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No new pin-up for 2007 - but that didn’t stop over a thousand people adding one of the earlier halloween cover images to each others social-networking sites (and in one case an ebay listing!).

It’s been a few weeks now, and everyone has had their spooky fun, so I taken the steps to replace it with an alternative message - in my own geeky game of trick or treat. Of course, I’d thought about spamvertising before, but decided this time to promote a good cause - cancer screening. It can’t be certain that old threads get read or noticed, so designed it with a strong use of (oldschool computing) colour and plenty of space around it and the competing area - whilst keeping the file-size extremely low (lots of hits = lots of bandwidth). Perhaps it is garish and attention seeking, and perhaps it might be noticed and maybe make a difference.

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Decided that living amongst huge piles of stuff probably isn’t the way forward. Stuff is good, and all that, but things are untify, and they need dusting. CD’s are mostly ugly, little plasticy things, nowhere near as enciting and evocative as vinyl. So what to do? well - back up all my music cds on a single hard drive for a start.

But what hard drive? there are countless wireless networkable media stations. Problem? they look like really quite ugly computer hardware. This ‘thing’ has to live in the living room.

Fortunately for me, LaCie asked Ora-Ïto to design a HDD, and they came up with the “Brick” - a hard disk which looks like an oversized lego brick. That’s a bright red, 500GB lego brick. The combination of over-powered hardware in toy-like housing just tickles me - 500GB? That’s roughly 125000 songs, or perhaps two Godspeedyou Black Emperor albums.

Plugged it in to the iBook G4 - and it just appears - exactly like any other HD, transfering files seemed reasonably quick, about the same speed as a usb thumbdrive. It does vibrate a little as the disk spins, and having it on a desk whilst hands were resting on a keyboard it was noticable. Not shown in the photograph is that it’s not USB powered and that it needs an external plug - there are probably sound engineering reasons for not having a motor-driven hard-drive running off of USB power but it does rather spoil the aesthetic, having a large power converter hanging off the back (it comes with its own UK and Europe plug - which is nice). It is fanless and almost silent - so perfect for media storage and playback.

And of course, bright red kinda goes with the bright red Smeg fridge and the Pro-Ject lemon yellow turntable.

News From Earth ^TM now with added clock.

Revisited News from Earth - added a brand-new analogue clock feature (get time, rotate object) and shifted the type to be more in-keeping with that as used on the spacecraft screens in 2001 - it’s still the best sci-fi inspired bbc rss newsfeed gathering widescreen desktop screensaver in the galaxy (download it).

Oh, and it’s still Windows only.

Viral marketing has finally ‘come of age’ or, perhaps, ‘gone senile’ with the Lost Game a game where simply getting other people to join the game is enough to win it - if it’s not a huge marketing scam, or new form of ARG, it very much should be.

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Christopher Tolkiens latest re-working of his fathers notes - The Children of Hurin has been published. One review, which turned into something of a critique of the whole of Tolkiens work from The Guardian crossed-over with some of the thoughts I’ve had regards Tollers work.

“…You may question the concept of a society that produces nothing except a slow decline over 6,000 years; but that’s the way Tolkien called it. There is a great, medieval bar over his imagination, beyond which nothing (except tobacco) is permitted. It is a world whose creator disapproves of every invention since, oh, let’s say, the harpsichord. (Actually, sometimes it even seems as if he’s not entirely happy with the invention of the wheel.)…”

The same can largely be said of arts and crafts polymath William Morris (to whome Tolkien directly owes a great deal more than Malory). For critics of Tolkien to be recounting the old Modernist tenants of progress through technology and evolution of man through science is not only disengenious in a post-industrial, post-modern culture, but misses the important …[more]