This weeks bookmarks start with one of those terrible geek moments of pure “finger hovering over ‘add to basket’ button but hell I’m gonna be in trouble at home” lust… The ridiculously cool looking pen-that-turns-sketches-into-digitalness was the cause of this lust. The fact that you can’t draw for toffee settles gently into the background as you imagine a career at Aardman stretching ahead of you. Well, it did me anyway…
From an even geekier perspective, this piece all about Google user testing of their algorithm was pretty fascinating. I managed to take it all seriously until I spotted who I’m sure was @danhilton at 2:03 – and then I got into thinking about the Turbo Encabulator and after that nothing quite seemed the same.
George Monbiot got his teeth into academic publishers on the Guardian blog, big-style – this is something that’s close to my heart having spent the last few years working in the education space. I remember only too well giving a talk about setting content free at an academic publishers conference and getting some pretty…robust…questions afterwards. The fact that I went on to spend the evening drinking champagne on a yacht hired by a well known academic publisher kind of highlighted Monbiot’s point. Still, great canapes…
Rather less seriously, 300 lines popped up on The Twitter. For those that are wondering about the technology used – it is actually magic, so don’t bother trying to work it out. Sockets, maybe. Or something.
A rather good piece on TechCrunch about the new (and remarkably horrible) Windows 8 Explorer did the rounds. The focus on how Apple is slowly pushing the entire notion of files and folders into the background while Microsoft is bringing it right up to the front was the most interesting part of this piece. Cloud working seems to very much favour the Apple way of thinking, but I’m guessing that from a user point of view the notion of files, folders, nesting and hierarchy are going to take a while to kill off.
In other Apple news an iPhone 5 was found, not found, maybe found, maybe a hoax, in a bar, not in a bar, lost by a member of Apple staff, not a member of Apple staff, a journalist… or something… ~yawn~
Finally, my friend Phil O’Brien sent me a link to this annotated graphic of that-now-famous Y-Combinator “Startup Ideas We’d Like To Fund” piece. It shows all the startup companies that now inhabit the spaces around those ideas. As Phil pointed out to me, there’s a biggish gap next to “Alternatives to Wikipedia”. If anyone fancies… no? Righto.
See you next week!
