While I have seen many different tree house designs in the past (none of which I appear to have blogged about), this one has to be one of the most impressive to date. Although it is dubious as to whether it can be considered a true tree house by the childhood definition of planks of wood nailed to a fork high up in a tree, the one pictured above is indeed a wooden house built 16 feet above the ground and supported by the surrounding trees which is good enough a reason for me to call it a tree house. Whats really good about this one is the fact that you may rent it out on holiday to spend a nice time exploring the local forest and getting to know nature a little bit better.

Above you can see what looks like a very cosy interior of the aforementioned tree house, it has a second level in the loft space however from the description that sounds like its the sleeping area for two people while the second couple would have to make use of the two sofas pictured above. Beings based near the Edisto River makes this an unlikely holiday destination for myself due to being thousands of miles away; which is unfortunate because it looks amazing.

The power of four as shown through a remarkably unique advertising campaign, these adverts are both simplistic in execution and excellent in transmitting the message of “so good it removes every hair.” I discovered this via heartistandhismodel.com and a couple more photos can be seen below, this is almost on par with using ants as a form of advertising.

The beauty that you see before you is an interesting concept for an alarm clock that visualises time designed by Antrepo Design Industry (source) the large numbers on the left signify the hour of the day while the red line moves across the bar to visualise the movement of seconds within each minute.

Unfortunately the above is very unlikely to reach our gadget shops any time soon, while it is super beautiful and pleasing on the eye we just dont have the technology available that would be able to reproduce it in the real world for a reasonable amount of money – any engineer will tell you that much. While bi-colour and tri-colour LED’s are widely available in many colour selections from red to green and red to yellow and so on I have yet to find a single one that goes from red to white (or grey as shown here) without having to use a tri-colour (RGB) LED which would certainly increase the complexity of manufacturing and costs. With that said, hats off to anyone who can manufacture this in the real world and make it available for less than £200 as David Forbes says:

It’s too bad that this clock can’t be produced at a reasonable cost, since it is a nice looking design. The LED dot matrix display itself would cost over 50 dollars and would get rather warm in operation. The retail price would have to be several hundred dollars.

If I had a few spare weeks and a couple hundred pound spare I would cirtainly give it ago, even just to have one myself, it would certainly need a light detector to automatically dim the LEDs during night time because I can foresee this illuminating a whole room. In any case some more pretty picutres below to please your viewing organs.

For a little while the above made me giggle a little bit  because I read it in context that Brittany only shares certain information with friends, but then I realised what it was really trying to get across. I don’t know if this is correct grammar or just my inability to read at that moment in time but it still seems an odd way to word such a sentence. Why not just say: “Brittany’s profile is for private friends only. To learn more about Brittany, add her as a friend.”

]]> http://photogabble.co.uk/2009/06/12/facebook-grammar/feed/ 0 http://photogabble.co.uk/2009/06/11/mac-motorcycles/ http://photogabble.co.uk/2009/06/11/mac-motorcycles/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:21:30 +0000 Carbon Twelve http://photogabble.co.uk/?p=1497

I am a sucker for good design, I bought a mac pro tower because of its sleek shape and beautiful aluminium frame, I have the new mac keyboard because of the same reasons and a HP w19 19″ monitor because it fits in with the style… ok maybe I am just a mac whore? In any case good design is something that really interests me and when I saw these motorbikes by mac-motorcycles on Bretts blog the pleasure centres of my brain begun firing quickly and that’s not just because Brett is a lovely man. The above photo is of their Roarer design available in any colour you like, so long as its black, the describe it as being designed based on the pre-war glory days when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and the enthusiastic amateur rode with pride, the other three designs can be seen below.

This is the Spud model based upon the concept of chopping pieces of a bike to make it lighter and thus faster. The Spud is available in both red and black however from the looks of it you could respray it any colour you liked as these designs appear to be made as customisable as possible by the typical bike enthusiast.

The Ruby model shown above honestly (at least to me) looks like just a slight modification of the Spud design with a smaller exhaust and slight changes on the front and rear metal bits as well as a more flowing body design but with that said it is arguably its own design all-be-it similar to the aforementioned. The manufacturers description of the Ruby design is that its much like the girl-next-door the first love with its flowing design and likeable accessories. The Ruby model comes in two shades black and blue, the blue is really nice.

