Charlie Brooker is on form with this article about Microsoft’s new campaign and his disliking of Mac evangelists. You can see the ad he’s on about here »

“It’s so terrible, it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment which I like to call “shitasmia”. It not only creates this emotion: it defines it. It’s the most shitasmic cultural artefact in history.”

So many brilliant quotes:

“Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Stumbled onto Studio On Fire’s blog Beast Pieces. Plenty of gorgeous letterpress work, but particularly taken by the collection of wedding invites they’ve printed. Loving the ligatures on the invite above by (the groom) Jefferson Perky.

It’s interesting that they print a whole set of cards, invites, RSVP’s, thankyou cards etc all in one go – “One of the things that we do to make printing them affordable is run all of the pieces on the same press sheet. Our presses are big enough to run several different cards on the same press sheet, then trim them down to size. This represents a huge cost savings over printing individual cards, setting up the press for each form on each card”.

Lovemix Boombox:

Great old school boombox with the love dial set to max, designed by Adam Ramerth. This design is even available for customisation if you’re interested.

Lovely set:

Loving all the colour combos and mix of paper stock & printing techniques. Great all together set with nice envelope labels, perforated RSVP’s and even tiny little envelope to send it back in. Designed by Erin Jang.

Haven’t actually been there, but I am planning to go next year, only fair since they’ve named a mountain after me ;). Linz (Land Information New Zealand) just released a new series of 1:50k today, so I headed over expecting it part with a fair amount of cash to buy all the maps I needed to walk the 1800 mile Te Araroa. Much to my delight you can download them all for free!

Good work New Zealand, I only wish more countries would make their maps available for free :)

I can’t play guitar, but there’s something irresistible about this amazing banana guitar! Please buy it quick before I succumb to temptation.. Apparently it’s not actually a banana, but rather a moon (Kawai Moonsault), here a video of someone playing one.

Anyhyow,  £3,322.75 started bid… and 4 days left on the auction.

This is alot safer for work than you might think ;) It’s quite a surprisingly good collection of vintage porno title frames and logos, put together by the appropriately named Pornographics agency.

Here’s the video:

Cheers for the link Dickon.

Just found this lovely online store, the London based Present & Correct. “A long-term obsession with stationery has culminated in a constantly evolving store. A selection of P&C products mixed up with handmade goods, vintage items and work by designers from all over the world”.

I could of happily bought just about everything on there, but had to restrain myself! I did pick up this great vintage dymo machine, and this 1949 book on preserving (and a few secret other things). Most of their stuff is one off finds so get over there and have a look before it all gets snapped up.

Dear Gastronaughts, extremely sad to hear the legendary Keith Floyd passed away on Monday, September 14 2009. I watched his cookery shows religously as kid, collected all his cook books to this day. If you’re not from the UK and don’t know who he is, Spitting Image’s 1987 parody should give you a good idea ;)

It’s no surprise really that he would die before his time, but he will be sorely missed.

He should be known for what he did best cooking & boozing so check out this clip of Mussels Mariniere, I think Me and Nicky will be cooking it in honor tonight.

I’ll leave you with a recipe from his hangover book – “probably the most famous moring-after reviver of all time”

The Prairie Oyster

1 measure of cognac
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon Angostura Bitters
Pinch of cayenne
The yolk of 1 free-range egg

Mix together all the ingredients, apart from the cayenne and egg yolk, in a whiskey glass. Add a small pinch of cayenne and drop in the egg yolk. Drink in one without breaking the yolk.

Barrel Photo via: Dion Farrell.

Great time lapse video from German hiker Christoph Rehage growing his beard (and barnet) while walking back home from Beijing?! He didn’t make it all the way back to Germany, just across China (4646km), but he did keep a bloody good account of his hair growing.

I’ve seen a few facial hair time lapses over the years, none as good as this. Some times it’s the standard day by day frame by frame technique, but usually he mixes it up with multiple shots as he rotates showing more of the scenery, or people in the background and some great timely facial expressions.

Strange seeing him shave it all of at the end, looks a completely different person, character even, I think he looks like a nicer person with the beard, he’s kinda slightly sinister without? Anyhow I know when I shaved my beard off after the CDT it freaked me out and I grew it straight back to cover the person I didn’t recognised below. If think with the caption “was it really me?” at the end, he felt the same. Grow it back Christoph, beards are best!

Via: Swiss Miss.

Kevin likes painting an unlikely subject matter, generally derelict old vans. But boy does he paint them well, rust, dents, graffiti, every imperfection and sign of age. I’m bloody love by ‘em.

Via: Dinosaurs and Robots.

I‘ve designed a couple of wedding invites lately so was interested to see what someone else had done when I saw this on 30gms. Wow, everykind of awesomeness! Designed by the groom Matt Dorfman, a designer from New York.

While I’m on the subject of cakes, I came across this Threadless Cake baking competition (now ended). Basically you had to re-create a Threadless t-shirt as a cake, my favourite was this You Are The Best cake by Leslie Evans. Look at the all the bloody detail on that lettering?! Everyone seems to be using ‘fondant’ though? Not nearly as tastey as marzipan, yum yum, looks like it might be a bit more sturdy to work with though.

Just back from our wedding tour of the north, here’s some pictures of the Eleanor & Andy’s wedding cake that me & Nicky made!

What inspired me to ask Eleanor if I could make her cake was the Eugene & Louise bakery art show. I blogged about it a while ago and have been itching for a good excuse to have a go since. Working the Marzipan was a bit harder than I had expected, not quite the same as plasticine.. Definitely didn’t reach E&L’s standards, but I think El was pretty happy with it none the less :)

The best bit was making all the marzipan men for the top. So much fun in fact that ended up with so many that they couldn’t all fit on the cake. We had extra marzipan for all the kids to make their own, took them about 10 minutes to realise it wasn’t plasticine and start eating it!

I think me & Nicky had the most brightly coloured wedding attire at the wedding! Although with everyone else on our row we almost had the whole spectrum.

Had to post a pic of this amazing old bus ticket machine, I was bus conductor on the way to the church and had to stamp the specially made tickets with it.

I’m afraid we were too pissed to take any pics of the cake actually being eaten.. but I’ve got a vague recollection that it tasted extremely good.

For those interested, more wedding pics and cake making pics on my Flickr.

Pleasantly surprised to see my mate Rob’s face on the front page of iPlayer last night! He’s in the first episode of Dragons’ Den: On Tour (skip halfway through for his bit).

There’s a sneak peek of his new hard cased rucksack which doubles as a child’s booster seat - BoostApak. Apparently there’s a law now that anyone under 12 or less than 135cm in height has to use a booster seat (news to me?), so I’m sure he’ll sell a shit load as it’s dual purpose makes it a hell of a lot more useful :) You’ll have to wait until Spring 2010 to get hold of one though :(

Also if you’ve got a little kiddie, check out his new limited edition Gruffalo Trunki, almost as good as mine & Nicky’s mammoth effort.

Just found these great daily illustrated facts on Cargo. This one seemed appropriate, not because I’ve just been robbed, but it is Tuesday.. By the Manchester based design studio – Young.