If you still think Apple are cool…

….then I suggest you give their tech support line a call, and ask to be put on hold. It’s where I am right now, and here’s the music they’ve played at me so far:

1st – Horrible live version of "Every Breath You Take", featuring an extended bit where Sting does ‘shout outs’ to his band.
2nd – Sub Green Day American "punk" music. In fact, scrub that, it’s sub Good Charlotte.
3rd – Naff Euro disco music. Sounds a bit like "I Miss You" by Everything But The Girl, but twenty times worse. The mixing was probably done on an old Nokia.

New Imaginary Foundation shirts

IF

The Imaginary Foundation has just released a new collection of T-shirts. The IF is surely one of the most peculiar of online t-shirt retailers (the IF itself is, apparently, a ” think tank from Switzerland that does experimental research on new ways of thinking and the power of the imagination”) but as ever, they’ve still come up with some wonderful t-shirt designs. Have a look here.

Chart: Top 10 Worries

As a new way of presenting some pertinent links, here is a list of my top 10 worries at the moment:

1 (-) George W. Bush
2 (-) North Korea
3 (NEW) How common it is for collossal squid to be found these days – are they about to make their move?
4 (UP) My teeth
5 (UP) The difficulty of buying a house in London if you’re not a millionaire
6 (UP) The fact lots of bloggers love Monocle, and I don’t
7 (DOWN) Iran (since I finished reading this book)
8 (DOWNwithit) My inability to understand hip-hop
9 (UP) Lack of traffic to this blog
10 (PLUMMETING) Wondering about how the Custom PC podcast will do (it’s done really, really well actually)

Wallpaper Images

Autumn blazing (2)

I first learned that Microsoft had approached a Flickr user to supply some of the standard wallpaper images included with Vista a while ago, but that little nugget of info has re-appeared today on Ars.Technica. I think it’s worth linking to the Flickr photoset from which MS bought two of the images that you can find in every copy of Vista. There’s also a good interview with the lucky (and talented) photographer who’s work will end up of bazillions of PCs world wide, here, which tells the full story.

Coincidentally, backgrounds was something I was wrestling with last night. I’ve just put together a PC for a computer-less friend, and once I’d finished downloading the basics (FireFox, Avast, Picasa etc) I started wondering what image to use as the wallpaper. Not wanting to hide my light under a bushel, I had a look through the mathematically generated set of my 100 most “interesting” pics on Flickr and I couldn’t actually find anything I was happy to use there: they all seemed a bit too…. aggressive. Going back to the Flickr pics MS used, I can see they do all have a very particular “wallpapery” quality to them: calm, despite the
fact there’s lots of highly-saturated colour, and subject matter that
is definitely natural but that still has very other-worldly feel to it. A dreaminess, I think. Anyone else got any other suggestions about what makes a good wallpaper? (No prizes for the first person to say scantily dressed babes…;)

(In the end, for my friend’s PC, I opted for the nice sunny shot above.)

Pecha Kucha

How on earth/how in hell do you get tickets to Pecha Kucha in London? Twice in the last month I’ve had the e-mail come through, gone straight to the site to buy tickets only to find they’re all gone already. Very frustrating, because it looks really inspiring.Not that I think I’ll ever be invited to do a presentation at PK, but the Delicious Pecha Kucha presentation creator is still a very cool little toy. Give it your Delicious user name and it will create a PK presentation using your last 20 links. Explaining it to yourself is an interesting challenge – can a bunch of links that only have their place in time tying them together be made into a coherent presentation?

[link via Jean Snow]

The Custom PC Podcast

Custom PC Podcast

At work we’ve just launched our first podcast. I’m very excited, since I’ve been really keen for us to do more stuff online and we’ve basically gone from talking about it to having it ready in just a couple of weeks. We managed to put the recording kit together for about £250, and considering we knew pretty much nothing about audio a month ago, I’m really pleased with how episode one has turned out.

It’s pretty hardcore techy stuff for the first half – so we cover Nvidia’s new cut-price DirectX10 graphics card, the GeForce 8800GTS 320MB, along with Intel’s cheap Core 2 Duos and the effects (or not) of ReadbyBoost in Windows Vista. The second half has some chat about the games charts and those ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ ads, so the tone is lighter and funnier.

If you fancy a listen:

* To subscribe in iTunes use this link.

* If you want to use another podcast program like Juice, the feed address to use is http://feeds.feedburner.com/custompc.

* We’re also on Odeo, too!

My Odeo Podcast

Let me know what you think…