10 Perfect Gadget

BoingBoing Gadgets has an excellent article all about the ten most perfect gadgets ever invented. They inlucde the wrist watch, the bicycle and printed money. I am not convinced that printed money can be defined as a gadget, but I would suggest that printed moey can be used to buy the other nine.

• Boing Boing Gadgets

As an aside I also want to link to Boing Boing TV’s “A Morning at Intelligentsia Coffee Part 2″

• BBTV

Eiffel redeux

Adding a thrill aspect to the tower, or a spider’s web

• Trend Hunter

Amazon Resdesign

Last night I was looking at Amazon (UK) and it had the old interface, today it has the new one. No restarts, no download latest update, no downloads. Fabulous, seamless, the joys of the web. Getting down to the redesign itself I like it in the sense of being logical, clear and clean - unlike Yahoo’s redesign for the “my” part of it’s site. I lot of thought and understanding of the user interaction must have gone in to this and it shows. It is fresh but not too radical, it is a change but not one that confuses or finds you losing your way.

Object Charts

I am new to this site, but I already like it. Fabulous

• OObject

Crystal Island

If they build it, it stays up, and they fill it then I might, finally, be tempted to visit Moscow.

• Inhabitat
• The Guardian

BMW X6

With just 20 years of oil supply left (this is what I heard from a professor of energy sometime last year) we don’t have long left to drive the cars that have been helping use up all this oil. So BMW have introduced, what they call, a whole new class of car - the Sports Activity Vehicle (SAV) - to help use up even more of this oil. How this is different from any other off-road car is somewhat of a semantic loss on me. However, the design and styling seem to appeal, and assuming you have huge buckets of cash waiting to be spent on something, it can be yours for at least 80000 USD. Hmmm, I want a new lens for my camera before that.

• Autoexpress

Other peoples’ houses

For at least the last few years, maybe longer, The Daily Telegraph has been part of a competition for find the best home building and renovations done in the UK. I’d like to think of it as the complete antithesis of the tat and eye corroding designs that the general “house builders” of the UK seem to get away with (and charge huge buckets of cash for).

Most important of all it does show that with a little imagination, and not so many buckets of cash, that new, or renovated, but certainly exciting houses can be built in the UK. These example are nothing short of inspirational, fabulous!

• The Daily Telegraph

Visions of the future

We will probably no more advanced in 50 years time than we are now, in fact it will probably more inconvenient but with bright, shiny white/black/silver brushed metal devices that play music, videos, TV, play games, etc. So pretty much like we have now. Unless aliens invade and enslave the planet.

At least you’d get this vision of the future given the following sites. My point is that we might have a giggle looking through weird ideas (like the ice-cycle, or a tower city with steam engines going round the outside) but our visions of the future here and now will equally be looked on as nothing more than foolish visions. Fabulous websites:

• Modern Mechix

• Paleo Future

Pivo 2

I did have respect for Nissan.

In Czech/Slovak “Pivo” means beer. You would probably need a few before getting into one of these (with a bag over your head, or tinted out windows)…

• Motortrend 

Down the pan

• Concierge