The above bike design is called the Pea Shooter and comes in the above Silver as well as black, in addition to my previous comments on the Ruby design there does seem to be very little difference between the Pea Shooter and the previous two bikes however all three do contain discrete design modifications which keep them apart. The Pea Shooter for one has a different tank design and a distinct exhaust, from their scrap book you can see the design influences of each design which come across in each really well. With that taken into context I believe these new bikes from a brand new British manufacturer are well worth supporting and while a British motorbike licence is required due to the bikes being powered by the Buell® single cylinder, air-cooled, 2-valve, push rod, 492cc, 5-speed ‘Blast’ engine as they have a bit more oomph than your typical 125cc. I would really love to have a go on one of these, but a I would need to actually take a bike test and pass before going out on the road and b starting bike riding on such a machine might be a bit of a death-wish, still I bet they sound awesome!

There is no pricing up on the manufacturers website however you can get in touch if you are interested, or just wish to give the chaps at mac motorcycles your support.

The above is the screen that confronts you when you boot up the program MISSION.exe which is the main game executable, there is also another two exe’s BRIEF.exe and MISINDX.exe however I believe MISINDX to be something that BRIEF works with so its better to leave it alone. BRIEF.exe when run gives you a menu structure to browse through and read the background infomation on the games story and indepth instructions on how to play the game. The graphics of the game are ascii in nature much like Karel3 and other rogue games of the time but not to the same degree of quality, with this said the game does have a lot of playability and I distinctly remember playing it for hours as a child. The theme of Mission Mainframe is similar to that of The Wizard’s Castle however instead of a castle your in a corporate building taken over by a malfunctioning mainframe, the aim of the game is to blast through the building level by level until you find the mainframe and win the game. Each time you play the game is different, beyond simply being able to choose your intial character from commando, secret agent, detective and private eye and setting up traits by roll of dice; each new game randomly builds up the map so no two games are the same.

While I do have a soft spot for this game there are a few niggles which fixed, would have made it much better, for one the top down map becomes very similar between floors very quickly and while I know its more about imagination and gameplay than being told what things look like a bigger screen area like that in Karel3 would have been amazing. With that said the game has quite a few moments of greatness, especially with the amount of modification you can do to your character to better yourself within the game. A must play for those whom are into classic dos games, especially the early open source home brew section. I have made Mission Mainframe available to download below so more people can enjoy it as I have yet to find another working download location and I would hate for such a great game to be lost to time.

I have included everything in the download zip file that I found with my copy, the CHR files are save games and you can see the last time I played this was 1999 a good 10 years ago, I have left them in the zip so you can play with a working character. Feel free to comment below on the game or any others I should check out.

I found my copy of the game on an old floppy disk which had once contained omnis 7 (1994) that I had obtained from somewhere in 1998 and formatted for my own use, once I had the games full name I googled it and found much to my suprise the game creators personal website (moved from the original homepage). It is really an amazing feeling to find something after years of searching and yes I know that spending so long hunting down a home-brew video game is a little bit sad but it is really worth it in the end. The game concept was put together by Gandalfs friend Morgul in two initial versions Karelitima I and II, of course those are just their aliases and indeed the man responsible for this games pointless inception is Alexandros Karelas whom according to Alexios Chouchoulas (Gandalf) developed them as part of learning how to code games in Turbo Pascal even the name Kareltima is a link to the creators name. In any case Alexios wrote Karelitima III himself in addition to the previous two and published them into the open source scene. You can download various ports of Karelitima III from his project page, however the source for the original two games has been lost to history, much like I thought this game had been.

The game play wasn’t really the point of the game, however it is a typical ASCII dosgame, which in itself is a joke. It is Set in a supposedly mystical world, where Gandalf the Grey is in the fake ID business, pub landlords know their calculus, malacks roam the towns (beware!), and bored priests are, well, very bored. The game is full of inside jokes between the two original developers and is very rude and crude in parts, however the game is still suprisingly very fun to play and I wasted entire afternoons attempting to beat it. I am still not sure if it’s actually completable or if that is part of the joke but it is well worth playing if you are a fan of dos rouge like games and have a sense of humour/irony.

