UK gets scarier and scarier : Student arrested for downloading a book.

(I wonder when, at some point, the UK will become less free than Brazil - a country still recovering from a fascist military dictatorship.)

Gonna be checking these Brazilian multi-touch / projector aficionados too.

http://www.youtube.com/user/nannibrandao

http://www.youtube.com/user/tangivel

iTouchMedia some kind of Chinese multi-touch / projector manufacturer?

Wow! Stack of new post-Johnny Chung Lee webcam + light-pen inputs and interactive projectors.

Another project blog to watch.

Yeah, regular readers probably know that I've been obsessing about a new generation of alternative input devices for a while.

Interestingly they've become the only thing that matters for the console games market.

Meanwhile vision recognition research is helping to turn everything into an input device.

The world continues to become enchanted.

(Hat-tip Exmosis)

More brilliance from Google.

Forget that they've taken over the world technically.

Now they're grabbing a slice of the hip art / fashion / culture world too. Google is becoming a branded brand which as Naomi Klein warns is always a zero-sum game to see who controls the memetic territory. Google as cuter Abzorbaloff swallowing whatever artistic talent it touches?

Especially shrewd is that some artists are contributing widgets (clocks, calendars) just as if they were adding their signature to a designer Swatch. Google know what they're doing here. Maybe branded widgets are the next ring-tones? (Especially once they're on Orkut or anywhere else OpenSocial.)

Make no mistake, this is a shot across Apple's bows. Google want to be cool. They have the smarts, and therefore the money. Now they're gonna try to take the sex.

(Aside - not a million miles away from my "skin hotmail" suggestion for Microsoft, is it?)

Update : themes are pretty sophisticated actually.

Beautiful painted Russian house.

More designery stuff : game exhibition and playful cities.

Orgy of consumerist eye-candy and "coolness".

Damn, it's hard to remain unaffected.

Umair pushes back on a comment I wrote to him the other day.

I think this is one of the grand, defining debates of our times ... with the discovery of "the edge" or "peer" or the "bazaar" model of production, those of us who believe in it, still need to orient our political attitudes with respect to it.

Do we remain sceptics, believing that, whatever its virtues, peer is just a tool, hostage to the foibles of human choice? Or do we believe it is, if not a law, then at least a pattern of the system dynamics of economies, as near to a historical inevitability as we may hope for in our times?

Wow! Fafblog is back!!!!

Bow before Giblets!

Introduction to Health Commons

As I'm a well-known hater of America's freedoms, I have no hesitation in urging people to Vote Republican, this fall.

Sadly, I'm not quite such a hater of freedom in the UK, so not sure exactly who to suggest you vote for to avoid this. Liberal Democrat I guess.

Eustonism is two.

K-Punk on "Hauntology"

Multi-touch Missile Command!

On seeing this, perhaps it would be cool to have two players either end of a M$ Surface, firing hundreds of colourful missile trails at each other. Could be kind of beautiful.x

LiveScribe at JavaOne

hat-tip Darius ... couple of interesting links on food prices.

Oil prices driving people to public transport.

For people not watching my other blog. I'm currently rolling out a new software service on top of the Google Application Engine.


Mind Traffic Control, I've described as "task-flow management for the Twitter generation". To understand why, and find out more, you can follow on Smart Disorganized.

Hmmm ... oil at $200 dollars?

Scare story or the inevitable over-peak kicking in?

Don't know if this is true, but it's a great anti-copyright story if it is.

Indian Geeks stay home.

Hat-tip Rup3rt : economist podcast on alt.money.

(No idea if it's good or not, yet. But will give it a go soon.)

PS : note this is another classic OPTIMAES blog posting ... but OPTIMAES blog is still impounded by Google as an alleged spam-blog ... after 6 months. WTF?

(Why am I trusting these people with my cool GAE application I'm working on?)

Sad to see M$ wheedling their way into the OLPC.

Stallman responds.

Update : Following arguments on OLPC News

Diesel Tweetie

Bard and Soderqvist interviewed on French blog TV!

UN continues it's campaign against biofuels.

Aaahrrgrgh! BldgBlog ... every time I dare go near it it overwhelms me ...

Space as a Symphony of Turning off Sounds

Game / Space

OK ... time to go back to ignoring it again ...

And note that I'm stupidly adding Airship World to my blogroll ... another wannaread blog

Fools!

John Robb links a scary graph of the increase in the cost of rice over the last 5 years.

Just say No! to Boris.