ABC3D does what it says on the tin. A 3D version of the alphabet. Each page pops up a letter or two in a very ingenious way.

See the video below for the book in action. It can be bought from the publishers website @ http://us.macmillan.com/abc3d.

Good luck to anyone willing to give the Khmer alphabet a go… :S

Scottish brewery BrewDog is set to launch a beer of ‘nuclear’ proportions.

The beer, named Tactical Nuclear Penguin, weighs in at a whopping 32% alcohol content. BrewDog have stated the drink should be enjoyed in small measures and responsibly and presumably at £35 a bottle, slowly

The beer beats the last winner of the World’s Strongest Beer, Schorschbraer, which weighed in at 31%. After releasing a beer called Tokyo that was 18%, BrewDog were called irresponsible and subsequently released a low alcohol beer, Nanny State.

BrewDog have stated on their blog that they will be producing 500 330ml bottles of Tactical Nuclear Penguin. 250 of which will be available at £35 a bottle. The other 250 will be at £250 a bottle complete with a share in the company.

I am a big fan of BrewDog beers and a bottle or nine two of Punk IPA often frequents my shopping basket after a hard week at work. BrewDog beers always have great working on the side of the bottles, I like the humour that comes with a bottle, it really adds to the experience. Here is what the Nuclear Penguin bottle says:

“This is an extremely strong beer, it should be enjoyed in small servings and with an air of aristocratic nonchalance. In exactly the same manner that you would enjoy a fine whisky, a Frank Zappa album or a visit from a friendly yet anxious ghost.“

The first batch of limited edition bottles has already sold out, but you can get on the list for the second lot here: http://www.brewdog.com/product.php?id=46. Also, that doesn’t stop you trying any of the other beers they brew…Trashy Blonde is also great.

Mmmmm beeeeeeer

“…oh what could be better, than a nice whistle wetter…”

I was using Dreamweaver today as I do every day and after going through adding lots of paragraph tags manually I figured there should be a shortcut to enclose text in a <p> tag. I knew of quite a few already such as Ctrl + B to put content in a <strong> tag and Ctrl + G to go to a line you want.

After a quick Google, I found a list of many Dreamweaver shortcuts. Lucky for me there was one for enclosing text in a paragraph (Ctrl + Shift + P).

Below is the complete list I found:

Kuler is a new piece of software from Adobe. It allows you to create colour themes or view ones that have already been created by the Kuler community.

It is free to use online and can also be integrated into your usual Adobe design software (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Firework and Flash). Kuler is also available for download as a desktop application and runs using Adobe Air.

It’s a great way for people who aren’t as design oriented like myself to get a great looking colour scheme going. Once you have created your theme, you can save it for later use.

How does it work?

It works around a five colour theme where there is a base colour and four related colours. nce you have selected the base colour, you can choose how the other four are picked from the six ‘colour harmony rules’. You can also select custome colours where you just drag the pins around the colourwheel youself.
You can re-order the colours by dragging them around in a shuffling kind of way. There is also the option to select the hex values of the colours so you can use them in other programs etc. Or you can paste hex values in yourself and create a theme from one of those.
Basically any way you can think of creating a theme of colours, Adobe have thought of it in Kuler. There’s sliders, RGB values, hex values, CMYK and more. It’s all there.
Once you’ve created the theme, you can save it for later or publish it for everyone in the community to see.

Them’s the rules…

Adobe Kuler uses 6 colour rules that are taken from colour theory, these are: Analogous, Monochromatic, Triad, Complementary, Compound, and Shades. Selecting your base colour and then clicking one of these rules quickly creates a complimentary theme of some variety.

Creating themes from images

Kuler allows you to upload images or even select images from Flickr to create themes. Here you can create them using ‘Moods’. The Moods available for use are: Colorful, Bright, Muted, Deep, Dark, and Custom. These pick colours from the image that you have selected or uploaded.

Community Service

Adobe seem to be creating a great community here whereby you can login with your Adobe ID, share your themes, download themes, comment on themes, rate other peoples themes and search the masses of themes already on there.

Adobe Kuler can be found here: http://kuler.adobe.com/

Chimpanzee riding on a Segway!

Above is Google Street View in action down The Shambles in York.

What is Google Street View?

