To promote the New Zealand Book Council’s efforts to encourage reading, Colenso BBDO created the Read At Work site. It’s a mock Windows desktop filled with books packaged as ‘fake’ Powerpoint documents to encourage people to read at their workplace without getting caught. Though it feels a bit scammy*, it’s a nice idea which is executed well.

* Hey, I live in Scam City so I am allowed to be skeptical

…the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters here to change the name of a prize-winning water-treatment plant on the shoreline to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

›› San Francisco may name sewage treatment plant after Bush

The Chumby has a touch screen, a 350mhz processor and a bunch of other hardware that’s held together by Linux. It displays widgets from the interweb, plays internet radio, has WiFi, an accelerometer, a squeeze sensor, small speakers, microphones and USB ports built-in. It is completely customizable and the developers have laid bare the hardware and software. It’s extremely cool, though I do find it a little ugly in that cute way. It has people raving about it and it costs $179.95.

This must be good fun — getting sudo to insult you.

Referencing almost everything from old-skool hip-hop to big beat electronica, the Freestylers unleashed the exhilarating and fun filled We Rock Hard in 1998. They sampled, cut, pillaged, mashed up and repackaged classics (from the likes of Kraftwerk, Public Enemy and James Brown) and created a sound that can be best described as being more diverse than original.

It’s an album that won’t please the crate digging purists and won’t be accessible to the casual listener. But there are enough of us in between those extremes who will really enjoy this decade old classic.

Some crap corporate cliche classics mentioned in this BBC write-up on office speak include “idea showers”, “a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach”, “pre-prepare”, “conversate”, “not let the grass grow too long” and “close of play”.

My personal favourite is “You can’t have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music” — you gotta love this bullshit.

Very Advanced Beauty, curated by Universal Everything and FreeFarm.

Too bad I only know how to design stuff for the web and not bugs that dump out petroleum after a meal.

Next on the list should be bugs that consume plastic and breathe in carbon monoxide and shit out pretty flowers and tasty marshmallows.

Nice suspenseful editing for the highly acclaimed 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

Let’s get one thing out of the way – this sweet F1 car steering wheel is a replica that is meant to be displayed on a shelf, not mounted in your car. These are handmade steering wheels from the Mclaren Mercedes, Ferrari, BMW and Red Bull Racing teams but they do jack shit. They cost £1,250 (about S$3,300 which can give me about 40 full tanks of petrol on my car with today’s prices) but you cannot use it in any productive manner whatsoever.

They just sit there.

When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML / CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup.

›› That’s the 37signals mantra, it seems

[Via Boing Boing]

Back then, if you couldn’t sing or write a song and yet you needed to express your feelings for someone, you’d have made a mix tape. Armed with a dual tape deck, our crappy musical tastes were a form of creative expression, with the analogue cassette tape as the canvas.

Nowadays, I hear that the kids just dedicate songs on Facebook.

If I had an inclination towards oversized, retro watches, I’d be very keen on the Nixon Rotolog series. They also come in a bunch of other colour combinations but the blue/yellow colour combination is really testing my aversion to oversized watches.

Update: Seems the blue/yellow one is out of stock, so that may have saved me an impulse buy.

Orbital’s seminal brown album from 1993 was my first real electronic music purchase 15 years ago. Despite the test of time, my CD has held up and the music has more than just held up. Anyone who grew up in the 90s would have heard the outstanding Halcyon + On + On on some movie soundtrack or the album is just like that track — brilliant, mesmerising and absolutely timeless.

So sweet…

Did you know George Lucas and his family made cameos in Revenge of the Sith? Are you at all surprised? And more importantly, do you really care?
If you do, you can get the action figures of the Lucas family characters from the Star Wars Shop.

Grab some Threadless T-shirts on sale while they still have sizes.

The battles of yesterday were fought over land… Those of the present center on oil. But those of the future, a future made hotter and dryer by climate change in much of the world, will focus on a much more basic resource: water.

›› Desertification of the landscape may be a real threat

Check out goosh.org — absolutely brilliant. Definitely a ‘why didn’t I think of that first’ idea.

Johnny Cupcakes is a huge T-shirt business that started as a joke and from the boot of a car.

I think I still have the classic Iron Maiden album Piece of Mind lying around somewhere on cassette. This shoe is presumably dedicated to that album and is presumably aimed at people like me who bought the album as a teenager.

Or not.