I’m off work for the Easter break at the moment so it felt like a good time to get in a blog post. I’ve had an active month catching up with friends and going to concerts, with Grizzly Bear and Beach House at The Roundhouse being the highlight! Just started on a new website design which I’m enjoying working on and should hopefully be able to post here in the next month or so. Also put a few more photographs up on my Flickr page recently, so feel free to take a look. Here are a few bits and bobs from the web that have caught my eye and imagination in the past month:

- Have to start with this. At long last, my beautiful home city of Bath was inducted on to Google street-view!

- Some songs: Radar Detector by Darwin Deez, Beba by Pantyraid, and Happy New Year Luie by Ronnie.

- Awesome herb-growing postcard designs.

-  A truly inspirational TED talk from Raghava KK about art, life, and following your heart.

- In praise of nothingness.

- Great article on the photographer/street-artist JR from the Observer.

- I really want to buy a print of this creation of C215’s.

- And finally, if you haven’t watched any of Merton’s hilarious Chatroulette piano improvisations yet - where have you been?!

About time I made another blog update. Not much to report really, plodding on with the new job still, while trying to organise the rest of my life at the weekends! Went to see Tim Key this past Saturday, and really enjoyed it. Such a different type of show to anything else I’ve ever seen, with a subtle blend of touching poetry and brilliantly crafted sly humor. Thoroughly recommended. Other than that, here are a few things that have caught my eye (and ear) these past few weeks:

- Loving the words of wisdom that can be found on Bobulate

- Trimester by xkcd

- Best cake I’ve ever seen

- This is how I should be living my life

- Phonebook. Awesome use of the iPhone.

- A couple of songs I’m liking at the moment: Gonjasufi - Candylane (funky) & anything by Beach House, but in particular Walk In The Park (luscious)

We keep working through them, and they keep coming. Next up 2010. This year has been a strange one for me, it was filled with some brilliant moments and people that I’ll remember forever but I also spent a lot of time struggling to find regular work, stewing in my own thoughts. 2010 has more direction, I know exactly where I am, I know what I have to do, I’m feeling more positive and more sociable. It’s all good. Below are a few end-of-year links, and for anyone who actually ever reads this, I hope you enjoy the first year of the new decade!

- Ingenious glass design

- It’s still a while off but this asteroid pass is going to be awesome (I heard a rumour that the Russians want to hit it with a rocket!).

- Proof that there is and never will be ‘A perfect job’

- 15 reasons to live for the next 10 years

-  2009 in photos: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

- The Alps at night timelapse. Incredibly soothing.

- Lastly my favourite album of 2009: xx

Things that I have seen and like from the past few days.

- A fun project involving cameras left on park benches in New York. Love the random selection of people and imagery that spontaneously erupt from simple ideas like this.

- This company called botanicalls sell little arduino based sets which can sense the water content of the soil supporting your plant and send messages to twitter accordingly. A nice little idea, but not sure if I’d pay the $99 for a single kit at this moment in time. I’ve been getting more into Twitter recently after many months of not joining/twittering. There now seem to be more people ‘on it’ that I am genuinely interested in hearing about/telling things to; so I’m finding it an amusing past-time.

- These World War II aviation photographs are pretty awesome. I believe that my grandfather worked on this sort of thing during the war so I may see if I can find some of his shots and post them online.

-  I can see myself getting a Kindle or similar device in the next few years, there is so much great free literature online, and being able to get a book as easily as a music download would be brilliant. This would be a bonus feature.

- Other bits and bobs; a super-fine way to display photographs, a 224-word pallindrome from Demetri Martin, and a nice collection of the characters found on subway/underground trains.

- Videos; Johnny Flynn sings and wonders the streets of Buenos Aires in another great video from La Blogotheque, a clever advert from Loewe, flippin’ awesome puppetry creates this very impressive dinosaur (though I think the desaturated video adds to the authentic appearance), and finally, Louis CK tells it like it is.

