The Eight Ball [8Ball]

Thanks Baron

Yup, Auckland still, Parnell baby! Keeping up a nice 6 month or less at any one location I am on my 8th city since april 2008 and 10th address, this-time-though I might stick around, finally unpacked my previous life that I had in boxes from before I left for the UK (the first time).

It’s a pretty weird feeling seeing things that were boxed up in october 2007, a flood of emotion – good/bad. It was a difficult period of time in my little life as it was the ending of a long term relationship and the beginning of a great adventure, a number of items were joint (take a hand written recipe book) which I quite enjoyed flicking through remembering the good parts of the relationship. This takes me to the deep relisation that our lives are brief moments squished together with some relating and others completely outside of normal living circumstances. I would love to be back to the house I/we had in 07 with all the gear (mostly sold or given away) but the reality is I am sitting in a different one with new and different objects surrounding me, objects which mean very different things to the ones that were in the boxes, perhaps even these objects from a former life are irrelevant to my new one.

The past few years have been a blur of experiences, a massive amount of them are ones that I will not have the pleasure of having again and others that frankly I’m glad I wont have too but they all make up the new character that J has become. Normality has sets back in and I am actually enjoying it, owning a car, buying useful items, not having to worry about being able to carry everything I own. These things are settling to the mind.

Perhaps what I am saying is that today I feel like the book of the past few years has closed and a new opened. I think and plan in 6 month chunks with an overlaying 2 year focus (and a master life ideology above that) the last 2 year period is finished, bring on the new one

Having had a play with it for both work and personal reasons over the last week I just simply want to say ‘i have no idea where this would fit into my life’. For someone like myself I’m already verging on the loony bin when it comes to technology intertwining and ruinin….ruling my life, adding a 4th screen (outside of the magic ‘THREE SCREENS’ master plan of Microsoft) seems wrong.

My daily life consists of 2 iphones (work, home), 1 macbook (work), a fixed pc (work), PC laptop (home) and usually a bit of the ol telly, trying to fit in using the iPad ended up being a chore… which… kind of had me a little sad, why sad? because it felt like I was getting old wanting to cling to a laptop on the couch instead of a tablet. What this all told me is that I simply want my current gen iphones to be faster (re: gen4) much more then I want an extra device to skim websites or the main thing I ended up doing, playing Plants vs Zombie.

Until these things are as thin as and flexible like paper I think ill be staying clear. Phil how do you find yours? I’m guessing you have laptops too at home so it would essentially replace one of them when couch surfing?

Lookie what we have here Intels new 6 core, 12 thread processor — the 3.33GHz Core i7-980X. I can feel Nez working out the cost estimates now for his next upgrade and if he really can part with that last kidney of his  At least for the majority of us we can look forward to this and kind of ‘#’s of processor overkill’ to be in our future box/laptop in a few eons time.

More unmanned then manned aircrafts being purchased by the States signals a turned towards Skynet supremacy. 24 cadets at the Air Force Academy received the first wings awarded in the institution’s history for pilots specializing in unmanned aerial systems and other remotely piloted aircraft. Prepare to be terminated.

Source

About 6 weeks back in the height of summer having already laid down a brew of beer with Nez that it was time to see just how easy it was to do the same with Cider. Conversations with various people led me to the simplest recipe imaginable:

• 1.5kgs Apples
• 5.7L Purified or Boiled Water
• 1kg White Sugar
• 3 Lemons
• (I added a fresh Nectarine off the tree outside)

Tools:

• Couple of Buckets
• Muslin Cloth (had to substitute a tea towel)
• Plastic Bottles
• Time

Read more…

via Kottke

And yes yes, I know that The 8ball is merely becoming a dumping ground for any kind of online video that crops up but seriously that is some impressive green screen effects going on right there. Makes you wonder when they will reach the point where by every single thing is green screened aside from the actors (that is until we perfect that too).

UPDATED BELOW

This is something of an eye opener for what is possibly in store for us in the later part of this century. With mobile computing/Internet increasing at a lovely rate (all be it else where in the world) there are already a number of iPhone apps that allow for some form of Augmented Reality. Keiichi Matsuda explains:

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

Less a little of the extreme advertising and this system would actually help us ‘connected generation’ to keep the umbilical cord flowing with juices from our always awake, always waiting friend the Internet.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

UPDATE

Another video that came out today about bing maps, shows live video being augmented over top of a street view image. Very impressive, scroll to 3mins for the build up.