The Woodbine Pub, originally uploaded by Wolfgang Haak.

Let me introduce to you: The Woodbine. My local pub is cool enough to warrant an entry on the blog. It’s open late, there’s no carpet, the decoration is fun and eclectic, the crowd is pleasant and good looking, the bar staff attentive, the music genre is mostly classic rock, it’s open late, got sofa’s and armchairs. If it had a fireplace it would be the best pub in London. I’ll be back plenty of times.

See the rest of the set over at flickr.

One of my favourite travel web-sites is the fabulous Atlas Obscura. If it didn’t exist, one would have to invent it. Although I doubt I would be able of such great feat myself.

To make a long story short, it’s simply a fantastic sight to visit, for everyone interested in Landscape design, sculptures, overgrown gardens, romanticism, esoterica or whatever morbid fantasies may draw you there. Even a cold and cloudy Easter Saturday made a worth while trip. Entry is £7 for an hour-long guided tour. The guides are volunteers and the money goes towards funding restoration, which the place is in dire need of.

As the lady the lead my group noted:

We don’t receive any government money so it’s more of a case of managed neglect.

Below you marvel at my snaps, there’s more info at the Atlas Obscura Website

and the Highgate Cemetery Website here.

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One of my weird t-shirt idea’s is available at Spreadshirt!

Inspired by the infamous  “Be Calm and Carry on!” WWII poster as discovered by Barter Books, this shirt reads:

Get it here: Spreadshirt.co.uk

Several years ago,

with the emergence of IKEA, Habitat and co. , the excitement of inexpensive furniture that was good looking and stylish took the western world in a storm. And it is blindingly clear why. Prior to the IKEA era (no disrespect for similar approaches that predate IKEA, but history has the unkind manner of only remembering those who pushed themselves hardest into the collective memory) there was a distinct absence of affordable decorations available. Cheap and nasty was contrasted by beautifully styled/crafted and prohibitively expensive.

For me personally the novelty of IKEA has since worn off. No longer do I receive their annual catalogue, nor does any sense of excitement pre-empt a visit to any of their stores. On the contrary, the continual disappointment with pieces of furniture after successful assembly when my eye wearily wondered over the inevitable spray of chipboard dust that threatened never to be vacuum cleaned out of the carpet again reinforced the understanding that IKEA furniture (for my liking) is best observed from the safety of their catalogue.

And after over one year of moving into my flat I was still falling over a few left-over boxes spew n around the place, with no hope of having a genuinely cool, well built and contemporary shelf to house the content of the boxes.

To the rescue came an idea that I have had for along time. I wanted to build shelves and furniture from pieces of scaffolding. Their rough and hard finish are the perfect marriage for a day to day material while being inexpensive, flexible, readily sourced and easily modded.

The real trouble however is sourcing the stuff. You see it everywhere, scaffold-like systems are used as racks in fashion stores, as rails in buses, urban trains and underground carriages, handrails in car parks and mobile barriers. But if you search for scaffolding on-line, or ask a retailer, it’s always a disappointment. What shows up are these giant gauge and clunky components sturdy enough to construct a medium rise building, but the stuff I saw around and craved was no-where to be found.

That’s because they are called “Key Camps”, not scaffolding. The smaller gauge items are fixed together with connectors that use Allen Key grub screws hence “Key clamps and tubes”.

Tools and precaution.

The amount of 3.2m size 6 (33.7mm dia) tubes and clamps came delivered in a truck. Gross weight: 98kg. It is pretty obvious that key clamps systems are heavy, hard and unforgiving to anything you smash into. So get a friend to help carrying the tubes around to avoid damage to yourself and your surroundings.

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For personal protection:

• sturdy food wear. Saftey shoes if you have them
• gloves. The cutting edges and manufacturing seams cam be razor sharp and pierce skin and clothes.
• safety goggles. You only have two eyes.
• strong clothes
• knee pads. I used my rollerblade ones, as I’ll often kneel when working with heavy items.

Tools:

• measuring tape
• fine tip marker ( to mark tubes for cutting)
• clamps (I used two sash-clamps, which really stabilize the tube while cutting)
• decent quality allen key (you’ll be opening and fastening the screws several times, so it pays to have decent tool to avoid “rounding” the grub screws!)
• Optional: torque wrench (all manufacturers specify a max torque, which is serves to avoid any slipping of the components and avoids damaging stuff)
• spirit level
• a friend to help, the stuff is heavy!

The variety of available sizes and connectors is bewildering and these clamps are unbelievably versatile. I already have a number of cool applications in mind, with something this cool and flexible, there is such thing as “left-overs” only source material for new projects.”