I just realised that I seem to treat the various applications that I use online as filters, with this blog being the final stage of refinement. I have loads of stuff saved as favourites in Google Reader, and a number of items manage to get into my delicious bookmarks and YouTube favourites, but after I look through them all I realise that there are only a distinct few that I appreciate more than the others and as such I feel are worth sharing. Also, I need to update this page more often, at least three posts per month would be a much more productive output!

- This video is so cool it’s unreal. I love it when spontaneous acts of creativity come out even better than you ever thought they could.

- Some nice images; a beautiful shot of a macaw, my favourite picture from the many taken over the recent snowy period in the UK, art can be created out of anything, awesome manipulation of the land masses of earth to form the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, I want to attempt to make some images like these using stereographic projection - super fine!

- I believe that the guy who helped create this nice surveillance themed project, Chris O’Shea, did the same University course as me. This is the kind of stuff that I could do… if I wanted to. Also through the CR blog: I really like the work of Berlin based artist Brad Downey. Particularly love ‘Negative space saves the day’.

- These chocolate pencils look so clever, stylish, and delicious!

- Nice blogs; COPPAKIDS is a supremely funny blog of kids pleas and excuses sent to a community website that they are too young to register for, this is another funny blog about the embarrassment experienced when one’s parents join Facebook, and this blog asks people to try and tell a story in one sentence - many of the entries are clever, witty, or moving.

- Super clever MIT students at the super intriguing TED conference show off some awesome technology/concepts. I recommend watching the videos.

- Some humorous videos; Learn to Speak Body: Tape 5 and ‘Hurt Feelings‘ from Flight of the Conchords.

- Some music videos; ‘In For The Kill‘ from La Roux (I like this more for the song than video), and ‘Nothing To Worry About‘ from Peter, Bjorn, and John (nice tune, mega-fine video).

- Finally. I have recently been laughing at the show/collective known as “How’s Your News?”. This video here can explain the premise of the show better than I can, but what I will say is that the biggest ‘issues’ about the show are the questions of whether it is exploitative and whether people are laughing at the presenters’ disabilities or at their irrepressible and extremely vibrant characters. I personally see no problem with this show. I find the presenters refreshingly honest, fun-loving, and passionate. It is the individual viewer of the shows’ problem if they laugh at the presenters disabilities. Although having said this, I believe that when the joke has run dry and their laughter has stuttered to a stop, they will realise what a frivolous joke it was, and will hopefully start to enjoy the show as the happy little gem that it is. Feel free to click on the following links to find out about my favourite presenters; Bobby, Jeremy, and Susan.

- Obama is President of the U.S.A. - here are few inauguration/Obama related items. Big pictures of the inauguration, Gawker’s top 10 moments of the inauguration, and my favorite, letters from schoolchildren to President Obama.

- Here is a gentle/macabre video of chocolate bunnies being melted.

- A guy named Zerofra has designed and built a new kind of all-terrain skateboard/bike thing. Looks pretty cool.

- Tony Hart really influenced me as a child and help feed my interest in art and creativity. Sadly he passed away last week. He will be sorely missed.

- Here is a funny and nice street art project where the artist places thought bubbles on the walls then snaps people when they walk by to make it look like their thoughts.

- Handegg.

- This is an awesome looking image matching/searching program. This would be so good for finding the name of a bit of art, or even a location, based on your own photograph.

- Lastly a couple of videos. This one is a short bit of Zach Galifianakis who I have recently stumbled upon. I enjoy his slightly uncomfortable style, makes him feel a bit more like a regular guy than a polished performer. The second video is a new song by K’Naan called Somalia. His last album was awesome and from the sound of things the next one will be just as good.

So 2008 is almost over. Just time to provide a few more links to various items of personal interest.

- The Ludacris Effect

- Absolutely super-fine architecture. Best roof of the year.

- Brian Dettmer creates these phenomenal sculpted books. They look so intricate and mechanical.

