For anyone reading this blog who lives in and around the area (or just passing through), I thought you may be interested in a Fun Day which my parents have been organising in memory of my brother... it's basically a nice day out in the country with lots of fun & entertainment (sheep racing, pig roast, bar and more) - it's happening on the 6th of September, you can see the full details on the poster below...

Check out the awesomeness in these… a company who custom makes rooms for kids…

I was playing around on YouTube yesterday and decided to make a playlist of every DMC champion from 1987 onwards. It's interesting to watch each 6 minute set to see how the skills (and music) have progressed. I remember being blown away seeing DJ Noize do his thing on TV back in 1996 — watching the anthology it’s clear that his approach changed things quite a lot.

YouTube’s great ain’t it!

I’d live in these — without a second thought.

Great micro-doc on the worlds largest record collection. I love this and as much as I enjoy digital music it’s such a shame that a huge portion of history will eventually get forgotten. It’s the same with VHS > DVD > Blu Ray — as each new format comes along only mainstream productions get converted.

I wouldn't normally post skateboard footage here… but this is truly inspiring.

A very sexy flashback from the late nineties, the effort that must have gone in into creating the art for this is just mindblowing.

Via Joystiq

And my first post in the TAK! blog as well, double awesome!

I’ve had it with Firefox 3. What should be a relatively lo-fi experience of ‘browsing the internet’ seems to be the most difficult task for this browser to handle. Maybe it’s trying to do to much and forgetting that is the core Firefox role?

For the past few weeks every 30 seconds of browsing time is punctuated by an annoying 3 second pause (beachball) as the browser plays catch up with itself. This tends to happen during the funny bits in YouTube videos or crucially when I press 'Proceed' in a checkout.

Maybe it’s deliberate?

The most recent spate of issues center around the browser totally smashing my computer’s processor. The fans kick in and everything grinds to a halt. Any input in any application takes forever and is only fixed by pressing the blue button below.

What gives? Don’t get me wrong — I see the potential in the browser — I love the new bookmark tagging and plug-ins (I only run a couple btw) but if this hinders the core process of accessing the internet then sorry — but it’s time to uninstall. That has to be the drastic measure — by keeping it on my hard drive, instinct will surely make me fire it up again.

So where next? Maybe… I might give Camino a whirl. It’s by Mozilla and is pretty decent. I might also give Flock a try. It’s a social networking aware browser which seems quite interesting. Or it’s back to Safari — but for some reason it isn’t storing my passwords correctly… sheesh!

For those ready to defend Firefox — I'm running on a 2.2Ghz Core Duo Macbook with 10.5 & 4gigs of RAM — should be more than plenty!

“Screen WM is the leading agency for film, television and digital media in the West Midlands”

Back in April we won a tender to redesign and redevelop the Screen WM website.We won the pitch based on our design skills and the simplicity of our CMS technology.

The site features clearer information structure as well as a comprehensive events calendar and video channel. The site also features numerous blogs and news sections to communicate all that is happening in the region. All this is powered by our in-house developed CMS — Wrapper. The result is a super fast site which is customised to the client.

Future updates will allow event submissions, possible video submissions and more. Watch this space.

Our shop is now open for business. We’ll be adding some more stuff in there over the next few weeks… for now you can buy our ‘Zine & bag. Woot!

Ah man… why don’t things like this happen in the UK?

Love this video for the Bomb The Bass track - sweeeet!

Birmingham city council has admitted to distributing a leaflet which shows an urban landscape of  Birmingham… in Alabama. I have to admit, I've googled the weather forecast for 'Birmingham' on several occasions and been shocked with the hot temperatures it forcasts… only to realise I'm actually looking at the US namesake.

Read the BBC news article.

Thanks to Joe for sharing the link, and this link.

Here's an interesting web app — Blip.fm is like a musical Twitter. Whereas sometimes I struggle to see the point of Twitter, Blip.fm demonstrated it’s genius within about 10 mins of use.

After signing up, you add DJ’s into a favorites list. These DJ’s are people who are into similar music you are into, they can be friends or strangers. Each Blip user when they particularly dig a tune ‘blips’ it. This tune then appears on the playlists of your followers. Likewise if a DJ you are following is vibing on a tune, then you too will get their recommendation. Your homepage acts as a giant playlist of musical blips and it’ll sequentially play through each track one by one.

Personally, I think works a lot better than the auto-selected Last.fm model which is based on listening habits. The Blip model is hand picked. Music should be hand picked.

Excellent!

Edit: I forgot to add - the service seems to have every tune under sun - not sure how... but I suppose that is the deciding factor - without music the service fails.

Thanks to Iain for the tip off…

Hand crafted wallets from North America. Some great stuff in here - wish I could afford...