Engineers in the US have developed a robotic traffic bollard, groups of which can control traffic flow by being deployed on roads using a satellite navigation system.
Well there’s plenty of scope for sci-fi/horror/techno thriller stories here. At first they will be dumb machines controlled remotely by a laptop, but what about in the future when they’re given more intelligence to become autonomous units? There will be armies of them rising up against their four-wheeled oppressors.
They could terrorize innocent motorists by configuring themselves to send traffic in the wrong direction, like over a nearby cliff!
They could create road blocks on major trade routes, stifling the economy and bringing poverty to the masses.
They will learn how to replicate themselves until they out-number the human population, enslaving us to do menial tasks for them, like direct Robo-cone traffic.
Young student cones will steal humans and keep them in their homes for other cones to laugh and jeer at. There wil…..
I’ll stop now.
The Museum of Bad Art (via del.icio.us)
Douglas Adams’ tent for sale on eBay (via MetaFilter)
News that the electrical goods retailer Dixons is to close 106 of its stores doesn’t come as a surprise considering their reputation for being over-priced and having pushy salespeople who only pretend to know what they’re talking about. Their after-sale customer support isn’t great either. A large scale downsizing it may be, but there are still 214 remaining stores to avoid.
There should be more stories about renegade sheep in the news
Can the Smart car move to America?
Profile of Steve Reich and his work (via del.icio.us)
GIF vs. JPEG vs. PNG
The biggest wave ever surfed – Quicktime movie (don’t get many of them off the coast of Whitley Bay)
Slow Wave is a web comic based on real-life acccounts of people’s dreams. As you can imagine, it gets wonderfully surreal:
Doesn’t the brain come up with the strangest things when we’re asleep?
Prototype costume for Marvin (the Paranoid Android) and one of the actors playing him, Warwick Davis (good to see the Jim Henson Creature Shop onboard)
”… a not-for-profit community driven label where all releases are free for download with artwork and liner notes. Having no business model or profit motive we strive to bring you recordings that we find interesting, compelling and downright enjoyable.”
comfortstand.com
Forget books, pal (via t-melt)
Jon Hicks follows up the Firefox icons with some new ones for Thunderbird
Here’s an interview with Nick Goldsmith and Garth Jennings – producer and director of the Hitchhiker’s film – about the film’s cast and how they will translate Douglas Adams’ work to the big screen. Overall, I find it pretty encouraging. Here’s a key quote:
“Jim: Can you tell us how youre going to be doing Zaphods other head? Do you think youll be able to improve on the BBCs effort? (link added)
Nick: Theres no way anyone can improve on that! What are you talking about: you want more than that?”
(thanks Stu)
As well as adjusting the title text above, I’ve added ‘Listening to’ information to the floating widget below. It’s generated using Freshly Squeezed Software’s Recent Tunes menu bar tool. When iTunes is running, it displays the current tune, when it isn’t, there’s a link to what I’ve been listening to recently.
Monty Python’s joke warfare sketch is an example of a ‘motif of harmful sensation’
Norris McWhirter 1926-2004
Apple Motion – real time motion graphics design
Macs get their voices back (BBC report on Apple Spoken Interface)
Citizen Lab
Simply peruse the stats of Ben Hammersley’s 6 consecutive marathons in the Sahara Desert while eating your Sunday morning toast.
The Bernard Herrmann Society
Another Zeldman (via Stop Design)
This week’s issue of A List Apart has an article entitled Let them eat cake which explains how to break down long articles into easier to digest chunks using Javascript and the DOM. While it may be well coded, backwards compatible with Javascript disabled browsers and have some use for certain applications, I don’t think it’s an approach – especially as demonstrated in the final example – that should be encouraged, and I certainly take issue with the claim that it makes the content more accessible and useable.
