The Dell Hybrid

Ye gads, Dell have shocked the pants off me with this tasty piece of industrial design! The diminutive Dell Hybrid PC comes with optional coloured sleeves, but in particular I rather love the bamboo sleeve version:

This kind of thing adds warmth and organic feel into something where normally only cold industrial aluminium or cheap black & grey plastic was before. Granted, there may well be cheap plastic in there, but this is a Dell that I would be proud to have on my desk. The specs also show it would make a good TV media centre – if only I could install OS X on it! More details on the Hybrid here

Maybe I’ll buy a bloody Dell after all.

Tags: dell, design, hardware, natural

Listen with Delia

Delia Derbyshire has long been considered ahead of her time. One of the earliest creators of electronic music, she is most famous for her work with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in Maida Vale, at which she created the haunting original Dr Who theme, in an age without synthesizers:

A lot of modern musicians like Orbital, Stereolab and Spacemen 3 cite her work as an influence, and it’s easy to to see why.

What sparked this blog post was the news that more of her work has been discovered, some 267 tapes to be exact! All of this is going to be digitized and made available, but in particular was this experimental dance track that she created in the 60’s. Made decades before ‘electronic dance music’ really happened, and yet it sounds like something created today.

This clip from a BBC Four documentary gives some insight into how she created music with reel to reel tapes:

Sadly she died in 2001 at 64, just after rediscovering her love of electronic music, working with Peter Kember (Spacemen 3, Sonic Boom), of which she said:

“Working with people like Sonic Boom on pure electronic music has re-invigorated me. He is from a later generation but has always had an affinity with the music of the 60s. Now without the constraints of doing ‘applied music’, my mind can fly free and pick-up where I left off.”

Discover more about her life at delia-derbyshire.org

Tags: drwho, electronica, music, sound

Geneviève Gauckler on CBBC?

I’m big fan of the French artist/illustrator Geneviève Gauckler, having discovered her work via the Guardian Angel Room project.

Now, I’m not sure why, but I was really surprised to see her work (or at least her style) in the backgrounds of CBBC, the site for BBC’s youth output.

I’ve tried to do a bit of searching, but no information is forthcoming, and I can’t see a credit anywhere. I’m surprised, can anyone tell me if these really are her work?

There’s also wallpapers available too:

Tags: art, bbc, cbbc, illustration

Opera Web Standards Curriculum

Gawd Bless™ Chris MIlls and Gawd Bless™ Opera, for together with authors like Norm they have begat the Opera Web Standards Curriculum.

I linked to this in my sidenotes a couple of days ago, but really felt it deserved a bit more attention, considering the extraordinary amount of work that has gone into it.

Opera’s new Web Standards Curriculum, released in association with the Yahoo! Developer Network, is a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics. It already has support from many organizations (including Yahoo! and the Web Standards Project) and universities. The first 23 articles are currently available, with about 30 more to be published between now and late September.

Finally, there is non-reference resource to point people to, where they can actually learn in stages what web standards mean, and how to adopt and use them to build a better web. Heartily slapped backs to all of the contributors!

Tags: education, opera, webstandards

The Stolen Earth Punditry

This is for those who watched (and care about!) Dr Who episode 12 The Stolen Earth, so be warned – there are spoilers!

This email landed this morning:

“I’m surprised to not see a Dr Who post on your blog. Are we going to get one? Will David Tennant be staying? Did you feel a pang of sadness at the thought of losing our current doctor?”

Ah, go on then.

I don’t think this is when David Tennant leaves, and I base that solely on the fact that he’s been seen filming the Christmas Episode! However, some points against that though:

• It’s possible that the production team kept his leaving secret – after all they had planned that Rose would be coming back, and managed to keep it secret for a couple of years.
• Catherine Tate did put her foot in it by saying this was his last season, after which there was an air of ‘she let the cat out of the bag’
• The scenes for the Christmas episode may be flashbacks, or some other ‘Time-Crash’ style plot device. Or even a complete Red Herring.
• Ood Sigma telling him that his “song may soon end” (although I take this to refer to Professor River Song – too literal?)

Still, my feeling is that next year’s special episodes will be his last. 3-4 years is the usual reign for a Doctor, and I’m sure that he would want to move on soon. He’s a great actor after all, and wouldn’t want to be typecast no matter how much of a fan he is. I hope he doesn’t go though – he makes even a bad script magic to watch.

So if this isn’t his last story, as I’m reckoning, then that leaves some issues. Will they back out and do some cringey plot device about how he regenerated but ‘came back the same’? Hopefully not, but here’s my theory: There was a brief mention to Donna that she ‘had something on her back’ – referencing the previous episode (Apparently Dextrus says this to Donna in ‘Fires of Pompeii’, but I missed that reference). There is still a Time Beetle™ on her back, and once some other choice is reversed, it will undo all these events. Anyway, we’ll see come Saturday!

Tags: drwho, punditry