I seem to encounter more inconsequential pleasures in the kitchen than anywhere else. The other day I was making borscht which usually involves me grating beetroot by hand, a very awkward and tiring job given the quantity I usually make. This time though I had the Magimix....

25 year old Magimix still going strong

This is a great piece of design. It feels solid, the plastic exterior wraps around a weighty motor that could run forever, indeed, this Magimix is around 25 years old. Best of all it has no buttons. To operate it you do no more than set the container on the base and snap the lid into place. Genius. It is so straightforward I find it charming. No instructions are required; it cannot work any other way. Not only isn't it overcomplicated, it also doesn't add complexity to the tasks it's designed to help accomplish.

I've watched the WWDC 2008 Keynote Address and it gets interesting from about twenty minutes in when new iPhone apps are presented. The two demos I really liked were:

• Finding out where friends are and what they're doing with Loopt
• Retrieving local news with the Associated Press

They're interesting because they rely on geolocation to provide relevant information which is a really useful implementation of the technology. The functionality of the iPhone looked seamless across the board; in fact the whole Keynote with its map of the iPhone's coming world domination was extremely slick. Worth a look.

Normally I stick to saving interesting sites I find to del.icio.us. You can see the latest finds at the bottom of the column to the right. This site merits a special mention however. It's The Big Picture, a photo blog from The Boston Globe's news site. It collects the best photography from key events happening around the globe with each image comfortably sized to fill your browser window at standard resolutions. Apart from a caption to give a little context there is no story with the photographs, the images are left to speak for themselves. A brilliant idea and one bound to become very popular very quickly due to the quality of the photographs chosen. Check out these images from the Chaiten Volcano erupting in Chile:

REUTERS / Carlos Gutierrez

Daylife offers something similar to explore, but without the careful choice of a range of pictures, although this one caught my attention.

1 original comment:

Thanks, I’ve been meaning to track down a decent sized version of that volcano pic. Or more specifically this one: http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/chaiten_06_0... which I saw in the paper. Awesome shot.
Comment by Rich — 13 June, 2008 @ 6:28 pm

As mentioned in my post about switching from Blogger to Wordpress I took Adam up on his recommendation to use 5quidhost.co.uk for hosting. I had no problems setting everything up but following the one-click upgrade to move to Wordpress 2.5 I started getting the error 'HTTP 406 Not acceptable' when saving posts I was editing. A lot of other people have had a similar experience, apparently it's related to mod_security settings and some of the advice was to switch this off via the .htaccess file. Presumably it's on for a reason and I don't know enough to go messing so dropped an email to support at 5quidhost. The issue was resolved that day. That's pretty amazing service so if you're looking for cheap hosting with great customer support then they get my recommendation.

2 original comments:

Similarly good experience here. Our site disappeared on Wednesday night due to (as Mark was first to point out) a denial of service attack affecting some of 5quid’s servers. Not their fault, and they managed to get it back up and running pretty quickly. Before I knew of the DOS attack I mailed them to ask what was up.
Amazingly, they took the time to reply and added me to a temporary mailing list that they created to keep the owners of affected sites informed.
Comment by handolio — 6 June, 2008 @ 7:56 pm

and I thought you were bored with technology handolio… shouldn’t you be hangin’ at the library instead of mooching about in cyberspace? ;)
Comment by Joe — 12 June, 2008 @ 9:37 pm

Ye gads. The Guardian is reporting Ban Ki-moon as saying that world food production needs to rise by 50% by 2030. Perhaps we could magic up a source of cheap energy, de-salinate seawater and irrigate the desert? Or perhaps increases in production to feed the hungry we already have could go hand-in-hand with a crash programme of policies to reduce our population and hence our ever greater demands on an over stretched biosphere? Just a thought. Oh, hang on, The Guardian's article is topped by a photo of Ban Ki-moon with the Pope. Rational and workable solutions to overpopulation will just have to wait. Have more kids, we've got the loaves and fishes on standby.