The 25th of May is an important date for geeks, a triumvirate of geek celebrations are all scheduled into our iCals on this day. Not only is it Towel Day, a day chosen by fans to mark the passing of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
All around the world this important date is being marked in a variety of ways and in dual celebration of Geek Pride Day and Towel Day, the kind folks at Powwownow have given me some cool prizes to give away.
Super-cheap computing is an area which is always fascinating, the idea of putting basic computing power into the hands of every person regardless of their financial position is extremely compelling. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project made good initial progress on this area with their goal to create a $100 computer for children in developing countries and while they still haven’t achieved their goal the work they did gave rise to the expanding budget netbook niche market.
Now a non-profit charity, who’s founders include video game developer David Braben, have made another step towards cheap, accessible computing for all with their £15 PC.
Last Friday we went to the Science Festival exhibition at the City Art Centre. There were activities and exhibitions on each floor aimed primarily at kids of varying ages. One of the exhibitions we enjoyed the most was the bubbles workshop. Here they had a variety of bubble experiments to interact and play with. I noticed on the wall a simple recipe for making your own homemade bubble solution and thought we’d give it a go. The bubble wands seemed simple enough to make as well and after experimenting with some different materials we had success and were soon making our own big bubbles in the garden.
1. A Glorious Dawn with Carl Sagan by Symphony of Science (feat. Stephen Hawking)
A friend at work just tipped me off via hotdeals to a special 20% off promotion Tesco are running on laptops and clothes. They’re advertising the laptops as ‘VAT Free’ which has cause some typical internet forum pedantry, is it 20% off or is it VAT Free? There is a difference, of course. With VAT at 20%, a pre-vat item costing £100 would be marked up to £120. Subtract 20% from £120 and the new price would actually be £96. When it comes to the price of a pair of socks, it’s negligible, but for electrical goods like laptops it could be substantially different.
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Overshadowed now by a run on sexist sky sports soccer pundits, you may have noticed that the FA last week launched a new campaign to clamp down on abusive parents at kids football games. The basic premise of the video involves badboy ex-footballer Neil Ruddock yelling at a young boy whilst comedian Mark Watson, as the chairman of Respect FC, orates a call to arms against ‘gobby morons’. It’s no doubt a worthy (if somewhat niche) cause to champion, focusing on a particularly public and intimidating form of bullying and as this week is demonstrating there’s clearly a need for more respect on the sidelines of the football pitch both at the grassroots and professional levels.
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The few of you who follow the geek parents twitter feed may already know that James handed over the reigns of geek parents to me at the end of last year. As any of you who are parents already know, we rarely have the precious spare time to do frivolous things like regularly update a blog never mind trying to launch and run an online community.
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