A little soapbox for me to stand on and rant from.
The BBC has an article on the peace sign, which recently turned 50 years old.
What was really interesting was its origins, apparently it was created as a symbol for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the the 1950s. The designer (Gerald Holtom) decided to combine the semaphore symbols for N (for Nuclear) and D (for Disarmament) to form one of the most widely recognised protest symbols.
Very nice, using “military” symbols to form a anti-war sign :)
Found this very nice “design” site called NOTCOT.org. Its tag line is ideas+aesthetics+amusement and its interesting picture oriented layout and content certainly does just that.
It covers art, architecture, websites, advertising and the like, I always seem to be able to find something of interest here.
For example today’s links includes:
Pi10k – This experiment attempts to convert the first 10,000 digits of pi into a musical sequence. you pick the scale or ten notes of your choice and watch it go.
Stop motion Gmail – To promote in Russia Gmail, Google along with the agency Saatchi & Saatchi, manually created a giant gmail interface in stop motion.
Oslo Opera House – Construction progress of the new Oslo Opera House by Snoetta Architects. The project is based on slopes, converting the roof in a massive public space.
Staircase bookcase – A cool staircase combined with a bookcase design for a small apartment.
Check it out.
Grabaseat now has an official blog.
The intro text reads:
“Welcome to the official grabaseat blog. Here you will find behind-the-scenes information and great ‘insider’ tips for grabaseat.”
Should be interesting to see what info lands up there. Check it out at http://grabaseatnz.blogspot.com/
I’m forever running out of books to read and never quite make it to the library so my interest was piqued when my friend Tim told me about a website you could download free sci-fi from.
I was thrilled when I visited the site and found that the books were from authors I knew because to be honest, many free books are not really that good.
The Baen Free Library is fantastic, it contains a large number of free books from the Baen catalog. The site is a little hard to navigate so this link will take you straight to the download pages (hosted on another site).
I would highly recommend:
The books come in a variety of formats, HTML, RTF etc. I have found that downloading the RTF format and then using OpenOffice to generate a PDF works really well.
If you are not using OpenOffice then download PDFCreator and you will be able to generate a PDF from Word by printing to the PDFCreator “printer” that the software installs…
Apart from the free books, you can also purchase other books in the Baen catalog from the site and get them in electronic form, quite a bit cheaper then buying the paperbacks.
The following is the currently list of authors with free books:
Happy reading…
I borrowed a water blaster from my in-laws to clean off a fence, figured it would be messy and tedious but truth be told I love it.
Just point and shoot and all the dirt and grime just vaporise, it is endless fun (even if it is wet and messy).
Found an awful lot of interesting spiders and bugs too. Even some really big (and ugly) wetas, had to be careful not to vaporise them as they are protected, but the spiders were fair game (I don’t like spiders).
It is also very effective, just check out this picture:
The bit on the right has been freshly water blastered, the bit on the left is still to be done.
Each fence section took about 20 minutes to complete and I’m giving the wood a few days to dry out before I stain the fence. We will see how it goes.
Now I’m eyeing up what else I can blast, I have a couple of other fences, a concrete driveway and the house itself…. think I’m going to enjoy myself !
So I have a new site up and running. Its called whatistheinternet.info
The site is an easy to use introduction to what the Internet is and how it works. It will have a strong focus on security and safe surfing as well.
Currently its very basic but check it out anyway.
Summer seems to finally here and whilst waiting for Portal to finish downloading, I thought I’d update my blog’s theme.
Turns out there are tons out there but not that many that look good and do a “fluid” layout well. I was tempted to start fresh and build my own using these free blank templates but decided I was just too lazy.
In the end I went with this theme called Skittish. Works out of the box and I’ve only had to do some minor tweaks.
Portal is still only at 69% (sigh) something really wrong with Steam at the moment… think I’ll go sit in the sun.
Not quite what the licensing department had in mind when they decided to allow customized plates :)
BOL0X belongs to my work mate, Dave…
Very very cool.
We won the e-Commerce category (the ISIS booking engine), the experimental category (for How Far Can I Go) and “The Best of The Best !” award for the How Far Can I Go application.
Checkout the TUANZ site for more info and the other winners.
So I decided (after much pressure from my workmates) to do Movember again. Which if you don’t know “is a moustache growing charity event held during November each year.
At the start of Movember guys register with a clean shaven face. The Movember participants known as Mo Bros then have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their moustache and along the way raiseas much money and awareness about male health issues, in particular prostate cancer as possible.“
Quite a shock to to be bald faced again. I can really feel every breeze !
So please sponsor me !
Ah yes forgot to mention if you have Facebook I have a created a Mo Bro Info application that lets you track the progress of a Mo Bro. Just visit http://apps.facebook.com/mobroinfo/ and enter in your (or someone’s) Movember registration details.
My registration number is 111719 and my country is New Zealand, if you want to track my progress ($80 so far !)