Links for the week 6-12th December

My favourite links for the week 6 - 12th December...

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/introducing-nexus-s-with-gingerbread.html

Always excited to see new Android stuff - Gingerbread looks nice, and a lot seems have been done under the hood, but it's not blown anyone away... The Nexus S also looks great if massively overpriced over here (£150 more than in the States).

http://www.shhhaw.com/2010/12/introducing-trippy-an-app-to-give-you-just-enough-to-read-on-your-commute.php

Really nice use of a whole bunch of different APIs to make something genuinely useful. Grabs your location, and where you're going to, figures out how long it's going to take and how much you can read and serves up @longreads articles

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/12/wikileaks-and-the-long-haul/

Clay Shirky (brilliant guy) on Wikileaks - makes some great points, the "we're no better than Burma" thing is great

http://craphound.com/walh/audiobook/download-audiobook

Cory Doctorow, a great geek author, has put out his new book in electronic formats (mp3 audiobooks and ebooks) for free! Go grab 'em!

http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/09/kinect-finally-fulfills-its-minority-report-destiny-video/

I'm pretty sceptical of Kinect hacks to control your computer by waving your hands around - it looks flashy and cool but can you really imagine doing that all day? But this demo is pretty cool, bringing Minority Report to life.

http://lifehacker.com/5710156/spoon-lets-you-run-portable-desktop-apps-from-your-browser

Google also launched Chrome OS this week, a totally web-based OS. I'm interested to see how this goes, but they really need something to take up the slack of traditional OSes until web apps can take over (I see this as inevitable). This Lifehacker article shows off a new system that installs a plugin on your browser that allows you to run full apps through the browser.

http://realtime.springer.com/

I've been looking into some altmetrics stuff recently (measuring and aggregating social commentary around academic articles) and I thought that this tech demo from Springer is interesting. It's a shame that there's no API to pull the data out though...

http://blog.jamendo.com/2010/12/10/jamendo-geeks-solve-the-hidden-chrome-os-equation/

Brilliantly geeky, and therefore awesome - in a Chrome OS demo video there was a hidden message. These guys figured it out and won a Chromebook for their efforts...

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NaBloPoMo: The Review

I participated in National Blog Posting Month last month, a movement to get people to post to their blogs once a day for a month. I managed to do 28 posts in the last month, only missing two which I think is quite good.

Did it change anything in my life? I'm not sure... I certainly think about blogging more often, especially as I'm aware that a lot of my online life is on Twitter - a medium that I do not 'own'. I'm definitely going to keep up with posting a weekly list of the most interesting links I've found on Twitter, and I'll probably continue to expand thoughts or arguments that I made on Twitter onto the blog. 

I think it was a really good to challenge myself to do something every day - even something as small as writing a quick post. I will continue to try and do month-long projects - I'll probably write about them a bit more on my other blog 30 Days rather than clutter up this main blog too much...

Drop me a comment below or tweet me (I'm @40_thieves) if you liked my blogs for this month :-)

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Links for the week of 22-28 November

Way late with this, but here's last week's links:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/summit/sourcecode/

Cannot wait for this - new film from the director of Moon (if you haven't seen this, you must) - looks like a fantastic sci-fi/time travel story.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/kinect_browser_navigation.php

Interesting to see where this goes - a JavaScript toolkit for working with hacked Kinects - I'm still not convinced that waving your arms around to navigate the web is a better user experience than a keyboard and mouse.

http://www.boardgame-remix-kit.com/

Love this, a the styling, the idea, everything. I actually bought it the ebook PDF because I loved it so much

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/26/bike-lock-that-hoist.html

Hilarious idea, but as someone on Twitter pointed out, you'd be screwed if someone double parked!

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/11/28/information_overload_the_early_years/?page=full

Really loved this... I'm personally a bit fed up of all the moaning about information overload - I've found enough filters and curation to not be overwhelmed. This is a great article about how we've tackling this problem for ages.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/fox-nation-readers-confuse-onion-article-real-news/

I laughed so hard when I read this - having seen the original Onion article (and it's obviously a joke).

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