Skyrails WOW!!!

Tweeting and Blogging

Today information is flowing about everything we have blogging, micro blogging, tweeting on every conceivable subject. And it not just humans that are in on the act plants are now using twitter to tell owners when to water them and my friends chickens even have their own blog. I quite fancy some of my own chickens but my cats are a little too keen on the idea.

Bike magic

Bike Kill festival of custom mod bike designs and hacks

He are topgun bike complete with Goose and Maveric riders. I particularly like what I hope if the girls fake mustache.

Zod kitchens, this is such a good spoof!

Two interesting series of underwater photos

This is such a terrific image I have no idea if it was done in photoshop of if someone managed to take this the good old fashioned way. Either way this is one of a number of very cool well thought out shots!

This image is a great shot and is so beautiful even when it has it's tounge in its cheek.

Homebrew eco vehicle race

Wayne Keith is headed to Las Vegas in an old Dodge pickup that runs on, of all things, wood. He gets about 1.6 mpp (that's miles per pound) and reckons he needs about 1,000 pounds to get there. No problem. He's carrying a chainsaw and a list of lumberyards along the way.

Such are the provisions you need for Escape from Berkeley, a madcap alt-fuel race that mashes up Mad Max and Cannonball Run with a touch of the Darpa Challenge and Burning Man. If the rules are simple -- no petroleum allowed, and fuel must be scavenged along the way -- the challenge is anything but.

"The basic premise is build a vehicle out of junk, we'll give you the equivalent of one gallon of gas and you have to drive 600 miles to Las Vegas. Oh, and you can't buy any fuel along the way," says Jim Mason, the artist and inventor behind the race. "That's a pretty heavy stone to carry."

full article here ...

Spaceship art ahoy

Great little forum site filled with peoples space ship imagenings

New website called moneydebt.net

Hi I have started to play about with Wordpress and moneydebt.net is the first site I have created so far. I need to do a better layout for it but its a start. Most of the articles so far are a merge of all my favorite money advice website articles but I will be putting up my own content too.

LHC destroys the world!

watch the world get destroyed by the LHC

Is it just me or does anyone else find it unlikely that the governments of the world would spend this much money on a science experiment with no militery application. I theorise that the LHC has turned Earth into an orbiting wepons platform for reasons as yet unknown!

Pedle power

Whilst still on a high from buying my dream mountain bike all hightech carbon lightweight sexyness that I thought is the ultimate pedle powered machine and then I go and spot the above at wiredl.com, now I want one of those too but I wont fit in my bike shed (inflated anyway)

Here is my new pedle powered machine.

All new favourite online webdev app is:

http://www.bgpatterns.com/

Iphone app site

This site - I use this - is like a digg for iphone apps and is usefull for keeping upto date on new releases user reviews and the best apps around for the iphone / touch

Wooden Sci-Fi Sculptures Make Great Geek Art

Wooden Sci-Fi Sculptures Make Great Geek Art Loving this I will have a dozen please!

Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Are you Worthy™ | contest

Some very impressive classic works of art reworked, impressed is I!

Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Are you Worthy™ | contest

Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Are you Worthy™ | contest

The One-Man Multiplayer World

Gallery: 'Love' — The One-Man Multiplayer World

WOw is all I can say about this pics in this article on a Multi player online world created by ONE man!! The landscape has been generated using procedure to avoid having to hand code everything. See the full article here

Impending Ouch!!!

Doooooom! on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

International Men Of Mystery

I have just bagged 3 new domains:

• InternationalMenOfMystery.com
• InternationalMenOfMystery.net
• InternationalMenOfMystery.org

Now I just need to come up with an idea to do with them, I am thinking of an travel site with a spin on adventurous sports and exotic travel destinations.

Beautiful Tag Cloud

I am not genrally a fan of tag clouds because they dont look good in genral and can often be confusing and detract from site content. Here is a tag clound that looks amazing though although the links are not clickable the typography is increadible and it just looks very cool.

