Depleting the World’s Natural Resources with Style
houseblinger.com. A site showcasing the work of those home owners who, every year, like to put strain on the national grid by adorning their houses with as many tacky lights as possible.
houseblinger.com. A site showcasing the work of those home owners who, every year, like to put strain on the national grid by adorning their houses with as many tacky lights as possible.
Oblique. A dashboard version of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, the set of simple statements designed to clear a creative block.
Albert Hubo shakes hands with George W. Bush. Poor Einstein.
Camino 1.0 Beta 1. Camino is still my favourite Mac browser.
Newcastle New Media. A site for the growing independent web design community in and around Newcastle Upon Tyne.
BBC News Online > Users flood ‘Most Wanted’ website. That’ll be because of the earlier BBC News item that linked to it. Must be a slow news day as the Beeb are resorting to making their own news stories.
Fixed the link to Albert Hubo
A couple of interesting new Google tools:
Save the Cameo Cinema. Some people want to convert this historic Edinburgh cinema into a crap Bar.
Engineers in South Korea have come up with a novel way to out-do Honda, Toyota and Sony by producing a bipedal robot called Albert Hubo, which, rather unnervingly, has Albert Einstein’s noggin attached to it. All they need to do now is drop in a positronic Einstein brain and we have the world’s most intelligent humanoid robot; they expect to do this sometime next week.
Did Apple Sabotage the ROKR?. The cynic in me says that the answer is probably ‘yes’.
National Portrait Gallery Photography Collection. This is really a bookmark to self.
There’s an unofficial RSS Feed for the Red Meat comic strip.
Anything you can do, I can do better…. Yahoo launches Maps (Beta).
esniper is a handy Perl script that automatically snipes ebay auctions for you. I’ve used it a few times and it works a treat. Should ‘just work’ on Mac and Linux.
Last week, I visited Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, home of William Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the negative/positive photographic process. I stood next to the window that became the subject of the first photographic negative, thinking that I should maybe take a picture of it but then remembering that I couldn’t because, strangely, photography wasn’t allowed in the house. One of the rooms contained, amongst the huge oil paintings adorning the walls, a framed history of the owners of the abbey since the 16th Century; it read ‘Talbot’ pretty much all the way along. Photography wasn’t the result hours of trial and error by the hard working hobbiest spending money they didn’t have. It was achieved by the society’s upper crust; those who had the time, the money, the acumen to refine the processes that others were working on before them. The photographic image had existed for a few decades before Talbot invented the negative, and the fact that he was the first is questioned by some. Furthermore, Talbot wasn’t exactly willing to set his discoveries free to the public; if you wanted to use his ‘Calotype’ process, you had to pay him up to £300 a year for the privilege.
Many fear the loss of traditional photographic processes and techniques; part of me does too. But then I see the digital process (capture and subsequent presentation using tools like Flickr) as the next step in the democratisation of photography that has been taking place over the last 100 years.
