Random Thoughts » Cool

Turn Any Web App Into An OS X App With Fluid

Drew — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:54:39 +0000

More and more of what we do these days is via the web, from Google Mail to Salesforce there are apps for pretty much any task. Living in the browser is fine but I tend to have a lot of tabs open and sometimes it is nice to just launch an app for a specific [...]

Gapminder World – Data Visualisation Tool

Drew — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 21:24:50 +0000

Gapminder World is a fantastic resource. In a nutshell it is a huge repository of world trend data covering a massive range of subjects. To cite some of the examples from the home page;

Wealth & Health of Nations CO2 emissions since 1820 Who has most internet users? Is child mortality falling? Where is HIV [...]

Hubble 20th Aniversary Google Earth Tour

Drew — Mon, 17 May 2010 14:29:51 +0000

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Hubble telescope Google has put together a file with a short 5 minute Google Earth tour of some of the iconic images gathered over the years. It relies on a version of Google Earth with the Sky mode but any recent version should have that. The tour has [...]

Star Wars Retold in Lego

Drew — Sun, 09 May 2010 09:12:48 +0000

Great TV Theme Medley

Drew — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:10:58 +0000

OK so not even I’ve seen all of these shows but this is a great piece of work.

Cool Large Hadron Collider Photos

Drew — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:42:59 +0000

The Boston Globe has a piece on the restart of the Large Hadron Collider that has some fantastic photos including some of the damage done at the original startup. The scale of this thing never ceases to amaze.

The article and the rest of the photos can be [...]

Colours Made Easy

Drew — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:09:23 +0000

For the non-arty one of the hardest things to do when putting together websites is to get just the right colours. For the criminally untalented, like me, there are loads of free css templates but when using these there is always the desire to choose different colours that make the site stand out. Even if [...]

Beautiful HD Wildlife Videos – For Free

Drew — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:20:39 +0000

I like me some wildlife shows and one of the joys of HD TV has been the gradual move to shooting wildlife documentaries in a format that truly does the subject justice.

Now there is a great free source of videos (and podcasts) that cover a huge variety of subjects. Earth-Touch.com releases videos daily and [...]

Toothpaste. Sleeping People. Artist. Genius.

Drew — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:14:11 +0000

Toothpaste Art on Passed Out People – Watch more Funny Videos

An End to Coin Tossing

Drew — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:14:19 +0000

Decisions. They can be tricky. There are lots of techniques to help though, tossing a coin, rolling a dice, eeny, meeny, miny, moe (which bizarrely has a Wikipedia entry!). There must be a better way.

Well now there is. Hunch.com is a site that guides you through the decision making process. Whether the decision is [...]

Interesting Video Projects

Drew — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:56:49 +0000

I was catching up on some TED talks* when I came across this one from Yann Arthus-Bertrand, a French photographer/filmaker and environmentalist, which included references to a couple of projects that he has worked on recently.

The 6 Billion Others project is a fascinating view of the peoples of the world. A group of [...]

Excellent Student Animations

Drew — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:48:01 +0000

The New York School of Visual Arts has posted their “best of 2009“. There are great examples of both computer animated short films and visual effects/motion graphics created by the 2009 cohort. There is clearly a lot of talent around, it’s well worth a look.

Unknown Files? No Problem.

Drew — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:25:47 +0000

You have to love software developers. If there is a chance for them to use a standard file type for whatever app they’ve developed you can guarantee that they will avoid it completely in favour of a proprietary file format that only their software can create or indeed read. So what do you do when [...]

A Novel Use For Burger Grease

Drew — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 09:31:35 +0000

Well sometimes those burgers from the van can be all grease. What you gonna do? Well you could paint the Mona Lisa!

Bonkers. But Cool.

Google Street View in the UK

Drew — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:34:02 +0000

Google’s cool street view technology has now been rolled out to a number of UK cities.Â It’s oddly satisfying to be able to roam around a city that you know looking at what has changed.

Here’s a good pub

View Larger Map

[...]

Convert PDFs to Word

Drew — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:48:15 +0000

PDFs are great but every now and then I have a need to edit one. There are of course a whole plethora of PDF creation/editing tools available, most of which will set you back some cash. But generally I don’t need this level of functionality, I just need to move some bits around. Well to [...]

It’s thingumy, you know, whatsit….

Drew — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:15:31 +0000

We’ve all been there. You are in full flow, at your eloquent best when suddenly that word escapes you. You know it. You know it’s the correct word and the context is fine, you just can’t remember the actual word. And then it nags at you. It’s a word you know, you’ve used it before, [...]

Smart Printing

Drew — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:00:26 +0000

Now in these days of environmentally friendly goodness we all try and refrain from producing printed output when we can. But every now and then there is something that we absolutely have to print and so the aim is keep it as brief and concise as possible. The problem of course is that web pages [...]

Memes R Us

Drew — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:06:00 +0000

Ah, internet memes. Where would we be without them. They come along, make us all laugh for a few days and then disappear.

Who can forget Dramatic Chipmunk, Diet Coke+Mentos, Numa Numa, Star Wars Kid or All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Not to forget 2 girls, 1 cup.

But by their very [...]

Mapping Local Crime

Drew — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:20:55 +0000

Recently there was a news story that the UK government was considering the introduction of monthly crime maps showing the nature of crimes in a local area in an attempt to close the gap between the actual recorded crime figures and the general perceptions of the level of crime. It was mentioned that there were [...]