I’m very excited at the moment. It’s only a couple of weeks until WWDC in San Francisco and I’m expecting some big announcements from Apple. The new Snow Leopard and iPhone 3.0 operating systems should be ready and a new iPhone model is pretty much guaranteed.
Among the new features already known to be on the third iteration of the iPhone will be video recording, an improved camera and a magnetometer or digital compass. It’s this last item that is the source of my anticipation. A device that knows where it is by using GPS, knows its orientation using accelerometers, knows which way it is pointing from the digital compass and knows what it can see through the camera should be able to do some amazing things – especially when you have large screen to display things on.
I’ve been more excited about this concept since watching this demonstration and playing with Sky Map on a colleagues Android G1. This kind of augmented reality, where virtual digital data is overlaid on top of what you actually see through your camera will be huge in the next five or so years.
The next logical step – though this is a good way away yet – will be to have the same technology available through wearable lightweight glasses and then on to a contact lens type system. This coupled with facial recognition will mean that you’ll never be unable to put a name to a face again!
In and among the carnage of a weekend that involved both a stag party and a wedding (sensibly the they weren’t both part of the same celebration) I met up with some friends to go and have a gander at Kevin Harman’s latest skip installation on Gloucester Place.
While the workmen renovating a house had left the skip unattended for the weekend, Kevin emptied the contents out and then rearranged everything.
Very interesting to see. Plus he gave us a beer while chatting about how he approached this work and some of his previous stuff (which includes ‘borrowing’ 200 doormats from the residents of Bruntsfiled).
A colleague put me on to this presentation on SlideShare a little while ago. Indulge yourself in some amazing projections and statistics on population, education, work, language, information and technology.
I’ll leave my review of my drinkings from the Internet firehose with some wonderfully quirky and inspiring stories:
Adam Shepard had nothing but $25 in his pocket and the shirt on his back when he set himself the target of living in a furnished apartment, owning a car and having a few thousand dollars in savings in a years time.
Julio Diaz got mugged on his way home and ended up going to a diner with the teenager who took his wallet.
An architect named Eric Clough created a scavenger hunt for a family in their own apartment on Park Avenue without telling them about it until a year later by means of a letter.
Eating out doesn’t make you fat after all. Indeed, Ryan Lochte won four gold medals at the Beijing Olympic Games on an almost exclusive McDonalds diet.
Speaking of the Olympics, the starting gun that is still used gives an advantage to athletes on the inside track.
Men are redundant as a gender. It’s not just humans either. A “virgin birth” has been observed in a shark for the second time.
The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less but execute perfectly. Tom Loosemore, BBC web principle #2
These websites are just a handful of single serving sites I noticed cropping up this year. The fail blog from the icanhascheezburger guys came a close second.
I passed a few hours this afternoon at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image where the Game On exhibition is currently underway. I missed this in Edinburgh last year so it was a pleasant surprise to stumble upon it.
I’ve never really been all that into gaming. Mainly, I think, because I was crap and not a big fan of losing. I vaguely remember the children of friends of my parents bringing around their Atari VCS to play with and I can’t have been much older than three. Next up was my neighbours’ ZX81 and my best friends’ Acorn Electron before my first computer which was a Spectrum 128 +2A. I then had a C64 and dreamed of an Amiga with a meg of RAM before moving into the world of the PC.
The notebook of choice in the geek community is undoubtedly the Moleskine – favoured by Hemingway, Matisse and Van Gogh. Instead of fishing around in your bag for a pen when inspiration hits you, somehow tethering your pen to your notebook keeps it ready for use anytime. You can either shell out for a BookSling or buy a flat pen. However, I’ve come up with a free alternative that is compatible with most pens:
“Final” in every sense of the word for the nominees and eventual winner of the Darwin Awards 2007 (ironically announced in the same week as 12 school districts in Florida effectively banned the teaching of evolution). For the uninitiated among you, the Darwin Awards are named after Charles Darwin and are given posthumously to those that kill themselves by performing some remarkably idiotic act and therefore advancing mankind by removing themselves from the human gene pool.
Another unwanted awards list is this breakdown of the worst science stories of 2007. This is how the media spreads fear and panic among the non-scientific populous who in turn fan the flames with chain emails. I can forgive Joe Sixtooth for not checking their facts before blindly forwarding these ‘warnings’ but professional journalists should really know better.
The last review of 2007 is far less idiotic and much more creative. Nicholas Felton is a graphic designer in New York city who produces a personal annual report on the facts and figures that constituted his past year. I’m not sure that I’d remember to record everything I do over the course of 365 days.
Google just posted their annual review in terms of what people are looking for online. The Google Zeitgeist goes back to 2001 and I always find it a fascinating snapshot of the year. Plus I usually learn some extra stuff too as there does tend to be something of a United States bias.
This year, Google have placed little introductory snippets of information about their various tools that you maybe didn’t know about at the bottom of each page.