The actual shelves I made from the cheapest wood available, sawn timbers, 25×50mm. I simply fashioned them into sort of mini palettes, as a fitting homage to all things urban. Lidl shops have them, the Ikea warehouse is full of them, and as unseen as millions of them transport our everyday goods around the globe, there is always one or two lying around in a skip at the end of you road. Must have urban accessory.

Cycling Highways? Boris you should learn how to walk before you can cycle. London’s streets are in a state of disrepair that won’t go away by merely talking about “excellence”, “militant about cycling”and  “world class” alone. Get the shovel out and keep the drivel to yourself.

Somehow I don’t think this kind of damage is going away by glueing down some coloured resin bonded gravel. It’s going take a fair bit of more work than that to turn London into a cycle friendly city. You can probably guess that I’m writing this because I’m angry somehow. And you’re absolutely right. A couple of weeks ago I was nearly thrown off my bike when I hit a severe pothole that broke my front rim in the instant of impact. My anger over the almost £100 I spend on a new front rim, tire and tube isn’t eased when these dirt tracks that London’s Mayor Boris Johnson wants to turn into “cycle highways” rattle the fillings out of my teeth.  At times you can not avoid going over these crevices because of the traffic situation. Neither does appear safe to slow down when there’s a hoard of cyclists following close behind – so you’re left with no option but to brave it through these assault courses.

If I hear Boris drivel on about Cycling Highways, and this is the state of roads we have to deal with, I can only conclude that delusion must a way of life for Boris.
View London Potholes – Cycling Danger in a larger map

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What can I add to that.  It’s early morning, I’m on my way to work. Waiting as most people with “plugs” in my ears, drinking a fresh coffee under the sterile lights deep underground on the cavernous platform, when I noticed that us passengers are not the only ones occupying the seats. There is someone on the empty seats, too.

On every one of them. I keep my head down, and hope I let “them” not know that I discovered “them”, maybe they’ll leave me in peace too. Scary stuff so early in the morning.

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google gears,

oh, dear oh, dear.

another website of mine (www.burstofcolour.com) is hosted on a seriously slow server. Cash is short supply atm, so I thought, I’d be smart and install Google Gears as this will help speeding up wordpress.

Follow the link to gears.google.com (temporarily allow scripts from google.com in ScriptBlock) and after a refresh you’d think you’re almost there.

But the clever guys over at Google haven’t figured out that on of the biggest Linux distros Debian, call their browser Iceweasel instead of Firefox, although they’re build from the same sources! It’s some legal issue apparently, but Debian’s interpretation of the GNU PL and shouldn’t concern Google. However Google uses the USER AGENT part of the HTTP REQUEST HEADER to read and id the browser. Of course Iceweasel reports “Iceweasel” and Google prevents the installation.

Simple workaround?

in a new tab, type “about:config”  (without the “”) into the address bar and confirm. Click through the warning and search for “useragent” (without the “”) Double click to change the value from

Iceweasel/3.x.x

to:

Firefox/3.x.x

(leave everything after and including the / intact)

The effect is instant, no restart required. Just navigate to gears.google.com and install. Once you’re done, simply revert the value back to Iceweasel.

You just out-smarted google. Even better, there are a few add-ons and plugins/other solutions available that allow you to do this, but why sintall stuff, restart, etc, when this one works a treat!

Share you thoughts in the comments!

Dangermouse: Name is the game

DJ Dangermouse has done it again. An incredible album. Loads of people love it. A lot of people call it “Album of the year”, and you can’t buy it, cos EMI killed it.

Some lawyer, jobsworth, moron, accountant, employee over at EMI obviously believes that if DJ Dangermouse’s creation won’t fit into a legal framework 300 years old  (no kiddin, kids. 1709 a.d.!) , then no-one can have it. So Dangermouse did what he did before, and pulled the plug. Anyway, someone “unkown” pushed it up on all sorts of filesharing sites where it happily lives today. Funnily enough, non of the 13 artists working with Dangermouse on it complained out that, which is a well as saying they put it up for download themselves.

Album is hauntingly beautiful and fresh, turn on your fav torrent client and enjoy this Gem. My favourite is track 12, “Grain Augury”, which sends shivers down my spine. The emotion that reverberates through the lead’s voice (who?) is outright haunting!

Both our families
Are to gathering
For cutting the baby out
With my grandmother’s heirloom antler-handled carving knife

They were under her grand chandelier
Where we altogether have shared holiday dinner
But it was YOUR father that was holding the knife!

