I‘m lovin’ Think Geek’s April Fools today, but I tell you what, I would genuinely buy one of these if they were available, brilliant :)

Ha ha, I have a bit of a soft spot for internet absurdities and Selleck Waterfall Sandwich delivers on that account. The man, his mustache, a waterfall and a sandwich for good measure, strangely entertaining..

Via: Neatorama.

Normally I would have a blind spot to web polls like online advertising, but not these from Spot The Tiger. Each week a new poll is illustrated by a guest designer and put up for vote, there’s some great designs and interesting results.

Pictured above: Nuclear weapons by Nazario Graziano, Smoking by Ed Nacional and Alcohol minimum price by Adam Morris.

Love that random note at the end :)
This fella clearly has some chopsticks up his sleeve:

Holy Crap, NASA are working on this one man helicopter/plane concept that Q in MI5 would be proud of. They’re calling it the Puffin, minus a few propellers here and there, it definitely has some similarities:

I love the quote on Scientific American’s article – “In my opinion, a mass-marketable version will need conventional seating and cup holders”. Yeah who cares if it’s an electric-powered flying suit, I need a fucking cup holder before I get in that thing ;)

Via: The Adventure Blog.

Wow, this thing looks set to be massive – Square is this tiny little dongle that fits into any device with an audio input jack, and turns your iPod (for example) into a credit card money taking machine. They are giving out the dongles for free, there’s no transaction charges, only a $1 fee to install the application on your device! It’s the brainchild of Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey, currently in beta and will roll out to everyone next year.

Where’s the Catch? Well I’m not sure if you can use you Visa or Mastercard on it, you might need to get a some sort of Square credit, debit or pre-paid card, suppose they’ve got to make there money somewhere? Sorry got the wrong end of the stick, just noticed the image above has a Mastercard logo in it… These days when everyone hates bankers and loves Twitter, I think there could be a lot of people happy to make the switch.

What I like about it, well as a freelancer who once a year has to try and find some receipts to offset against my tax, this is a dream come true, everything stored digitally online where I can’t lose it and I can access easily from anywhere. Also this is going to be a massive help to small independent businesses which is always going to be a good thing.

Via: Matthew Buchanan.

Lovely on going collection of re-worked Twitter Avatars by Adam Koford. Reminds me of those cartoon political maps.

Via: Drawn!

While I’m on the subject of adventure film making, I’ve been meaning to blog about this site Kickstarter for a while now. It’s not about film making, but it is about raising money to do stuff.

I’ve seen this sort thing before, but the interesting angle about Kickstarter is you have to supply tiered ‘rewards’ for the people giving you cash. People get quite creative not only with their ideas they want to get off the ground, but also with these rewards that they give back. Brilliantly it’s working, check out and see how many projects have already been funded and how much money they’ve raised.

Problem is you need an invite to post a project and I don’t have one :( So if you have a spare invite to Kickstarter please sent it my way, Cheers for the invite Lisa Yao, you are a legend :) Ok so here’s my pitch:

I’m planning to walk 1900 miles across New Zealand from the Northern most point to the southern tip next year, the trail is called Te Araroa and it officially opens next year. Problem is I’m spending too much time these days planning/mapping, rather than earning money for it.. So the concept of Kickstarter instantly appealed to me :) But I think my work could be worth while rewards for would be pledgers.

Pledge $5 or more and you’ll be able to download all the route maps I’ve been making and use them for your own hike.

Pledge $25 or more and I’ll mail you the finished DVD once we return and edit it. Here’s an example of last years video of my hike across America. Plus all the maps on a separate disc, and hey shit I’ll stick your name in the credits!

Pledge $50 or more you’ll get all the above plus beautifully screen printed A2 poster of the route, maybe some sort of date planner thing like this.

Pledge $100 or more and I’ll leave your name (obviously nothing permanent) along the route somewhere, write it out in rocks, draw it in sand on a beach, piss into snow, chips on my plate, whatever! Promise to do something interesting and send you the hi-res photo.

Pledge $1000 or more Ha ha, this is the big one and it was Nicky’s idea so unsurprisingly involves me making an arse of myself.. but It could be pretty funny so – donate $1000 or more then at the end of each month you decide what I have to do with my facial hair.. It’s a bit of a tradition that you grow your beard on a long walk, but I’m giving you the chance to style it for me – Big Lamb chop side burns, down to the moustache, shave half off vertically… (Only six available, 1 each month).

Finally I got my Typekit invite yesterday :) It’s ridiculous really when you think about how long the web has built on only a handfull of fonts.. well no longer!

All the major browsers are now starting to support this embeded font thing if you provide a URL in your CSS to the font file, great news. Problem is there’s not that many fonts that you can ‘legally’ use in this way. That’s where Typekit comes in, it’s essentially web only font licencing service, with some clever stuff behind the scenes that smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type.

You can sign up and use the free fonts (for free), or drop a bit of cash (up to $50 a year subscription) to get access to hundreds more.

“For designers and developers, this is a significant step forward. No longer will you need to trap your content in images or Flash just to express yourself visually. Pages will be more usable, accessible, and indexable.”

I’ve been having a little play around with it, and am currently using Buendia by César Puertas for the titles. I think it might be time for a full re-design soon though.

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.

Up until today I wished I made a more unique name than Simon Cook, there’s shit loads of them out there! I could never get near the top of the google rankings, although I’m now slowly making my way up there, currently 5th :)

But I’ve seen 2 things today that made me happy that I’ve got loads of other namesakes. First up is this Personas site by Aaron Zinman from MIT it searches the internets for you and your namesakes and creates a visual aggregation of their online identities. I think the final result is a bit of a let down (I’m sure Jonathan Harris could do some much more interesting with the data). But watching the other Simon Cook’s and things they are up to flashing across the screen was quite fascinating.

Then I randomly went to see what Craig Robinson (Flip Flop Flyin’) was up to. He’s snapped up CraigRobinson.com when it became available, and rather than use it himself, he’s made a site linking up all the Craig Robinsons out there!

I love the idea, I think there should be a law that ‘name URLs’ should link up everyone that shares the name. I would definitely do the same if SimonCook.com ever became available.

Blimey this guy must of spent a lot of time scanning the planet to find all these. My favourite is the letter ‘M’, what’s the chance of a farmer having fields like that?

Cheers for the link Ollie.

Heading up to Surenenpass, the first pass of the holiday. The first few hundred meters of climbing were pretty easy because we took the cable car to Brusti :)

So, you work at a big corporate, huh? And you’re not allowed to use Twitter… Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a Twitter tool that looked just like Excel? Welcome to Spreadtweet.

I found out yesterday that my documentary of the CDT has been selected as an Official Honoree of the 13th Webby Awards. In some ways I’m quite sad about this news, would of liked to got a proper nomination… Mustn’t grumble though, it’s still good news eh :)

And thanks to Nicky for paying the submission for me (birthday present).