Alasdair Watson

The next film by the guy behind Helevtica and Objectified.

Dubstep remixes of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds.

Ever wondered just how much Google is learning about you? Turn this on, and see. I'm not posting this as a dig at Google, but rather just in a "be informed about what information about you goes where".

Requires an iPad and 2 iPhones to play. Suspect that it's not going to be set-the-world-on-fire exciting, but it's worth a look, I think, if nothing else than because it's a reasonable innovative idea that is bound to have other applications.

I've been Instapapering stuff ever since I got my iPad for weeks now, and not quite finding the time to get it all read – to the point that when I'm done with my current book, I'll probably spend a week or two's commuting time catching up on them, rather than picking up another book. So obviously, what I need to make my backlog truly huge is a trove of excellent instapaper fodder. (If you are an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad user who isn't making use of Instapaper, you're missing out on one of the best things about them.)

My boss turned this up on a routine vanity search for our company name (Aardvark Media), and immediately ordered a couple of the posters, from of all this, a Tea room in St Leonards-on-Sea. I am quite tempted to order one of them for myself for home as well. Any manifesto which begins "Kill your TV" and includes "Make Stuff", "Drink Tea", "Bake Cake", "Grow You Community" and "Champion the Underdog" is kind of tailor made for me, and, I would imagine, a number of other people reading this.

I bookmarked Gruber's previous efforts on this front, and I will move to using this improved pattern in the future.

A comparison of Apple's iMac website with the websites for Dell and HP's primary desktop machines. I'm genuinely not posting this to cheerlead for Apple, I'm actually posting it as a reminder to self in a "what not to do" kind of way, because I suspect a lot og my work falls closer to HP and Dell than Apple.

My brain hurts. Of possibly it will hurt in the future, and the quantum-level changes have moved back in time. In any event, I eagerly await being given a quantum supercomputer to play with.

Horrifyingly addictive little game – I downloaded it, and then when I looked up, it was hours later.

I'm actually more optimistic about what "Big Society" can potentially achieve than most people I know, but I recognise that actually, most of what it can achieve is (significant) optimisation of already-funded and already-managed programs that are set up with the correct social tools. Which is why I found this such interesting ready: Charlie Stross, in the course of wondering about how many people you'd need to send to Mars, ably demonstrates why society is already far too large and complex for "Big Society" to ever work past a certain limit.

Actually, these aren't half bad, and if I could make more of an effort to remember them, it'd probably lift my writing quite a lot.

Architectures of control, right here. Nice.

I admit to coming off like a bit of an Apple fanboy, but still, this piece really nailed something for me: if Apple are sometimes arrogant (and I don't think there's a dispute about whether or not they are) then it's because they've earned the right to be by leading the way in personal computing on a technology level for decades now. They may not have been the most successful financially, but they've been the game changing-innovators since before the iPod, never mind the iPhone and iPad. And if someone comes along that can humble them, then I will sincerely welcome them but it hasn't happened yet. The reason I buy Apple products is that they're the best on sale at the moment, and as soon as someone comes along that offers me a better experience, I'll switch.

I'm a little fucked off about this, but not quite willing to throw my toys from the pram over it – not least because I can't, having just signed up for another 18 months. But it's one to keep an eye on, and one to be professionally aware of, at least, as more clients start asking up for iPhone/iPad tailored content.

Fascinating article on the fluidity of sexuality – the idea that people, particularly women, can, in fact, switch from hetero- to homo-sexuality in different phases of their life – that it's possible to be sincerely heterosexual, and then later, sincerely homosexual without ever being bisexual, and without devaluing one's previous sexuality.

I laughed like a drain.

I love my iPad – I'm carrying so many books around with me these days, and it is very liberating. But I also love my bookshelves. One day, I hope to have space for my books, but I accept that this may be a fools dream, and I may have to resign myself to an iPad-based future. In the meantime, I shall stare at this with envy.

I've been following boyd's research for a few years now, and have been particularly interested in her data regarding class/race/gender divides in social media use, and I really hope the rallying cry that she's putting out here has some effect, because I would really like to see people stop arguing over the scope the problem, and start talking about what can be done about it. "On the internet, no-one knows you're a dog" is both a triumph *and* a tragedy, and we need to start addressing that.

I freely admit, I'm a massive nerd. But I haven't bought a GW related product in some years, and this looks like it might be the one to get me back…

This looks very interesting. Must pick up a PDF edition when I'm at home.

"It's good to know what people think, even if you don't approve. " This 12 words, right here, is why I love the internet.

I am 100% in favour of this. And I fully support backdating it quite massively. But then, unlike most of my friends, I'm not a graduate. But I find it hard to argue against the point that if it is now reasonable for society to ask students to pay for their education, then it must surely also be reasonable for society to ask those who got their education for free to give the money back? (Mind you, I think her educationally-privileged background is showing a bit in the comments thread.)

If you still make a distinction between "in the real world" and "on the internet", then frankly, you're probably quite stupid. Some of this article is hippy claptrap, but it captures something I've been thinking about for a while now, when faced with friends who say that they "don't like doing X on the internet", when what they really mean is that they "can't be bothered to develop the skillset to do X on the internet". It's *not* a separate conversation to the one going on in the rest of your life. The issues are the same, the information the same, if not better, and if you can't engage with them on the internet, then you can't engage with them properly in other areas of your life.

This is why you need to be careful with what data you hand to what websites, kids. You might well trust any given website website and the people running it today, but if something goes wrong, and the company goes bankrupt, your data is an asset that belongs to them. And as this article makes clear, the only thing that bankruptcy administrators are allowed to care about it getting the most money back for the creditors. Which means (at the moment, pending a change in the law to improve privacy in cases like this) they're ethically constrained from being picky about what happens to your data – if the highest bidder is a shit who is going to use the data to make everyone involved's life in some way worse, that's just tough for them, because they have to sell to the highest bidder in order to fairly represent the creditor's interests.

Interesting piece about predictions, singularities, and the tendency of utopians (and a lot of doomsayers) to predict paradigm shifting event to occur around the end of their own lifetime.

If they add some form of over-the-air syncing, then I'm sold.