This is a really nice visualisation of the battery charge on a phone, it also makes use of a motion sensor to tilt like liquid. The phone is the NTT Docomo N702iS (and apart from this actually looks a little standard IMO). It is a little unclear what else the motion sensor is used for, surely it cant just be for creating a spiffy background.
Cant wait for someone to make a quartz version of this for the Powerbook’s motion sensors…now if only my powerbook was new enough to have motion sensors.
This is a car advert for BMW from South Africa, as with many car ads it doesnt actually show the car, rather a set of kinetic sculptures by Theo Jansen.
I saw some of his strandbeest (as he calls them) in London a few weeks back, they truly are as amazing as they look.
Need I say more?
Recently I have been having all sorts of fun with WDS, the Wireless Distribution System. Basically it is a method of linking two (or more) wireless access points together wirelessly and allowing them to share the same network (or internet connection). This means that you can have a network with strong signal, without needing ethernet cable to be run around the house…true wireless bliss!
Unfortunately, as I have come to realise…WDS is like WiFi was in it’s early days; a complete pain in the ass! WDS is a little different on every device that comes with it, this means setting one up with two devices made by different people can be a nightmare. This is mainly because the devices are usually rather cryptic in terms of what needs to be done to get it working. Im sure it is probably explained very well in the manual…but seriously, what techie R(s)TFM?
My previous experience was with an apple airport network. With airports you simply goto the admin console on the main base station and select the remote stations you want to connect…then it goes of and reconfigures them all for you, great stuff! Almost idiot proof, although I still vaguely recall breaking a wireless network for an hour or so the first time I did it…
So, setting up my home wireless network which consists of a couple of belkin’s, a thompson router and a single airport express wouldn’t be so bad I thought…bleugh, was I wrong!
After many hours of screwing around in various admin pages, loosing connectivity, reseting and finally factory reseting, I have come up with a bunch of things which anyone setting up a WDS network (especially with the Belkin routers) should know.
This is the information that I wish I had read about three weeks ago…
I am hoping that this info becomes obsolete soon, wireless mesh networks are pretty handy when they work right but the setup really isn’t for the feint hearted.
As with many things, the technology is here…we just aren’t sure how to best present it yet.
hah, following on from my post at the weekend about wired’s sudden interest in artistic crop circles a new one has been made…in the style of a firefox logo! Will crop circles be the next big thing for advertising? or is this simply a bunch of nerds running around crushing corn? either way, it looks good from the sky…
This is the artwork of a British pavement artist called Julian Beever (yes and I bet he has heard them all before too).
He draws his pictures using an anamorphic stretch to create a fantastic and probably pretty odd effect from just one angle. This is better explained by looking at the correct angle then another angle.
See a gallery with some more images here
and see his own 90’s style website here
This is perhaps the best interface I have used for a connection speed tester, it actually makes it fun to check your internet connection speed…well…you know…if you are a geek 
Try it out here
I have kinda been avoiding IE7 for the previous betas simply due to the tight integration with Windows Update and all the nasty WGA stuff. But since it is due to be released ‘this summer’, and after having read this post about the IE7 release…I figured it was probably time to see actually how much work it will cause me to do and how much stuff it will not work with.
So, I fired up virtual pc (hah! you think I would install it on my main box?) and downloaded a copy of IE7 beta3 from here and ran the installer. First impressions, mmm…windows blue installer, next, next, ok, next, ‘the installer wants to validate this copy of windows’…whatever!, next, next, install…ahh, it would seem microsoft have decided to do away with the pesky progress indicator and replace it with a meaningless xp-startup style knightrider effect. I assume to show windows hasn’t crashed yet, but deliberately not to show how much longer the process will take. Is this because they don’t know how much stuff is going to be installed? perhaps it is only because the software is beta, they will wrap it up at the end…I hope. After quite some time of ‘essential updates’, ‘installing core components’ and whatnot we are finally at the restart your computer screen…
After restarting, I open it up by clicking the spiffy new icon and am immediately taken of and bounced around microsoft.com, msn.com etc…finally ending up at a configuration page allowing me to enable phishing validation and all sorts of other ‘protect me from the internet’ style options. The phishing validation seems to be something IE7 is quite proud of, it sends a url to microsoft which decides whether it is safe or not…hmm, not a wholly bad plan…but I am not sure about microsoft making the decision for me, I think I will leave it disabled for now.
Looking at the screen in-front of me, something is wrong…something is missing, ahh…the ‘file’, ‘edit’, ‘view’…menus are missing…oh no…they have just moved them from the expected top-left, to bottom-right…how handy. I guess most IE users probably don’t use them anyway. Luckily in the (bottom-right) Tools menu, I found it can be turned back on, except it appears below the address bar, instead of above it…now I have 2 ‘tools’ menus, with slightly different menu items inside…although the first few options are the same just to add a little more confusion. Someone didn’t quite think that one through too well…
hey look…tabs, thank god for that…they are all chunky and rounded. The interface for them is quite nice though, a new tab is signified by just a little bit of a tab to the right…which I like. The close button is a little ‘x’ on the tab itself, safari style, (and an essential extension for firefox). My only gripes are the rather naff looking blue sonar loading icon, but that is pretty inconsequential and that none of my favicons seems to be appearing, I guess they must have changed something, bah!. After opening a new tab, there is a nice microsoft explanation about what tabs are and why they are worth using, which I dare say most users will never remove. Also appearing when I open more than one tab is a ‘thumbnail’ button, sort of an expose-style page showing the contents of all your tabs…nice.
