Status-Q

There's been much debate here in the UK about whether the BBC is giving too much coverage to the football (soccer) World Cup. On their web site, they've come up with a neat solution: you can choose whether or not to put the site into 'World Cup mode'.

It probably won't be long before we're able to do such things with our TVs and radios as well. The concept of discrete channels is so 20th century; soon your channels will be hierarchical. ('Tonight I'm going to watch cnn.sports.hockey'). Or maybe you'll simply tune your TV to a set of your favourite keywords...

I've compiled mtr-0.71 it for Mac OS X, and you can get it here: mtr.zip.

The zip file contains a universal binary, a man page, and a README file telling you what to do with them.

More Sketchup tutorials available here.

Hee hee! Lots more fun stuff!

So how will people create these models? Using Google Sketchup - a lovely simple 3D modelling tool which you could use for all sorts of other things too. It also links to a community-generated online library of models.

Sketchup has some good clear video tutorials here. Have a play!

Ah, lots of fun stuff this weekend. Here's a great video clip showing what the kitten of today likes in the way of toys.

Have posted some thoughts about this over on the Ndiyo blog.

Alan Becker's Animator vs. Animation is a very nice bit of work. If you've used Flash or any similar design tools, you'll enjoy this.

What do Mentos mints do if you mix them with Diet Coke? THIS. It's fabulous.

Guy Kawasaki has some interesting observations on what makes Silicon Valley work, for those wanting to replicate its success. Some of them are quite unexpected:

High housing prices. If houses are cheap, it means that young people can buy housing sooner and have kids. When they have kids, they can't take as much risk and don't have as much energy to start companies. (I have four kids--I barely have the time and energy to blog, much less start a company.) Also, if houses are cheap, it's easier to ""make it big,"" and you want it to be hard to make it big.