Wonderland

Inspired by Frontierland..

..in Disneyland Paris, I now have a new role model, Poker Alice:

Disneyland Paris is fabulous in a wet, European, smoky, gum-plastered, dirty, queue-jumping and yelling kind of way. A world apart from California, which is orderly, sunny, clean, all-smiles and All Show. Maybe they should build a new land over there, EuropeLand, where the rides are death-defying car rollercoasters driven by Italians and you can't see the floor for (plastic, naturellement) artily-placed fag ends.

...and there was me about to give up smoking for new year, too. Gosh darn it.

Futuristic weps, jetpacks and madcappery..

...over at Future Horizons (thanks CarlosX!), including the Sonic Devestator [sic]:

"This handheld space age weapon of the future is powered by (2) 9 volt batteries contained within the handle. It is capable of emitting intense ultrasonic blasts from its output transducer".

Output transducer! Brilliant.

A shred of sense left..

... thank gawd. KaZaA can't be sued for being the network across which sometimes pirated material can be distributed. Well duh, would they sue the Royal Mail too for people who send each other tapes?

The Wired article quotes:

"We now have the unpleasant situation that only the consumers who swap music can be held accountable for copyright violation," said Cees van Rij, the head of legal affairs at Buma/Stemra.

You mean only the pirates can get done, instead of innocent parties and businesses too? Chuh!

Effing YES

Potted trees are cool, I have last year's outside my door, and he's happy (except for an attempted uprooting yesterday when I thought the vendors had all sold out this year) .. four hours, one potting, gravelling, poking.. baubling, lighting, shovelling, propping and general grovelling in front of the Xmas godlet... ta daaah!

I feel so grown-up.

(p.s. don't expect much for the next few days. Xmas, innit.)

Urgh

Three BBC parties in a row. Very few photos to show for it. I know, I know.

Some cute ones though:

More here.

My cochlea is ringing

The Reg reports that Sanyo is shipping a subsonic mobile - hold it to your cheekbone and hear better than via an ordinary receiver.

"The upshot: the user hears a 'sound' that isn't actually there. Sanyo claims bone conduction makes the 'sound' easier to hear, especially in a noisy environment."

Good for parties then, although they'll have to figure out background-noise cancellation for the poor sod on the other end. Talking of parties, it's big work celebration week, so don't expect much from me except incriminating photographs. Cackle.

Just when I was about to plug in the microphone

Skype gets a royal kicking.

Those wily Scandies'll get with interop as soon as it's worth their coding while, I'm sure. But meanwhile, Skype's interface is so nice that no user is likely to care about SIP or no SIP - they'll just get on with it if it works.

Good design can cause havoc to standards - just like in principle people want things to adhere to standards but will go with whatever works the nicest, like they'll declare a belief in personal privacy but will sell their data in a second for a free burger (or in my case, thanks to a Large Food Corporation, a free PS2 in return for years and years of shopping "loyalty").

More cool present-things

A skip and a hop from a Wired piece got me to:

Mini skull with brain parts, a Brain jelly mould (anatomically correct!) for the Hannibal in you, a Heart jelly mould or HUGE Heart chocolate

... and lastly, too-cute 'maladies' stuffed toys, including cuddly Athlete's Foot!

"They make the ultimate gift for doctors, anatomy students or your sweetheart"

(In that order).

HOW cool is this?

Spotted in Camden Market at the weekend, this dining table with no price tag (dangerous) .. straight off the Star Wars set?

10 say WANT WANT WANT
20 goto 10

I had a bit of a nutso idea

..well, more of a thought, the other day. I'm wondering whether digital settop boxes have, or could/would have, any VoIP capability any time soon?
Just musing about when people watch a show whether talking over it to a mate would be interesting. It's one of those, "in ten years' time when the 'television' is a spray-on videowall that is interwebcasting with video, audio, data and voice, then sure, of course people will talk via their televisions" things.

Meanwhile we're still dealing with folk today who think people 'will never watch television on their PC'. But.. so.. then you see little niblets like this - hacking TiVO to show caller-ID. Baby steps!