Windows Live appears to be the default search engine…and…hey, what a surprise…they offer no other packaged options for searching. Although it was pretty easy to install Google from the installation site, it would have been nice to have the option from the start…I guess Live search will be taking a slightly bigger slice of the search market in the future…I don’t have a massive problem with that, as my sculpture site is ranked #1 for ‘sculpture‘ as a search 
The rss integration is quite nice, I certainly think it will begin to make rss a little more accessible to the non-techie…also it is now called ‘feeds’ rather than rss, probably a good thing to make it look a little less geeky. When you press the feed icon, you are whisked off to a safari style feed template, certainly better than raw xml…
There are now Internet Explorer ‘add-ons’ to rival firefox’s extensions…I doubt they will have the same range of innovation in the short-term (probably not in the long-term either), at the moment they are things like: auto-complete forms, offline browsers and flash players…the sikly-sweet stock photography on these pages made me want to wretch too.
There is also a ‘zoom-in’, ‘zoom-out’ button in the bottom-right to scale the page, (images and all) opera-style, this is something firefox has needed for sometime. It means that I can view big pages (even big pages with liquid layouts) on my little 800×600 virtual pc screen…again, thats kinda nice…
All in all, IE7 (or Windows Internet Explorer as it is now dubbed) seems like a pretty good update to IE6. They have clearly given it quite a bit of thought as to the interface and targeted it specifically at the non-tech who (most-likely)isn’t totally clear on what a browser is, let alone why they should get a new one. It doesn’t really offer anything especially new over the current competition, however it does wrap up some of the nicer features in opera (page-scaling), firefox (tabs, extensions) and safari (rss skinning) into one browser, considering it has been over half-a-decade since the last iteration of IE one would expect this.
It seems to run a little slower than IE6, which is not surprising although it is a difficult call for me to make as I am running it through a virtual pc. As well as the fact that speed refinement is usually last to be done in the software dev process.
Most importantly, So far there are only the most minor changes which need to be done with regards to it’s page rendering engine…it doesn’t drastically screw-up any of my pages, at least no more than IE6, which I am a little surprised about.
Would I switch from Firefox to IE7? No chance in hell…I don’t like to be talked-down to in a browser, I like the non-fisher-price buttons in firefox and there is no way IE7 could have the range of techie extensions which I currently use…oh, and I like having the same browser (with sync’ed bookmarks and similar functionality) on PC and Mac. Are we expecting a mac version of IE7?..doubt it…
Would I recommend IE7 to a non-tech user over Firefox? Now thats a difficult question…It would very much depend on whether it was a non-tech user who wanted to learn, or whether it was a non-tech user who gets angry at having to learn…the former I would probably suggest they enjoy the benefits of firefox, and join the movement to which it stands. The latter would probably prefer a little more cotton-wool between them and the web, so IE7 would be the best-bet. This is a pretty significant change from what I would have said yesterday…the new IE has impressed me…
Sometime ago I was quite impressed with people taking long exposure photos while drawing stuff with light, kinda like writing your name with a sparkler. Now with the wonders of modern technology a bunch of innovative people have added another dimension to it…animation.
Lightpen animations here (warning: this is a huge page with many ‘mahoosive’ animated gifs, not one to load on a dialup)
Amazon.com shoehorned grocery shopping into their scripts, it really isnt too pretty as the scripts are obviosly meant for technology. Seeing the product features of milk is mildly entertaining, but what takes the buscuit is the reviews, in particular the Tuscon Whole Milk, now standing at 388 reviews…they are great ones too.
Although it took me a while to configure this jug to be compliant with the interface settings, after about half an hour, I was able to establish a connection. This is due to the lack of a user manual for the product.
If you are going to be using this product, and are a novice to the Milk field, I would suggest picking up “Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl. oz for Dummies”, or some other suitable introduction to the product.
I drank the entire 128 fl oz in one gulp, and for the next 43 minutes and twelve seconds I could divide by zero. The taste is okay, but what makes it worth the shipping is the ability it confers: the ability to defy the laws of mathmatics with impunity.
I used to drink regular store milk while reading these reviews but I had to stop. The other milk always burned when I blew it out my nose from laughing so hard. Thank you so much Tuscan! I can now read these reviews, drink your milk and avoid severe pain. What a deal.
You owe it to yourself to order a gallon today and catch up on these reviews pain free!
But really…I am actually having trouble thinking of what a serious review for milk would sound like…and it isn’t just milk which brings hilarity, check out the related product reviews too.
