Links & notes for this month

• Mock Duck - "a delicious assortment of thrift-store cookbooks". If you've ever wondered how, following the apocalypse, you will pull off a swanky 60s-style dinner party with only tinned food, you could do better than some of this lot. You might get bored of luncheon meat and baked beans, no matter how cleverly disguised, though... |
• More Google Maps hackery: Blockies allows users to tag photos by location, but even better, it then displays the locations of any photos tagged appropriately on this page, which hacks Google Maps to great effect. I'm kind of in love with Blockies, conceptually, and really want a London version... (I mentioned Blockies a few days ago). |
• Stonking huge quotation from Steven Berlin Johnson (and his new book, Everything Good Is Bad For You in his post on what might have happened had videogames come before books: "While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children.". |
• A pair of interesting screenwriting links, today. First, the weblog of John August, who wrote Go, Charlie's Angels, and Big Fish. From there I found the site for celtx, a free cross-platform screenwriting program based upon (of all things) Firefox. celtx is pretty good - a bit clunky and it takes a while to get used to, but not half bad. John August is great; lots of interesting posts and he really likes to engage with his readers. |
• McSweeney's lists: Physical theories as women. Delightful, and oh so true. "4. General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons". |
• Five simple steps to better typography - a really interesting and well presented guide by Mark Boulton. It manages to explain concepts founded in print but with an eye to how they may work online. Useful stuff, a bookmark to come back to. |
• Phatduck - the blog of an American chef on a two month stage at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck - recently voted #1 restaurant in the world in the Restaurant magazine awards. It's fabulous; really personal, really interesting, and oh the food. Do subscribe. |
• Blockies lets you annotate the planet even more than you have done already. You take a photo on your cameraphone, put a sticker with a unique code where you took the pic, send it to blockies.com with the code appended in a message. Now anyone passing just needs to message blockies, GET your unique code... and they get the photo. "Photo graffiti", they call it. Now, to batch upload to both Blockies and Flickr... [via We make money not art] |
• Yep, it's live: Google Maps UK. Same features as the US version but without the creepy satellite photos (yet). Pretty accurate, good route-finding (although it automatically assumes A-roads are faster than anything else, which is not the case in London), and all the business data is taken from Yell so it's got lots of great stuff in. Like, for instance, all the Indian restaurants near me. The top link, Indigo, I can strongly recommend. |
• Brian Meidell is hacking his workplace coffee machine. For serious. Dumping EPROMS, burning new ones. Not sure what he's going to do with it yet, but it looks mighty fun. |