emconsteroids

Today, I was helping my sister to sell her Recycled Magic Wallets at Brick Lane Market (Back Yard Market).

On one of the stalls, an Italian fellow was selling cheap chinese imported sun glasses for £5 a pair. He was the “odd man out” in the market as everyone else was selling hand made stuff. Yet it seems that his stall seemed to be one of the most popular ones. It was the perfect prove that the price was what makes people buy stuff. Everyone liked the idea of my sister’s Recycled Magic Wallets, yet hardly anyone appreciated the work which was needed to produce them. Let alone pay for it. It’s sad but a hard fact. Cheap stuff from China still sells better quantities than good hand made local craftsmanship. And better quantities gives more profit. And more profit gives more incentive.

You can see more pictures of Recycled Magic Wallets on Flickr.

NOTE: My sister still sold a couple of wallets. Not everyone was just looking at the price. There are people who appreciate ideas, innovation and hard work.

Some search engine caught everyone’s attention today. Cuil was supposed to be the next Google according to - well, first of all, … Google. But also the New York Times, the BBC, SlashDot, CNET and much more…

I’ve been working on a “new approach to web search” for a while either, and what Cuil did, I must say, is very clever.

If you search for anything which for sure will not yield in any results, for example jakldfjasdfhjklasdfaajdkfla, you will be facing a error message saying “No results because of high load…”.

I highly doubt that this has to do anything with the load. They are just not prepared to admit that there is simply no result for this query at all.

This rises the question: What is better? Admitting that there is too much load or admitting that there is no result at all? I’d go for the latter. Unless you’re cheating. Meaning, while showing the error message, going sneakingly grabbing results from other search engines and aggregate them. Or why else would you write “Please try your search again.”? You would only do that if you know that the next attempt would return some useful results. Usually, this is the case. Not however with jakldfjasdfhjklasdfaajdkfla.

Of course, the first thing I tried today was the vanity search. At first I got the too much traffic error. At present, I get 1,628 results.

emcons.net gets me currently 398 irrelevant hits. Let’s see how many there will be tomorrow…

Helvetica - the documentary film by Gary Huswit is now available for download in iTunes.

I got myself a limited edition of the movie on DVD last year and saw the movie a couple of times already. Even though it is not exceptionally exciting, it has a few interesting passages. Towards the end of the movie however it’s slightly too long stretched. If you enjoy beautiful fonts though, this is a movie for you. Even just looking at the images makes your heart jump higher … because let’s be honest: Helvetica is the most beautiful typeface ever designed.

What I find striking about the movie being on iTunes are two things:

1.) Distribution has become dirt cheap. Whereas before, you had to produce DVDs including all sorts of material such as DVD packaging, cover design, DVD design and merchandising, nowadays you simply upload it to what is to become the universal gate for software. This is good for the producers, the consumers and above all: Apple. This however is a worry to media distribution companies such as Universal, Sony, Warner and the such.

2.) The second thing that strikes me about this is what I’ve just done can be done easily: recommending or linking to it. This for sure will drive sales as a sale is basically less than 5 clicks or 5 seconds away from here. I find it wrong that I can generate value for all those guys mentioned above (the consumers, the producers and Apple) without seeing a single penny.

Something has to be invented here. I’m working on it. Stay tuned!

I’ve written about Net Neutrality earlier on a more academic angle. The below video also gives you the more popular view on what the issue is all about:

Spread the word! Net Neutrality is where all our innovation bases on.

Shouldn’t this say “25 knots = 46.3 kilometers per hour” ?

A video recommended to watch not only from the aesthetical but also from the content point of view.

Just about the right thing at the moment to attract a lot of attention. Via Mayari’s Blog

Welcome my younger sister Tanja to the blogsphere. Her blog “Mayari’s Blog” can be found under www.mayari.net/blog. We will all be excited to read what you have to say, Sis. And I am convinced that there’s a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas you will be sharing with us.

I believe that a large number of wars these days can be traced back to misunderstandings. Understanding each other is the fundamental base on which we can communicate and exchange, share and maybe dispute on thoughts, ideas, ideologies and moral concepts. Unfortunately it’s all already failing at the communication - the fact that we speak different languages.

This image found on foreignpolicy.com is - though not contributing much to world peace - a tiny sign in the big ocean of misunderstandings that there are efforts to understand each other. This is the very and only foundation on which future disastrous disagreements can be avoided. Hopefully?

A US officer with the 101st Airborne Division learns Arabic at a combat outpost in the northern Iraqi town of Baiji, near the oil city of Kirkuk.

(Image: PATRICK BAZ/AFP/Getty Images via http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/7710)

Gee, flight simulators have come a long way since I’ve used Flight Simulator in MSDOS the first time!

1988 (Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0 for DOS, in front of cloudy Chicago):

Today (X-Plane, TWA flight 707 over Paris):

Who would have thought this? The Sun promotes QR Codes on it’s yesterday issue. On page three to boot:

This is a QR code, a new kind of barcode, and it will revolutionalise the way you use your mobile – and the way you read your Sun.