This is the cover of this weeks magazine. Nice headline huh? Because of this you should expect, as I did, to possibly find fortnights edition to be nestled between more, erm, specialist magazines. You know the ones with nekkid ladies all over them? Yeah, there. Especially if, like me, you buy your literature from motorway service stations. At least they didn’t put them in an opaque white bag.

The Boxee box

This alpha potential has been realized in the form of the newly announced beta and the Boxee Box. Although Boxee is quite intuitive to use, it can be a total bugger to setup, as was XBMC before it. Your options are hack your Apple TV or build a Linux machine and dive into a bundle of .debs and Pulse audio problems. Oh, and good luck on 64-bit Ubuntu, it’s a bloody nightmare! The Boxee Box removes all these headaches and essentially makes Boxee suitable for non-geeks. It’s built by DLink, who in my experience seem to churn out reasonable rooters/modems, and we’re promised it’ll cost a quite reasonable $200. This investment will open up a world of couch-accessible online content. There is a growing amount of independent media available online and bringing it from tiny laptop screens and onto that new 37″ monster you have in your living room could be the shot in the arm that many indie shows need.

I was going to blog about how stupid the case design was. “Don’t they understand that people are still going to have audio equipment/a DVD recorder/etc under their TV?”, I prepared myself to rant, “don’t they realize that such a bizarre shape will make it impossible to stack and fit under televisions?”. But as further details have emerged, it seems that the Box is so small that none of this should be a concern and as the remote control is RF then you could even hide it behind your flat-screen if you want.

This thing is seriously small

The closest thing we’ve seen to this has been the Apple TV, which like Boxee could view web content. But being Apple, you were tied into the Apple iTunes marketplace, and thinking. No thanks, Jobs, no DRM crap for me. The Boxee Box’s design, cost and potential have lead to a very desirable little product and it is a testament to the Open-source projects that have gone before it. Put me down for one.

(More details on the Boxee blog)

As is the norm now for most new BBC television programs, it takes about 7 minutes to get started. Those first 7 minutes of the show are catching up, explaining what happened in the previous episode. In this day of Sky+, HDD recorders and (more importantly) iPlayer, is this necessary? I know it makes the show cheaper to make, but for crying out loud. Just make it a little shorter if you’re going to piss around so much.

It’s shot beautifully well and we get to see plenty of the beautiful bits of Paris, as apposed to the hours and hours of shots of that bloody Gerkin thing in London that anyone who watches the Apprentice has forced upon them. When talking about this show, I’m going to compare it to the Apprentice, because the similarities are obvious (and I’m lazy). It features a team of designers (business men?) who fight to show they are the best designer (most shouty business man?) to prove they can work with designer extraordinaire, Philipee Stark (Suralun?).

the Design for Life participants

Participant Nebil is the most ‘Apprentice like’, because he patronizes everyone he gets to talk to. This probably is an attempt to look better than everyone else but at least he does know his shit. I’m sure that to anyone who actually has their design game-face on, his “let me just explain this too you, thicko” tone will probably make him look like a bit of a dick. Still, he gets a lot of screen time because he has a lot to say and even his dick-ishness is minor compared with the mega-cocks that rut around in any given episode of the Apprentice. He gets his come-upance tho, which is another reason why I love this show. It’s obvious that the shows producers set him off against the other stand-out, Ilsa, because she’s got a pretty good set of claws and will bite back.

I guess a large part of the show will boil down to “do you like Philipee Stark”. I do. Him and his bloody chairs, or whatever the hell he’s supposed to be most famous for. He’s pretentious, but y’know he’s a brilliant designer so he can afford to be and after all, this is design. You’re supposed to be pretentious. He also dismisses the participants easily, based on some seemingly whimsical idea he has. Again: he’s a designer. I’ve had designers happily shit on my ideas in the past and non of them were exactly Phillipee Stark. At least when he drops people he’s really nice about it. I’d love to be sacked by him. None of this catch-phrase “You’re fired” crap. I also like his attitude towards ‘wasteful’ design. He’s green without being sickly. Personally Alan Sugar really gets on my tits because turned Amstrad into crap (I love my old CPC6128) and I tire of his attitude and his stupid Labour ‘business-tzar’ beard.