- This project (We Feel Fine) by Johnathan Harris is the kind of stuff that I like; finding the little bits of tender emotion buried under the weight of the Web and presenting them as the distant and deeply touching whispers that they are.

- A nice list of the top 10 technology breakthroughs of the year. I’m not sure if this means breakthrough ‘in the lab’ or breakthrough into the public domain. Either way it’s an interesting list.

- Possibly disgusting. Definitely amazing. A Canadian film-maker plans to turn his empty eye socket into a hidden camera!

-Nanotech food!

- Finally. I hope to see the stars tonight at some point. I find space hypnotic and overwhelming in it’s sheer scale. It makes me feel so insignificant and yet simultaneously reminds me of the stand-out brilliance of human emotion, creativity, and scientific endeavour. Here are a few of the best pictures of space taken over the past year.

What I would not give to be the protagonist of Olaf Stapleton’s Star Maker!

Once again a wide range of subjects are covered in this post’s links.

- A couple of brain-tech pages first. This is an interesting article on how the brain can be tricked into responding to interaction with the body of an avatar as if it was the users actual body, and this article introduces some amazing advancements made by Japanese scientists who have managed to extract pre-defined images directly from a users thoughts based on the slight alterations in blood flow.

- I seem to go through phases of finding ‘new’ music to keep me entertained when going about my everyday tasks. A couple of songs that I have come by through Kanye West’s blog include this one by Sia, who I have heard of before and even enjoyed through the work of Zero 7, but had never listened to before as a solo artist. The second song that lead me to seek out a new album was this remix of the Jay-Z tune ‘Sweet’. The whole album blends African rhythms with Jay-Z’s flow to tremendous effect.

- A clever bit of graffiti in Portugal. Includes a nice little video explaining the piece.

- I love this Bill Murray anecdote, whether it’s true or not. I reckon it is true though, it’s the sort of thing he’d do. I remember reading about how he turned up at a student house party in St. Andrews the other year, hung out in the kitchen for a while, and helped wash up.

- An interesting article on the end of online anonymity. I’m starting to find the amount of user-names and passwords that I have a bit overwhelming, and try and avoid giving out too much information about myself on sites like Facebook. Hopefully the single id thing can be sorted out in the next decade or so.

- Teddies in space! Brilliant.

- Lastly. This video is a bit wacky but I found it hugely amusing.

Not really much of a post this, but here are a few things that I’ve found online over the last week or so.

- Daddy, Where’s Your Phone is a short but sweet article by Tim O’Reilly that documents a moment of realization. I like the fact that the child doesn’t think twice about using the phone as a tool for obtaining the necessary information, it’s a natural reaction that just shows how mobile devices and networks are becoming integral and embedded parts of our, and our children’s lives.

- I’m not a vein person, but I think that this mirror by hemlock design is great. The way that the reflections of various colours and parts of the environment create an almost cubist reflection of reality is really cool. Plus you can check your hair from any number of places in the room!

- I really enjoy this song and video - which was put together from footage of a Mark Gonzales performance from 1998. I almost feel as though the performance took the skating off of the street and into a gallery to try and show a new audience the beauty and fluidity of skateboarding, and the song is trying to take it back to it’s roots on the west coast.

A few of these links are from a while back, but due to my politically themed previous post I’ve had to wait till now to link to them.

- The Onion comes up with more clever and hilarious content. I particularly like this article about Americas worst job, and this video on youtube with added interface manipulation (look at the tabs above the video).

- My cat does most of these things. I find it particularly uncomfortable when she stares at me - could she be a killer?

- This is an awesome search tool that returns image results selected from flickr based on the colours selected.

- This blog is actually ‘written’ by a plant in a cafe in Japan. If you put the site through a translation system you can just about get the gist of what it’s talking about. Basically it seems that sensors detect the weather conditions and other quantifiable information about the environment so that they know how the plant is feeling, and then write an entry accordingly. So if it’s cloudy and people have neglected to water the plant then the blog entry will be miserable and say ‘I was thirsty and didn’t get much light today’ or something like that.