Author: Alasdair

Links for Thursday May 5th 2011

• Kinect and 3D printer turns people into action-figure souvenirs – Boing Boing
  Another one from the "shut up about your fucking jetpack already" files: using consumer-grade tech and little hacking, we can now scan people in full 3D, and print out action figures based on them. Stop and think about that – all those sci-fi body scanners where the hero walks through some kind of light grid, and then we see the little £D spinning image of them on some computer screen? Yeah, that. Now think about that for just for tailoring alone, for god's sake.
• Look at this DIY banana DNA extraction – Boing Boing
  If you're wondering where science is at these days, look here. It's a bloke in a tent with a drill, some stuff you've got in your kitchen, and about 10 quid's worth of kit that you can buy with paypal over the electric intertubes, demonstrating how to extract your own DNA, and where you can go from there.
• ThinkUp: Social Media Insights Platform
  Need to grab this and have a play with it when time permits.
• Byword
  Another "focus on your writing and only that" type app. They're not a magical thing that will make you write better, but they do often improve the experience. This one looks particularly aesthetically pleasing.
• Use SSH scripts to share Safari tabs between two Macs
  Less interested in this for itself, and more as a demonstration of principle.
• Information Architects – Business Class: Freemium for News?
  To any news-publishing company execs who are reading this: I would pay in the region of 25 quid a year *per publication I read online* (and I read a lot) for a Business-Class news experience. I'd like to pay less, of course, but I'm just saying: an annual subscription to a *really good* news experience is something I'd love.