Lovely new ways to waste time

Knotty pointed out this new game that’s being developed for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I love the way it uses the sensor within the gadget as part of the game play. Nice!

TED meet BIL, BIL meet TED

I love TED lectures. I have an ambition to actually go one day. Maybe even pull the wool over someone’s eyes for long enough that they let me up on stage to speak. But it’s $6000 just to attend. And that doesn’t include my flights, stay in a posh hotel and massive bar tab.

However, there is now an alternative to TED. And it’s called BIL. It stands for the Bilateral, Intelligence, Life (I think they just cobbled some random words together so that they could have a name just like TED). It seems to be a bit like Speaker’s Corner for geeks. Anyone who’s got something to say can just turn up and start talking. This is their reason for starting it:

At some point we realized we are all interesting people with worthwhile things to say, and it didn’t make sense to rely always on centrally organized ways for spreading ideas. There is a time and place for traditional conferences, TED is a great conference, but perhaps a little emergence and anarchy is needed.

I fear that it’s just going to be a bunch of self-interested bores doing bad presentations. But I hope I’m wrong. We need to spread more intelligence around this little planet of ours.

So it’s cheaper than TED and there’s no barrier to me getting up and speaking. But unfortunately it still won’t help me cut down on those expensive bar bills.

Ruin your life for entertainment

There’s a TV show in the States called Moment of Truth, where people simply have to tell the truth to win prizes. They’re asked all the questions before the show while strapped up to a lie detector. Then during the show they simply have to answer all the questions correctly in front of their family and friends. If they tell a lie, they lose everything. Easy eh?

Not if you’re a lying, cheating, adulterous piece of crap, apparently. It’s been big news on the other side of the pond when a certain Laura Cleary destroyed her marriage and reputation for nothing. Here’s the footage of the sorry incident. Ugh!

Yum yum

I went to the Wapping Project for dinner last night to celebrate some developments with Unchained. And what an amazing place to celebrate.

When we walked in we were directed to an exhibition space behind the restaurant while they prepared our table. That’s where I took the above shot. It was like a small wood with strangely dressed mannequins dotted around. If you could imagine what a gothic S&M alien bride would wear, you’ll have a good idea of what most of the designs were like. It was quite awe-inspiring.

The inside of the restaurant is pretty quirky as well. It’s an old power station with all the machinery still intact. And the candle-lit ambience makes it look like it doesn’t want to bother any other power stations by asking for some of their electricity.

And the food was rather special. I cleaned my plate on each of the three courses.

Plus they played Tom Waits and Nick Cave - which kept my ears as happy as my mouth and eyes.

Delicious!

Face #65

i can haz low intrezt ratez?

In an attempt to attract more customers, an Aussie bank has decided to use some singing kittens as a lure. They’ve added in the ability to personalise it in a very basic way. It’s not good. It’s not funny. It’s just mildly cute.

If they think kittens are the way forward, maybe they should just have lolinated their site.

Thanks to Asi 

Teddy is down on his luck

I spotted this little dude in the street yesterday. I just wanted to put a can of Special Brew and a polystyrene cup with a few coins beside him.  Then finish off the image by pouring some vegetable cup-a-soup on the pavement. Poor chap.

The power of the people adds up to bugger all

eBay recently announced some changes that will have a pretty big impact on sellers. So the sellers revolted. They grouped together to boycot eBay and hit them where it hurts. But it clearly didn’t hurt enough. In fact, eBay say they didn’t even notice. And they’re not going to reverse the changes. Tough crap sellers. So the protesters have now put down their placards, ended their strike and turned for home, grumbling profanities under their digital breath.

The Man - 1. The People - 0.

You can read more about the sorry debacle here.

Is this the future of mobile?

As part of MoMA’s ‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘ exhibition in New York, Nokia is showing their concept gadget - Morph. This is apparently what mobile devices will be like in the future. You may notice that they only talk about technology and not how it connects you to anything in a practical or emotional way. Strap on your jet pack and enter the future here:

An interactive charticle of cinema box office takings

 

Following Iain’s recent post about Charticles, I thought I should post this lovely example showing box office takings from 1986-2007. As you roll over the ripples and folds of the graph, it reveals which lump represents which film. It’s so much quicker to get to interesting information than trawling through hundreds of words of turgid copy. I love it. Long live the charticle!

Social whinging

My fellow Poker, Igor, found this amazing site to report local problems around the UK. It’s called FixMyStreet.com and it’s a social haven for Daily Mail-types.

You simply enter your postcode, put a cross on the map where the problem is and start your bitter rant.

I just enjoyed looking through everyone else’s complaints. Here’s a sample:

Occasional nuisance from scientologists

The Scientologists have recently set up a stall on the street outside the Liverpool street station plaza on Bishopsgate. From what I can tell, these guys were operating a commercial operation without permission of either the council, railtrack or Broadgate estates, however they had located their stall on the ground where the three boundaries adjoin each other. Could you take a moment to ensure that local police know who these people are and what they are up to!

Combining two of my big loves

I love playing musical instruments. And I love food. This genius has combined them to create something truly special. My favourite is his broccoli ocarina. Yum!

Real world cartoons

Usually iron railings are topped by vicious looking spikes. Something that says “Oi! Piss off! This is my patch of ground and you’re not welcome.” But not these ones up at Hoxton Square. I’ve wandered past them lots of times and never noticed their cute little quirk until last week.

Face #64

Vandalising the vandalism

One of the things I love about the East End of London is the street art. But I’m not a great fan of Cartrain’s stuff. He’s just another stencilist without enough visual wit or conceptual skill to interest me. So I was amused to find someone making a small addition to his signature. It’s got all the wit that his work is lacking.

Sorry. What was that you said?

The Government has an ambient noise strategy apparently. Hopefully with Brian Eno at the helm. So to help everyone understand the impact that road traffic has on their life, it’s created a great big colour-coded noise map of London. It’s pretty impressive. You can see Poke in the map above. We live in the large white rectangle at the top right of the image.

This is just the first part of their measurement. They also have plans to cover other noise polluters like aircraft, neighbours, flatulence and pensioners.

I just wonder what they’re going to do with all this information. How will they actually make things easier on our ears? When they realise that it’s too expensive to make cars, trucks and jumbo jets quieter they’ll probably just issue us all with government regulation earplugs.

Research for research’s sake, I reckon.

Introducing the latest screen cleaning technology

Got unsightly marks on your monitor? Standard screen-cleaning wipes just not doing the trick?

Click the image above for a more intense clean.

I’d love this as a mac screensaver. Can anyone sort it out for me?

Thanks to Pas

We will find it, we will watch it

I was just telling my daughter about the wonderful thing that was Bagpuss. Just the sound of the theme tune makes me feel all warm inside. After a quick search, I found an entire episode of it on YouTube. So I thought I would share it as a weekend treat. Enjoy!

The internet has been Sweded

I think I may be a bit late on picking this up - but as part of the promotion for Be Kind, Rewind they decided to swede the internet. It’s a sweet idea but I would like to have seen it done as an engine that automatically cobbled a webpage together for you. Instead it’s asking the public to cobble together pages themselves. And as much as that’s using a community, it’s asking a lot from them. A good piece of fun nonetheless. Click the image above to visit the site.

Prophecy from a toilet in Soho

I found this prophetic message on the screen of an air freshener contraption last night. Sorry everyone. Whatever you wanted to do, you’re too late. Time’s up. Just sit down and calmly wait for the horsemen of the apocalypse to arrive. It was good while it lasted. Farewell.