JOY!

Who remembers that joyus wonderous time back in the 90's when all we did was play Sensible Soccer?



Well here is some fantastic news.... It's back!!!

Yes... we can play the new version of the most fun computer representation of that game too many people worship in time for the world cup. Rock on!

Comments?

Capla Kesting's latest sculpture is going to raise a few eyebrows... what do you think?



"Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston"

Windows XP on Intel iMac

Windows XP on Intel iMac: confirmed

Love it. Now that's the kind of Dual Boot we like.

Thinking out loud

I was thinking the other night…

What about a media player visualiser that played video clips based on tags? i.e, you tag your music collection and video clip collection (and tags for the same music/video could be pulled from eg. pandora.com or some other net repository), then a tag cloud theasaurus - like a recommendation type psuedo tag relationship type engine makes best guesses on types of tags that are related then plays appropriate video clips according the music type. It could also have transitions related to tags and also beat/waveform analysers that generate tags and kick off transitions based on the waveform analysis of the music currently being played and then feed that back into the engine that is choosing the tags. You could also make it adaptive and learning. Could be a cool use of BBC creative archive content... I dunno, if I had a few spare weeks I'd probably try and make a prototype...

Help me LazyWeb!

Fuel for my fire

More iPod Stupidity

I know I ranted yesterday, but I wanted to post this link, which only serves to reinforce my views on Apples ridiculous marketing.

In the article they compare the iPod HiFi to a toaster, fax machine and printer, suggesting that you should have one in place of these items. There is also a picture of the speaker unit on a shelf (copied below) illustrating further still how useless the design is.


Just read it and giggle at such literary gems as this

Now you’re cooking
Space is of the essence in any true gourmand’s kitchen. But even if you’re just whipping up a bowl of sugar puffs, you can munch along to music...

Style over content

iPod HiFi

This is the STUPIDEST idea I have ever seen. iPods are not Hi Fidelity by their very nature - they play MP3s, a crippled audio format desigfned to mask out frequencies that most people can't really discern in order to save disk space and make audio portable. But the point is that on tiny little ear-buds that is ok, becuase their dynamic range and sound recreation is pretty, well, shit.

If you plug even a semi pro pair of headphones into an iPod you'll start to hear it's limitations. Not to mention the fact that it will drain power and fall over because the internal headphone amp is 32ohm rated, and most pro cans are at least 64ohms. (Ohms is a measure of resistance, the unit has to work harder to drive the sound through, but the benefits are a greater dynamic range and faithful recreation of sound).

So you might try pluggin loudspeakers into an iPod, or running it through another amp and out through a HiFi. You'll soon hear the sound quality embarrased by decent kit. So now we have the monstrosity above. They calim it is reinventing HiFi. That's a marketing claim and totally unfounded, I bet ShinyShiny will come in their iPod white panties at the sight of it, but I think it's ugly. A rack of speakers is so 1980. And then, and this is the crux, WHY IS THE iPOD DOCK ON THE TOP OF THE UNIT?

Seriously - how the hell are you gonna put that on a bookshelf? Or under the TV? How are you going to arrange you life around the most amazing stupid design idea in the history of everything? Donald Norman would have a fit.Did no-one in the design room suggest that maybe it'd be really easy to snap off? That it actually won't fit in an Ikea home becuase even if you got it into a useful space you would still need manouevering space above it to plug the fiddly white brick in?

Stupid Stupid Stupid! and so design-over-content I cannot even fathom what they are going to come up with next. iPoid HiFi is an oxymoron and a design nightmare.

Drug Trial Shock: Just a thought

The poor guys after a quick buck involved in the Failed Drug Trial have my sympathies, as do their friends and family.

But a quick bit of lateral thinking got me wondering how quickly the company involved in adminstering the drug will be on the bankroll of military research? A drug that causes a victim's head to balloon and suffer multiple organ failure within minutes of administration? Holy grail for the mad military giants of this world?

Scary thought, huh?

Bucket gob causes grazed knees

Do people with big chins grow beards to hide their big chin? Don't they realise it's making it worse? Nothing like a furry face apendage to weird you out in the morning.

My knees hurt. I fell down the stairs at the train station this morning. I was walking along and got distracted (actally, fascinated) by this fat woman I keep seeing on the tube. She was fisting a pastry into her whale gullet and I was so engrossed I promptly missed the first step.

MC Hammer Blog

STOP! Hammer time!

As a colleague put it... it's why the internet was invented: to eavesdrop on the lives of others.

Everyone's a voyeur...