24 January 2006




Snowboarders and skiers can now take their phone calls while careening down the mountainside. Motorola and Burton Snowboards have teamed up to making the Bluetooth-capable Audex jacket.


How-To: Build a practical HTPC

Aspinal of London

World of Warcraft at Level 60 Gameguide

MyStickies Goes Live
Sticky notes for the web! MyStickies let's you put sticky notes on a web page and loads them back up when you come back to the page. You can also tag your notes, change note colors, and manage all your notes from the free on-line account at mystickies.com. Future features include sharing notes with friends and creating public notes.

Tracing An Email
Hack: Cell phone + wireless router = Mobile hotspot
Huge List of Free Photoshop Brushes Resources. and more at devArt

Mobile phone users in Michigan can now bypass movie ticket lines by flashing an on-screen barcode. After purchasing "tickets" from the Movie Box Office (MBO) website, users are sent a weblink via SMS that displays a barcode. Theatre employees then scan the barcode just like any movie ticket. MBO claims that tickets can now be bought, "anytime, anywhere from the palm of your hand."
Forget Movie Tickets, Just Use Your Cellphone
A company called Mobile Box Office has launched a new service for WAP-enabled cell phone users in the US, allowing you to browse movie listing dates and times, select and pay for any movie, then use your phone as a ticket at the movie theater. So, after you pick your movie and buy your ticket with a secure credit card transaction, you’ll get an electronic bar-coded ticket on your phone that is scanned at the theater of your choice (oh, your screen has to be color, by the way). Very clever. And easy. Though right now, only Emagine Entertainment theaters are offering this service.
Mobile Phone Users Can Now Buy and Receive Movie Tickets Directly on Handhelds [Geekzone]

Something's Fishy Around Here
Some clever people are using their flat panel displays to play back a video loop depicting fish swimming around in a tank. Well now here's a twist on that idea, where you hang a fish tank on the wall...

Tim Berners-Lee is currently working for the rather awesomely named "Decentralized Information Group" "The Decentralized Information Group explores technical, institutional, and public policy questions necessary to advance the development of global, decentralized information environments."

And finally, we have the S88, a phone that boasts a 2-inch OLED screen as well as a 2-mp camera, Bluetooth and PictBridge for easy photo printing. That means you'll be able to hook it straight up to your photo printer to print images without involving a PC. There's also an MP3 player and an MPEG video recorder and player. A MicroSD card slot's in place, along with 16MB of internal memory. It's also apparently got 3D surround sound which I'm currently feeling a mite sceptical about, but hopefully I'll be proved wrong when we finally get to play with the samples later. Oh, and apparently the shape is "Squound" - square and round and the colour is purple which represents some other sort of union apparently (something about blue standing for quality and red standing for passion or somesuch). Nothing to do with it being BenQ's favoured colour of course. more

Sweden Raises The Renewable Energy Bar
January 24, 2006 09:17 AM - John Laumer, Philadelphia

Henrik_Montgomery_IBS_315Nobel.jpg

Sweden has the reputation among the world's most regulated industries as being annoying. The Swedish government has for decades argued for international policies that discourage the use of toxic and bioaccumulative materials, which fed into EU-wide interest in the "precautionary principle". And, as the picture symbolizes, the Nobel prize has been given for "green chemistry". Even Sweden's well known industries, Volvo for instance, seem to share the forward-looking culture. Year's ago Volvo produced internal "grey lists" of substances that should not be used during manufacture and eventually shared the same expectation with their suppliers. Now this is a worldwide trend. By the early 1990's it had become obvious that you could see a major environmental managment trend coming by watching what happens after Sweden. As soon as a US broadcaster says "In Sweden today..." you know it's coming to California,... and so on. So, it was with great interest that we read this recent headline: "Sweden Plans on Being the First Country in the World to Be Free From Oil in 2020". Need we say more? Of course.

Laughter paves the way for romance
Studies suggest humour signals big brain and good partner-potential. If love is blind, then maybe humour is the attention-grabber. That's the conclusion of two recent studies that confirm a long-standing stereotype of flirting: that women like joky men, while men like women who laugh at their jokes. The idea that funny people are attractive may seem obvious. But there have been very few scientific studies to examine whether or not this is true.

from plasticbag
Know Your Type - Starting points for Typographic Inspiration Very interesting primer in Typography that I don't entirely agree with, but has given me a different perspective on what I've been doing on plasticbag. Hopefully at some point soon an iterative redesign will appear

Philips VP5500 VoIP Cordless Videophone
The Philips VP5500 was designed to hold live video chats via a broadband connection. It operates very much like the everyday cordless phone, save for the fact that it supports live video calls as well. A built-in hands-free speaker system is included in case your hands are occupied. Being WiFi ready, this phone offers freedom to move anywhere you like during a conversation. The VP5500 runs on Linux and is currently available in Holland only, with plans for an European introduction later this year. Via Mobile Whack

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