Yeah, I begged me not to make me tell ya
Yeah, I pleaded with ya
To leave it alone

I told ya, I told you that
You didn’t want to know
What went in my horrible dream

I was peering in through the picture window
It was a heartwarming tableau like a Norman Rockwell painting
Until I zoomed in

I was making noises in my sleep
But you wouldn’t believe me when I told ya that I wasn’t with someone
In my dream

Catfish were wriggling in blood and gore in the kitchen sink!

Yeah, I told ya, I told ya, I told you …
You …

I often tune into documentaries, radio programmes etc while at work. I work  in 3D graphics, which often involves almost mechanical tasks, like checking and converting endless iterations of data sets as assets for crating 3D environments.  They are mind-numbingly simple and should be automated, only, I’m not a good script writer, and secondly, until a script can handle the info in the required way for a one-off project, you’re better off doing it by hand. Anyway, I need to entertain my mind, and listening to info porn documentaries has become my latest obsession.

One of the first hits for the search term “documentary” on youtube brings up a wealth of entrainment, and no – this is not meant in an educational way. Take “New Swirled Order” as an example, a 2009 “crop circle documentary”. I doubt you sue your company for “injuries sustained at work” due to  “falling of your chair laughing” , because the corporate firewall didn’t prohibit you from watching it.

Anyway enter the genre of environmental documentaries.
There are quite a few, a lot of them interesting and system-shocking and wake-up-sad.

• Take FLOW (For the Love Of Water) as an example. some things we should know about the politics of water, and don’t blame me if you get a chilling effect of deja-vu.
• Or take End of the Line, a documentary that despite its “action buster” musical score leaves you very concerned about that state of our oceans. Never mind the politics of food in general.

But amongst gems and jokes, where a few films that caught my attention. And they involved the subject of Peak Oil. I had (I’ll freely admit) no idea what the term meant, but it immediately suggests the notion that all fossil fuels are a finite resource, and that they will run out at some point.  (You have to bear in mind how long it takes to make a fresh batch, vs. the current consumption). So films about this subject should make interesting watching (listening in my case).

The first candidate (Understanding Peak Oil)  indeed held up to expectations, rapid cuts between snippets of interviews of honourably looking gentlemen, overlaid historic footage, plenty of repetition to fill an hour of program  without dropping below the attention threshold, a few facts and numbers thrown in between to beef up the claims and keep any notion of critical approach firmly locked out.

The second one , Oil Smoke and Mirrors , was far worse. Pretty much a one to one clone of “Understanding Peak Oil” the experts that gave testimony to the camera crew waited until the middle of the film before systematically dismantling any of their white lab coat authority as they buried their arguments deep in the excavation pits of NY’s ground zero.  In its defence, if I had known that the film’s tagline is ” There is no war on terror ” I wouldn’t have bothered with watching it in the first place.

Now is the time to invest in micro-solar equipment:

From these two films I was intrigued as to how big the BS factor in these films really is, or if I’m the last person understand the problem. A quick search on google for “peak oil” throws up an unsurprising amount of hits, but domain names such as “lifeaftertheoilcrash.net”, “peakoil.com/net/org” and “oildecline.com” and “peak-oil-crisis.com” give the whole argument new interest. Naturally I followed “www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net”, goolge teased me with the meta extract “Examines the impact of the depletion of the world’s oil reserves and its consequences for the world economy and population”. Irresistible.

What greets you on the far side of the click is a heaven of subtlety, style and bulletproof research. The internetz is not made of tubes, it’s made of 1980’s home improvement catalogues. Read the Pulitzer Prize attracting introduction:

“Dear Reader,

Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely-respected geologists physicists, bankers, and investors in the world.”

followed on the side panel by:

Now is the time to invest in micro-solar equipment

It would be far stretched to accuse the owner of the website web-shop of hypocrisy or  scaremongering selling an array of post-apocalyptic survival tools such as “made from petroleum” solar ovens, torches, ponchos, photovoltaic devices, walkie-talkies, and a collection of grow your own veggies  books. Scout essentials such as the “US Army Survival Handbook” can’t be missing in this collection either.

The Freeze dried annual supply of dodgy food can’t be left out by those who take their survival seriously. Because even if oil runs out, and all supplies fail as lorries railways and merchant ships run out of fuel, you, your children and grandchildren can easily stave off any long term problems by opening up another can.

Well then, what’s the fuss all about?

Sapolsky’s outstanding Stanford lecture on “The Uniqueness of Humans”

Reblogged/Bookmarked from Boingboing.net

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/10/sapolskys-outstandin.html