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.
Sustainability is everywhere these days - but what about on the web?
It won’t come as a shock to any thinking person - but on a monitor dark colours tend to use less energy than light ones - so light backgrounds on websites ect. are actually causing us to use more energy than we need to. Energy Star show the wattage used for several colours. The energy use difference is much lower on LCD monitors, but darker is still more efficient, and that’s why Nightsoil has gone dark.
Of course the web is a network and The Sustainable Web is not just about the end-users energy …[more]
News from Earth transforms your boring old monitor into a randomly colour changing live news broadcast, inspired by the on-board spaceship screens from 2001: a space odyssey and it’s (under-rated) sequel 2010: the year we make contact - complete with mysterious TLAs.
Download News from Earth screensaver (PC only I’m afraid).
Christopher Tolkiens latest re-working of his fathers notes - The Children of Hurin
“…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]
The One Laptop Per Child project is an incredible idea. Design and build a laptop for under $100, and send it out to the third world. I’ve been intermittently following the project for a few years. As of now, the hardware has been made, and beta units of the XO are being shipped.
It’s incredibly interesting from a design perspecitve - from the ruggedisation (no HDD!), mesh networking to the user interface.