Google Street View is a 360° view of streets. So instead of the normal view you are used to in Google of looking down upon the street from a birds eye view, it displays in a way that you would walk down it.

The views are all staged every so many metres, so you can move on a bit and then view everything around you and keep doing this as you wander around hopelessly trying to find yourself somwhere!

To gather all this data, Google sent out a number of cars to drive around all the streets in certain cities in the UK. These cars had a multitude of cameras attached taking God knows how much data in as they go. Living in York myself, it was nice to hear that they had driven around our streets. The obvious first thing to do was to find my house

Activating the Street View

To activate the street view, you need to drag the little orange man on the map controls onto a street. As you are dragging him, the streets with Street View activated will turn blue. Once dropped, the view loads and you can then drag the map around and use the controls to change the view and walk the streets.

Invasion of privacy?

There has been a lot of debating as to whether or not this has been a massive invasion of people’s privacy. In York at least the council have been pretty miffed at the fact Google didn’t ask permission to drive around our noble streets….does almighty Google need to ask permission? There must be thousands of people who take footage of York and post it on the net. A quick search on YouTube would find this…

The only people I can see having a major problem with this are the people who have something to hide, perhaps the people who have been spotted coming out of sex shops or in places they weren’t supposed to be, with people they shouldn’t be with or carrying out acts of crime…

I think it’s great and have spent a bit of time wandering my home town. Google Street View is currently in the following cities in the UK: Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Bradford, Scunthorpe, Bristol, London, Belfast, Cardiff, Gateshead, Swansea, Norwich, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Birmingham, Coventry, Liverpool, Southampton, York, Cambridge, Oxford, Watford.

Celeb spotting

There have been a number of supposed spotting of celebrities and other weird and wonderful things on Street View. Things like Wally from Where’s Wally? Liam Gallagher, the Stig and more. I think as more towns and cities catch wind that Google will be driving around their place soon, they will conjour up fun games to spot and play on the Street View.

Comic Relief 2009 at 9xb

Well, it’s that time of year again where people do crazy things in aid of Comic Refief. Countless employees around the UK will be the victim of the head shaving experience on this day, but at 9xb it was Doug’s turn to face the ’shear’ embarassment.

It didn’t start off well though as you can see by the first image, the clippers gave up the ghost after much trying of getting through the first layer of hair on Doug’s trusty bouffon.

“My head itches” – Doug
“Trust me Doug, that’s the least of your worries” – Nick

After the false start and Gyles having to go out to get some new clippers, it was eventually possible to get going on the behemoth that is (or was) Doug’s hair.

I’d say it took a good hour before the hair had gone from bush to chessboard to tidy, trimmed….well skin head!

As this was all in aid of Comic Relief, the hat was passed round and money plopped in from all angles. Eventually 9xb managed o scrape together a healthy £160! Well done chaps!

I went to the City Screen Basement Bar in York the other week and saw Mr David Viner play. I really like the sound he was getting from his guitar and it also looked pretty amazing too. After a little bit of ‘googling’ around, I found out that it was the Gibson ES-150. Very nice and very expensive!

The Gibson ES-150 is thought of as the first Spanish style electric guitar. ES after all stands for ‘Electric Spanish’. The 150 is from the amount in dollars that it cost (with the EH-150 amp and cable) when it first hit the shelves in 1936. $150 for a guitar of that quality! If only it were that little now

Over the years it has been widely used by Jazz musicians because of the loud sound it made that could be more clearly heard in larger orchestras.

The guitar became more popular yet by guitarist Charlie Christian and because of this popularisation, they named the pickup after him.

Wood-n’t it be nice…

The is a big difference between the ES-150 and other archtop guitar. Basically the inside of the guitar back is not carved to match the outside. This means it is not suitable for turning the energy from the strings into sound, which in turn reduces the problem of feedback that you get from other electro-acoustic guitars.

After the war, the “Charlie Christian” pickup was replaced with a p-90 pickup, but this was dis-continued in the 1950’s. Later, the ES-150DC was introduced. It looked a lot different and was in fact more a hollowbody electric guitar than an archtop guitar. This model was not as popular as its predecesor and was discontinued in the mid 70’s.

In summary then…

• It has an interesting history
• It looks great
• It sounds great

Final thoughts…

Where do I buy one?