student has more space and its much easier to move around. For some reasons, it also seems like there is much more work. It's so good, that I going to return so I can spend longer on the more interesting stuff.

http://www.rca.ac.uk/pages/news/rca_announces_the_great_3824.html

My pick was 'The Object of My affection' by Elanor Davies. There are a series of one off amorphus sculpture blobs made by a 3D printer using data from DNA and personality tests. It was a fascinating idea if you applied it to a family or generations.

Atom trap is a step towards a quantum computer

from New Scientist

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn12082&feedId=online-news_rss20

TV Links

Watch almost any TV show online: TV Links

Podcast: Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo talks about design

I highly recommend listening to this inspiring podcast from IT Conversations.



Tim Brown makes two really great points. Firstly, it's the storytelling around an idea that makes sure it gets made. Secondly, the measure of how good an organsiation can innovate is the speed at which it can prototype.



I've been really struggling with finding a really quick method of making clickable prototypes. I always think there must be a way of using a pen, digital camera and software to do this faster. Paper prototyping is always held up as the fastest way, but I find it just doesn't quite feel like a screen based experience.



What's your favorite package for making an interactive prototype? I heard that windows vista was done in macromedia director.

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let’s talk washing up shall we

Passive-aggressive publicly posted notes blog.

Innovative lighting ideas (not strictly digital)

Although there is a site.





  

Lamps made from preserved sheep-stomachs.



Ruminant Bloom are beautiful, blossom-like lamps that are made from preserved sheep stomachs, each with a unique structure.



Found by: A D Ginsberg

Crazy

H&M - Sims2 Add-On

Don't know why I thought this was such a strange cross-over. Would seem perfectly natural in Second Life. Well, I say natural...

Project playlist

A rather nifty playlist thingy from www.projectplaylist.com which you can stick on your blog, website, myspace, facebook, bebo etc. etc. etc. It seems to resource the music from whereever it can find it so it allows you to check the links work before you add a song. You can also choose whether it auto-plays or not!

Mario Brothers in Lego

Hardly groundbreaking but use of green backdrop and recorder music was much appreciated.

What the...?

Oh my word.

I am stunned.

How?

Photosynth

A talk on Photosynth, a Microsoft project that aims to build up 3d spacial associations between images on the web, such as flickr photos. Rather clever!

The talk is here at ted.com. (This place is generally worth keeping an eye on for interesting talks.)

There's a demo of the tech at the photosynth project page.

Game, game, and again game

Weird hybrid of abstract poetry and game. Has to be played to be believed.
Link here

We've seen a lot of these types of interfaces being demoed about the place lately, looks like Microsoft liked the demos too. Bits I like and haven't seen before are dragging images straight onto your phone and restaurant bills straight onto your credit card.

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Music Aggregators

Two aggregator sites/reccomendation engines that are good for discovering music: Hype Machine and Critical Metrics.

Google maps to add Quicktime-VR-style interactive Flash street views

Article here

Demo here

Curses

Peggle

My new favourite game.

A mixture of Arkanoid and Bagatelle. Some wonderful touches. Good learning curve.







Found by: The guys at Renderheads

Apple Display Technology

From http://fun-4-amdavadi-gujarati.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=73&topic=613.0

Reno Balloon Race 2006

I just called to say...

http://odeo.com/audio/11569773/view

'I don't give a damn if you're twelve years old...'

Not the usual e-cards one would expect.

Warning: Some are a little rude.







Found by: Mike

55+ represent 22.0% of UK visits

Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has picked up on an interesting trend - the rise of the 55+ online. Compare 2007 with 2005 below: But, wealth continues to be a divider - the very poor are are under represented and the wealthiest are far more active.

Rube Goldberg Machines

There's some really clever bits of mechanics in some of these machines.

Gentle leaking

Another Transformers trailer.



It would seem that a large part of the budget, that could have been spent on dialogue, has been redirected to CGI.