Further contrasts to the Apprentice are easy to highlight. The participants are young, attractive and probably smell quite good. They are also very, very white. And middle class uni-graduates. They actually get very visibly nervous, which makes you feel a little more sympathetic. Hell, in the 2nd episode one of the participants has a genuinely great idea: Polly and her water-level meter. What have the Apprentice chimps ever done, but chuck crap at each other? Design for Life actually talks about design. Pitching, ideas, briefs, presentations and all the bullshit in-between. That’s some real genuine content from the BBC.

The show is at 9.00pm on BBC 2, Mondays but you can follow the show here, on iPlayer.

As an aside; it’s narrated by Adam ‘Adam + Joe’ Buxton. I look forward to the DVD release where Joe does a funny-man voice-over.

Via the ever brilliant @bengoldacre – an essential follow.

Here in the UK we sometimes like to poke fun at the US’s attitude to current affairs reporting. Maybe we’ll laugh at the CNN homepage as it becomes full of reports of Britneys latest outburst. Or possibly we’d compare measured debate on Newsnight to O Reily / Becks insane outbursts. But on the web and especially at Current TV, the US often takes the intellectual high-ground (or at least the high-brow ground).  I attach the following as evidence from my Twitter client:

Current TV in my twitter feed

Sadly, this sort of contrast is pretty typical. If you don’t believe me, I recommend you go to the Current website and use the top-right icon to switch between the British and American versions. So in short: come on Current UK! You’ve got some great staff and in the UK we’d love some relevant localised reporting. Surpass your US brother and don’t fall into the Heat Magazine pit.

(yes, I realise I posted this just after kittens. Shameful)

The 10:10 campaign was launched in the Tate Modern because obviously a more smug middle class location was not available.I think the 10:10 tags are set to become some of this years more desirable items. Like those ‘Make Poverty History’ bracelets (I wonder how that one turned out?). All in all I think it’s a great idea. However it may contain too many elements which put us in danger of creating a wall of smugness that distances those who honestly care about climate change from those who are yet to sign up for the full effort.

Web developer hat on: The 10:10 website is superb in both it’s design and execution, except totally unnecessary use of flash of course.

What do you think? What are the blogs saying? What have twitter-users voted? All questions that are asked by the ‘mainstream media’ in their desperate (and some might say futile) attempt not to be rendered completely irrelevant by ‘new media’. This video, although obviously delivered tongue in cheek, is actually quite believable. There is less of a whirlwind of tacky special effects and switching between scenes on tv news here in the UK, but the desperate call for viewer feedback is still there. It’s gotten quite embarrassing; even on previously quite clever shows like Newsnight.

Maybe it’ll stop. Maybe Rupert Murdoch will work out how to use robots.txt. Probably not before we’ve all stopped getting our news from our television sets.

Stewart Lee

Stewart Lee isn’t just good at pissing off Christians, he’s also a very funny stand-up comic. Now he might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s great to have a comedian on that early in the evening on BBC2 who doesn’t insult my intelligence. Especially as he spends most of the time slagging off the BBC staples of Moyles, Clarkson et al. It’s not even a one off. He’s got a series out of it. God knows who let that happen. Presumably the same person who allowed the classic TMWRNJ with Richard Herring. It’s even produced by Armando Iannucci for crying out loud! What more do you people want?

Last nights show focused on ‘Toilet Books’, or rather celebrity hardbacks. Leigh deals with the whole thing not with anger, or angst but with a lofty disapproval. He’s cleverer than all of us (and of course much funnier). That’s just something we have to deal with.

See it on iPlayer here for the next few days.

And yes, it’s got the actor Kevin Eldon in it, obviously.

Star of this is Ed Helms of course, who’s musical stylings are probably the best part of the whole show. This post is primarily for one of my keenest commenters, Rami.

via Huff post

Coulter wrote, “Her obvious imitation of Jackie O’s style – the flipped-under hair, the sleeveless A-line dresses, the short strands of fake pearls – would have been laughable if done by anyone other than a media-designated saint.”

Coulter said Cindy McCain, the wife of vanquished GOP nominee John McCain, “dressed well without freakishly imitating famous First Ladies in history.”

I found this amusing for two reasons; Firstly, Jackie dressed exactly how a first lady should. Any emulation of her look is common-sense for any woman lucky enough to be able to pull it off (read: not the Bush wives). Secondly, Cindy McCain? Well dressed?

A 'well dressed' Cindy McCain

I can’t remember if that was before or after she stopped playing with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Yup; lets hope Coulter gets that jaw un-wired again and we can enjoy her dropping bitchy lol-bombs well after the inauguration.

via Huffington Post