In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.
Hans Nyberg’s latest ‘QTVR of the day‘ is a suitably hyper-real spherical encounter with a public hearing of the 9-11 Commission in NYC, assembled by Jook Leung. These images are very unsettling. There’s something about this totally immersive (and totally mute) imagery that can make even a snapshot of bureaucrats at work strange and enthralling.
(don’t even try to load this page in Mozilla on OS X – your machine will lock!)
Google hacksI blogged Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest’s Google Hacks at the weekend and decided it was important enough to write up properly for ‘Bowbrick at Large‘ at Guardian Unlimited.
The ingenuity of British manufacturing industry continues to impress, even if its timing doesn’t. The FT reports on an upmarket extension to the defiantly trashy Pot Noodle range from Unilever – and I mean upmarket. We’re talking Wild Scottish Salmon, Kobe Beef, Caspian Caviar and Tuscan truffles. Apart from being a bit weird, this is textbook product innovation and a real sign of vitality in the sector but would you launch a new convenience food in the middle of a war? (The Confectionery Early Warning boys over at Snackspot have already issued their verdict, naturally).
Update: of course, I clocked this one as an April fool, no problem. Honest. To be really honest, I’d read the FT front to back and satisfied myself that there were no April Fool jokes in it. I think I’d convinced myself it must be something to do with the war…
Stuart Hughes is a BBC journalist keeping a real weblog from somewhere in Northern Iraq. He’s posting words, pictures and some audio and, amazingly, he has time to surf the web (how does he do that? Via his satphone? That’s where my license fee is going, then…) so it’s from Stuart that I got this link to a Slate article that answers my questions from the other day about these videophone gadgets. I learn, for instance, that they achieve the 128Kb necessary for a reasonable picture by lashing together two satphone lines.