No reason not to see it though.



Found by: Conor

FlashPaper in action

Not sure if it's still called this after Adobe.

A bit like a PDF without the hanging browser.



This is a paper from Magus who provide automated digital web standards management.

And the overview from Adobe.

Salvation - VJ realtime video mixer

The thing is, there's a 30 day free trial so worth a look.

Short demo.

More Firefox Bloat? (Wired)

Further to Daniel's Firefox post, thought I'd post a link to this article from Wired magazine. It looks forward to the new Firefox release (3.0, coming in the summer), and provides good insight into the balance between adding new features and keeping the browser as lightweight as possible. To be fair to Firefox, a lot of the gripes about the new version are based on the beta version, which is bound to be buggy.

I stopped using Firefox a while back, mainly because of how slow it was making my machine run, and because on OS X, it behaves unpredictably when doing basic things - so it was good to see this post by a member of the Mac team at Firefox, asking "What sucks about Firefox on the Mac?" The gripes in the comments are all familiar.

You think you've deleted something from your hard drivce

but that's rarely the case.

Apocryphal stories cite HDs burnt, drowned and smashed but still giving up data that had been in the Recycle Bin and then emptied.



So create some noise on the drive with Eraser.

Is it just me or is Firefox stealing lots of CPU lately?

I found this.



http://www.ccleaner.com/



Firefox seems to bloat when the cache is huge and it tries to be a bit too clever.



Good for fixing invalid registry entries also.



Source: Conor

Am I really lowering the tone with this?

"Perfect for cosplay or everyday wear! I wear mine all the time."

That's a quote. Not a quotation.







Get these and more at bunnywarez

.

Found by: A friend

Apple moving to LED-based displays

(Artist's impression)

Apple recently announced its intentions to switch from LCD displays to LED-based display technology. Initially the displays will be available in the MacBook Pro line, but will filter down to MacBooks soon.

If you believe what the internet has to say, LED displays are brighter, better quality, longer-lasting, thinner, toxin-free, and less power-hungry than LED displays. Phew.

Read the full story here.

Alfresco: Open source document management

The CMS / document management is crowded and confusing. Many of our clients seem to spend a fortune on systems that really don't seem to function very well. Alfresco has a core management team from documentum - the grand daddy of document management. This pedigree makes it interesting. I heard about it via this podcast from Phil Windley: "Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. The company's CTO, John Newton, joins Phil, Scott, and Ben to discuss how Alfresco uses an open source strategy to assist organizations to manage the capture, storage, security, revision control, retrieval, distribution, preservation and destruction of documents and content. In addition to reviewing the technical aspects, he talks about the practical uses of the system." John Newton - Technometria: Enterprise Content Management

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The IBM "Bow Tie" Theory

As part of a big IBM research project back in 2000, scientists identified 4 distinct types of site based on connectedness. Google page rank naturally gives higher ranking to those sites at the core. Most site would naturally like to be part of the core, but this means you have to have good links away from the site in addition to incoming. This idea is often billed as a 'link strategy'. Often brand sites seem very reticent about linking out to 3rd party sites, particularly if they provide better content. This model give a good argument for explaining why linking away doesn't 'leak' traffic, but makes the site better findable.

Stage6 : Youtube in HD

A friend just watched Spiderman III on stage 6, as he says "its a screener but amazing quality shot on HD with no one in the cinema..." I think it's been out in the UK for about two weeks. Unlike youtube, all the South Park episodes haven't been pulled...yet. Like youtube, enjoy while the good times last.

Originally found via tv-links.co.uk

Peole actually want to buy broken iPods. So be Green.

And do it.







BuyMyBrokeniPod.com



We don't care if the iPod has a cracked screen, the hard drive busted or shows a sad face, buttons don’t work, is acting weird, is old and creepy, has water damage, or if the battery is dead. Click below to get a price quote, and in 3 easy steps turn your broken iPod into CASH!





Source: Springwise