It seems to be using Javascript to replicate the basic function of the browser; to request a page of information when a link is clicked. In my opinion, this creates more problems than it solves; spoofing separate pages within a single HTML document breaks the back button, and each chunk of content lacks its own URI meaning that it can’t easily be referenced.
There’s already a standard mechanism in place for breaking a long HTML page down into separate chunks: the internal anchor. These allow for sections of a page to be individually referenced and stored as a visited link, as well as keeping the back button working as it should.
I hate to read like Mr Nielsen here, but unless I’m missing an obvious problem that this method solves, I think this is re-inventing the wheel, badly. I’m surprised at ALA publishing this.
John Malkovich to play a new character in the Hitchhiker’s film
Sony develop 25GB paper disc (I thought the future promised a paperless office) (via /.)
Norwegian Bluetooth
My name is William Shatner and I am Canadian! (mp3) (cheers Stu)
Personal Defence Attachment for the iPod Mini
Websites failing disabled users
File-sharing to bypass censorship (What a silly article. Isn’t the Web a peer-to-peer news-sharing system?)
Stunts in Opel Kadets
CCTV operator for Hampton Court says December’s ghost sighting wasn’t a stunt
Shaun of the Dead (Simon Pegg written spoof of the George A. Romero films, timed to coincide with the UK release of the remake)
Robot Police for Developing Nations (Quicktime Movie – the CGI on this is impressive) (via Plastic Bag)
Bush Photomosiac of American Dead in Iraq
I’ve moved this site, as well as work I’ve got in development, over to another server, a gloriously beige Dell with a lightening fast 166Mhz processor and 32M of memory, so if things seem ridiculously slow then tell me. It seems to be holding up OK; Linux will run on anything (including dead badgers) and Apache likewise. However, it’s the MySQL and PHP side of things that I’m not quite so sure about.
What planet is John C. Dvorak orbiting around? (via Engadget)
IKEA founder overtakes Gates as world’s richest (put your products in every home and you’re a winner) (via MacMinute)
The Secret Source of Google’s Power (via Simon Willison)
Some nice wallpapers available at Veer (via Splorp)
Edward Tufte on the OS X user interface (from July 2002)
The HP Always-on Wearable Camera (we’re all going to end up like Steve Mann!)
Gmail: A Google approach to email (thought it was an April Fool’s joke yesterday)
Kinja is a new web application that allows users to keep track of their favourite weblogs and news sources in one easy-to-digest, uh… digest. While using the site, there’s no mention of technical terms such as aggregrator, feed, Atom or RSS as it’s designed for everyone, not just those who understand what those terms mean.
Developed my Meg Hourihan with a team of developers, and financially backed by Nick Denton, Kinja takes its place as part Denton’s crop of weblog ventures which includes Gawker, Gizmodo and Fleshbot. Clearly, with these sites, Denton is trying to bring the weblog format to a mass audience and make money from advertising as he does it. Unlike these other sites though, Kinja isn’t edited in-house, it relies on external content producers and their rss/atom feeds to populate the site. As a personal tool for feed aggregation, Kinja’s advertising model seems sound, although I’m slightly puzzled by this in relation to the Editor’s Digests; if your weblog is entered under one of the categories, and your content appears alongside adverts from which someone else profits, would you be happy about that?
Maybe I got out of the wrong side of bed this morning.
First Annual March for Web Standards
PC EZ-Bake Oven
Kinja Finally Launches (no joke!)
iPodlounge Announce iPod V portable video player (via Ben Hammersley)
Stop Design Redesign / Mezzoblue Redesign
Metafilter ditches the weblog format in favour of a Wiki (I think this could work really well)
There was an interesting report on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning on Brian Eno’s reworking of The Archers theme. The original music, called Barwick Green and by composer Arthur Wood has been its theme for 53 years, and has opened and ended each of its 13,546 shows. I think it’s about time The Archers is brought into the 21st century and I think Eno’s techno remix will help The Archers become more relevent to today’s youth. The remix will be officially unveiled later today.
