“Kneel before Zod…ahem… Lord Asriel!!!!”

» BBC Press Release: 2.12.2002: BBC Radio 4 is to broadcast Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

First up – go and bookmark Mike Lee’s blog. Brad’s right… He makes cool things.

Secondly, Mike got a sidekick/danger hiptop, and reports back on his out-of-the-box experience with it here.

I’d love to play with a hiptop, and have been reading mike’s experience’s testing one avidly. I’m a little worried about the everything-is-on-the-server model it follows though: more at JWZ’s livejournal.

Anyway – I’d still like to play with one (if anyone from Danger is reading!) – I think Mike’s hit on something when he says [my bold]:

“This device attempts to break the paradigm of a mobile communicator by exploring a hybrid form factor that is 60% wireless Internet interface and 40% cellphone with a tiny digital camera and games thrown in for fun. The design gets a lot of things right, and provides a tantalizing catalyst for imagining what’s possible in the next version.”

Instead of brandwank-led “emotional” strategies that look like nothing more than the fevered child of Dragonball-Z, the daisy age, most-shamelessly, the Apple “think different” campaign, wouldn’t marketing wireless, always-on IM be an instantly-graspable, easily-communicable differentiator for troubled 3g operators?

Those marvellous people at BBC News have public-beta’d some RSS feeds for us all to enjoy:

BBC News Frontpage Index
http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/front_page/rss091.xml
BBC News Technology Index
http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/technology/rss091.xml
BBC News UK Index
http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/uk/rss091.xml
BBC News World Index
http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/world/rss091.xml

How green is your laptop? A thread on the awesome Barbelith Underground about sustainable computing musing about more viridian design alternatives has emerged:

“Machines are constructed to obsolescence – especially computers. That’s about as environmentally friendly as disposable batteries and plastic bags. It’s a lunacy.

So where are the computers built to last? The boxes made of something other than plastic, where modular components can be inserted, discarded, or added on as new levels of power become available?”

I have a very beautiful sliver of titanium, silicon, polycarbonate etc. on my desk that is the result of some fairly intensive and wasteful wittling down from enormous lumps of ore and rock.

At Doors6, John Thackara questioned precisely this myth that computing technology was ‘lightweight’ by asking the audience to imagine the ‘ecological rucksack’ that his powerbook actually represented – the raw materials discarded in order to manufacture the objects that power what we perceive to be lightweight, modern and immaterial. He paced the stage describing the 50ft by 50ft by 50ft cube of material that had to be winnowed down into the A4-sized plastic clam of his powerbook. Very powerful mental image.

» Barbelith Underground >> Laboratory >> Sustainable computers?

—
N.B. Doors7 earlybird registration closes tommorrow. I just registered. Andrew Otwell has posted an eloquent description of why it’s such a great event. I;d only add that, at the time of going to my first Doors I was left baffled and unmoved by a lot of it, and thought I may have wasted my money… only to find themes and ideas from the event percolating up through my thoughts and into my work for the rest of the year…

This is interesting. Ray Ozzie’s company, Groove, is working towards a ‘blog-policy’ which clarifies the rights and responsibilties of the companies employees when writing personal content on their weblogs.

» Ray Ozzie’s Weblog: Weblog policy

“Although violent crimes are committed in other parks around the city, Freeway Park is distinct in the sense that it’s hard to separate its crimes from its design.”

» TheStranger.com: TOPOGRAPHY OF TERROR by Charles Mudede
[thanks Alex!]

with tremendous synchronicity, from IBM’s “New Paradigms in Using Computers” event.

» Dan Gillmor’s eJournal: User Interface, User Experience — Where’s It Going?

My alignment-test results.

“Law: 0
Chaos: 6
Good: 4
Evil: 2
Your alignment: Chaotic Good

Lazyweb challenge of the day then, is hack up a dynamic/statist/big/little IA-alignment test…

🙂

» Planet AD&D: Alignment Test

I’ve sworn off talking about what I do, in place of just doing it; but can’t resist this. Clay, in his continuing metamorphosis toward being the James Randi of the web; has a new piece up debunking some digital-divide myths. In it he points to an interesting idea – Dynamists vs. Statists.

“Virginia Postrel, in her book “The Future and Its Enemies”, (ISBN: 0684862697) suggests that the old distinctions of right and left are now less important than a distinction between statists and dynamists. Statists are people who believe that the world either is or should be a controlled, predictable place. Dynamists, by contrast, see the world as a set of dynamic processes”

This is great! It give us all another axis of definition to argue about! I like it because it reminds me of alignment in D&D… I was always chaotic-good… and now I guess I’m a “Big-Dynamist” IA… Heheh.

» Shirky: Half the World

“Developed by self-confessed cricket nut Dr Paul Hawkins in collaboration with contract research and development outfit Roke Manor Research, Hawk-Eye uses vision processing technology to track the progress of a cricket ball as it is released from the bowler’s fingers and travels towards the batsman. Three high-speed cameras placed around the ground take around 450 images of the ball in flight. These are processed into a 3D graphical track of the ball, in an action that takes about 1.5 seconds. “Hawk-Eye can track the flight of a ball and position it to within a tolerance of 5mm anywhere on the field,” says Hawkins.

Designed principally as a tool to explain and aid lbw decisions, Hawk-Eye’s graphical representations have become a crucial part of the commentator’s arsenal. “Hawk-Eye can show where the ball was pitched, how the line deviated, whether the bowler put any swing on the ball, how high it bounced and what speed it was travelling at, as well as predicting if it would have hit the wicket in any lbw decision,” says Hawkins.”

» MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | All eyes are on the ball