Here’s some things I’ve been looking at over the past month:

The Eyeballing Game – I managed to sneak under 4.0. How good is your coordination?

Best of Bootie 2008 CD – is now out (free download). Featuring the best mash-up mixes of the last year. Quality stuff as per.

LIFE Magazine Photo Archive. Huge resource of images.

The 50 most Strangest Buildings in the World. It’s a funny old world.

Here’s a few interesting things I’ve seen or heard on the net recently.

Want to edit your photographs but don’t have Photoshop? Then use the online image editor at Pixlr. It’s relatively simple to use.

Live camera from the LHC collider in France.

Games:

Coign Of Vantage. Rotate the screen using your mouse to find the hidden image.

Totem Destroyer. Perfect blend of skill and luck. I managed to do all 25!

Split Words. Match the correct parts of words together. This is much harder than it first seems.

Music:

The Re:Publikan Podcast. Download mixes by AtJazz, Mark Farina etc..

Dixon presents Inner City 2005 – 2008

Here’s a few things I’ve been looking at during our dreary summer.

20 Abandoned Cities and Towns at Web Urbanist.

Minimal Techno actually invented in late 60’s shock! Hear the lost tapes of Delia Derbyshire the BBC electric music pioneer.

The timeline of internet memes. From this chart I think I was first getting into the internet in 1998.

Superb interview podcast with Charles Webster. Some great songs there along with a discussion about his new compilation CD on NRK Records.

Well I picked up one of these last Saturday and I thought I’d share how I feel about the device.

Firstly, it looks amazing and is a perfect size, roughly 5 CD cases stuck together. And for £39.99 does the three things I need it to do; listen to radio; allows me to plug my mp3 player into it; and is a portable speaker with the addition of a battery. I’ve been looking for something that could do all this for a while at that price, but with no luck.

Plugging in my mp3 player the sound was amazing. It disables the volume control when you do this turning it into a simple monitor speaker. It’s very punchy for it’s size and was much louder than I thought it would be.

The radio auto-tuned in around 30 seconds and it found 20 stations to listen to. I was getting 3 out of 7 signal bars but this seemed enough for clear reception.

I often listen to the radio as I fall asleep and the Pure Mini’s low volume range was perfect. I had three volume settings that could all be used for getting off to sleep depending on the external noise.

But, it’s not all roses. I’m finding quite a few issues with the machine. Enough to think about taking it back and waiting another year for some one to create the simple radio I need.

Now, I’m not sure if it’s just this strange humidity we’re getting in the south of the UK this week but my DAB reception has been all over the place. It’s jumping from 1 to 4 bars (out of a max of 7) constantly which is leading to a lot of bubbling and cutting out. I don’t live remotely or in a valley and the Pure Bug Too I had for a month last year had amazing reception so I can only presume that the DAB tuner in the Mini has been scaled back. Then again, I also lose a Freeview Multiplex with this weather so maybe it is just atmospheric conditions. There’s no external aerial socket so you’re pretty much left with the 17 inch fully extended aerial to get a signal.

Selecting the station is also a bit more complicated than it needs to be. It needs three actions; pressing the stations button, turning the volume dial to the required station, then pressing this dial in to select it. An additional station dial would have been better, although I think the normal Pure One uses the same all-in-one functionality.

Finally there’s one issue which could well be a fault. When the radio is on standby, i.e. plugged in but in the off mode, and the mp3 player is plugged it occasionally makes some feedback noise, like a cough, as if it’s discharging some energy. It’s very annoying and loud enough to wake you up.

So, I’ll wait a week or two but if I’m still having issues I’ll have to take it back and maybe buy a more expensive, less portable radio. That’s unless somebody can suggest a solution to the reception issues. Can I crocodile-clip a better aerial to the top of the current one?

Yes, another set of links I’m dumping here top clear up my browser’s bookmarks.

Film sequel quiz. Go on – you know they made one more.

Current status of HDTV in the UK.

Logic Puzzles. For when you want to waste an afternoon.

Sorry I Missed Your Party. If you can’t make it to a party youself take a look at these ones.

Whole Lotta Blog. Searches blogs for links to music files. Dodgy (in the crim way) but very good at finding obscure stuff without resorting to bit torrents.

German Bunker In My Garden. Guy tries to find a bunker in his garden. Start at the link and work your way up the archive.

Fed up of badly made, badly designed, expensive t-shirts? Well worry no more as now there is a unique t-shirt store based in the US that will always have a design you like.

Design By Humans selects five designs each week to become part of their collection. It then also selects designs of the week and the month. The current design of the week is this one:

Most of these t-shirts are $24(US). If you buy two t-shirts the shipping costs to the UK are $14(US), which makes $62(US) in total which is around £16 per t-shirt. There’s no import tax on that and it comes in a high quality parcel that will always survive the journey.

The quality of the material is amazing allowing the print to last much longer than shirts I’ve bought in the UK. To take a look at the huge range of t-shirts they have then just follow this link.

Red Arrows flypast at Shoreham Airshow, West Sussex:

My first airshow seen from 200ft above the airport:

Semi-related. Manston Airport landing and take off zones.

Been a real busy month at King Mansions with some great web projects coming out the door this week.

Here are a few of the things I have been reading and looking at during the month of August.

Easy to follow recipe for Bhindi Gosht. Great Pakistani Okra & Lamb Curry from scratch. You can get half of those ingredients in a packet of Karahi Gosht Masala spice blend available from your local world food outlet.

Short Movie (10 mins) called Flesh which juxtaposes a vision of a pornographic American society with the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. This is NSFW.

“Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.” Superb article in The Nation.

Motorcycle News magazine need to check which ads go with which stories, as can be seen here.

How many times can Superman give his secret identity away without anybody remembering? Lots.

Ooh! Another new episode of Tribe tonight. Read interviews with the presenter Bruce Parry and some of his crew.