Website Health Monitor Montastic

After discovering my server had gone down I started to wonder about monitoring software, at my day job we pay £580 per url to be monitored but the seemed RATHER STEEP to me. After a little digging on the web I came across Montastic It is a free service that monitors your sites for you. It is open source and so far I am very impressed, stick in a list of the urls you want monitoring, download a widget, and away you go. It has both Dashboard widgets for the mac or yahoo widgets for windows or a desktop app. It also has an rss feed for showing system downtimes and an email gets fired off when a site goes down.

This seems like a great tool, I will look into setting up an automatic forward to the support team if a site goes down to minimise downtime. With tools like this available for free enterprise class development and website hosting is becoming better and cheaper.

Big box, little box ,light box, multibox, shadow box, box box box

Just spotted a great article comparing different light box variants.A Lightbox is a combination of css and javascript used to display content within a webpage in a stylish way without having to leave the page (displaying content inline). Generally the background of the website fades away and a box displays the content to the user with an option to close the window an goback to the main webpage. This looks cool and draws the users attention to the content. The article is a matrix showing the underlying frameworks for each implementation, the file size and what it can handle. Looking through Multibox comes out on top with a great look, smooth animation and the most flexible features. Shadowbox also looks very good and is flexible in terms of content it can display although it does not say the size of the files involved with using it.

Photrade

I have just started using a new web service called Photrade, its a cross between Flickr and a stock image selling site.  You upload you photos organise them into galleries and then you can set pricing levels if you want to sell the prints. I think it is a great idea and shows promise, since it is in private beta at the moment it lacks the critical mass to get people trading and buying each others pictures.

You can see my gallery here and one option that you can see is missing is the ability to rotate your images since a few of mine or the wrong way around.

view my gallery here

Richard Bransons skydive

I was chatting at work about skydiving and it reminded me about this OLD clip of Richard Branson pulling the wrong cord, so that rather than opening his parachute it detaches away from him. When you are traveling towards Earth at 120mph and you find yourself not in a plane do not throw your parachute away!



Fortunately skydivers carry a reserve chute in case of accidents or the main chute failing. You would need to be very unlucky for both not to work but as demonstrated below you can survive. My favorite part is after falling 12,000 feet onto the ground his friend asks if he is okay to which her replies, NO! classic british understatement

It's my Birthday soon, how about a bot beer opener

SEO tools

Here is a great list of SEO tools to use to help tune your site, very useful!!!!

4 gigs in and working

Cool illustration Site

Here is a very impressive set of illustrations on this site. Clearly a very talented artist :




 

Power Boost

I have just ordered 4 gig of ram to put in my imac. It set me back £63 which seems a bargain for me but then thats computer kit for you, faster better and cheaper each year. I calculate that I now have 131072 times the RAM I use to have on my first computer the BBC micro B

SproutCore

Have you heard of SproutCore if you are a none developer that's okay why would you? If you are a developer and you've not heard, shame on you! The blogosphere is rife with people talking about it. Here are the main points of this framework below:

• RIA (Rich Internet Application) development framework
• Uses web standards (CSS, html, javascript) to produce applications rather than proprietary frameworks requiring separate installs in user computers.
• Provem tech, it has been used for over a year in apples .mac service for picture galleries and is being used across the board on the mobile me apple service that is due to be rolled out.
  
• Language agnostic - it can be used with any language supporting JSON but ties in with ruby out the box.

Since different internet devices support different frameworks if you want to design an application to work across the board you need to stick to the web standards. Using Sproutcore you can design a RIA which will be using web standards for across the board compatibility but also delivering a rich looking environment of proprietary technologies.

I suggest checking out the tutorial here and the sproutcore demo here and here

Other technologies to keep a watchful eye on are Objective-J, it is another JavaScript framework that mimics cocoa. The whole tech is under wraps at the moment with a 'Coming soon.' being displayed at the site but the thing that has everyone dribbling is that it was used to produce this fantastic looking presentation site called 280Slides

Mozilla Center, mac addicts

Here is a pic from arstechnica of the mozilla developers on the Firefox3 download day. Can anyone spot a none mac computer, no, neither can I.