Download

From what I remember they used the sound track from the beginning of the film up until the robots c3p0 and r2d2 escape to Tatuine.

Speed restrictions, for the most part, face an increasing resistance from car owners in their ability to stick to them; constantly I am driving down the M40 doing a steady 70MPH (as registered by a GPS synced speedometer) and I get overtaken by other cars travelling at around 90 to a 100MPH on what can be considered at parts a very windy stretch of road with cross winds that can and have pushed lorries across whole lanes in the past. Now consider the traditional yellow boxed speed camera, we all see them from a mile off, most of us have GPS systems which contain a database of their known locations and in contradiction to what most people say: they do work, people have to slow down for them or risk getting three points and a nice fine.  The problem with these speed cameras is that as soon as people have slowed down for them they accelerate back to what ever speed they had been doing, which proves they were not doing the speed limit because had they been doing so they would have no reason to slow down in the first place!

Now we are seeing a new breed of speed cameras, the average speed recorder which owns no flash and can measure your speed to an incredible accuracy over a distance of several miles by measuring the time it takes you to travel between two points; French toll roads have had a similar system in place which pressed an on the spot fine for speeding between two toll booths. The BBC have reported on the first average speed cameras in Wales being set up and have included a couple of comments by locals which appear to be less aimed at the speed cameras and more at peoples driving ability – or lack thereof.

The first comment that took my eye is the following which appears slightly contradictory with whom it blames for congestion:

The planned roadworks have not even started but the 50mph limit is in force. It is ridiculous, and now average speed cameras! Just another way of raising easy money from the motorists. The 50mph limit will prove to increase congestion on an already congested part of the motorway network, with drivers hogging the middle lane effectively reducing the network to 2 lanes!

There is the typical attack on local authority by stating its more about money collection than actual safety, lest they know how much these systems cost? What is most interesting is the blaming of a 50MPH restriction on an already congested part of the motorway network because of drivers “hogging the middle lane effectively reducing the network to 2 lanes.” This is the real problem, inconsiderate drivers, driving without due care and attention consuming the middle lane forcing other road users to over take into the third lane further slowing down traffic, occasionally causing other motorists to dare undertake which has in the past caused numerous crashes. Ever wondered why you suddenly hit a traffic jam on the motorway which has no apparent cause? The reason often is someone driving at 60MPH in the middle lane, people overtaking at 70MPH and then someone breaking from 90MHP to avoid hitting those overtaking causing a concertina effect slowing down traffic behind until eventually someone stops.

I believe we shouldn’t be attacking the speed enforcement cameras, rather we should be attacking those whom drive like they paid their test instructor to pass them. People who hog the middle lane should be the police’s next target because they are more dangerous than most other road users. Also for the record I believe the national speed limit on most motorways should be 80MPH for the reason that it is already the average speed traveled on the network and thus officially raising it shouldn’t effect road incidients at all.

Image Credit: SPG Media

Nestle Banoffee Pie Recipe

Biscuit Base:
100g (3½oz) butter (non salted variety), melted
250g (9oz) digestive biscuits

Caramel layer:
100g (3½oz) butter
100g (3½oz) dark brown soft sugar (can use mixture of caster and brown sugar in a 1:1 ratio)
397g can Carnation Sweetened Condensed Milk

Topping:
4 small bananas
284ml carton double cream, lightly whipped
cocoa powder or flake, for dusting

Equipment:
20cm (8”) loose-bottomed cake tin, greased and based lined (The bigger the tin, the thinner your base will be, however you can just double up the ingredients to match a bigger tin 40cm tin or two 20cm ones means twice the ingredients and so on)

To make the base:
Crush the biscuits until like fine crumbs (I place the digestive biscuits into a freezer bag and crush them with a rolling pin) then put into a bowl. Stir in the melted butter. Press the mixture into the base and 4cm (1½in) up the sides of the tin. Chill the base while you make the filling.

To make the filling:
Place the butter and sugar into a non-stick saucepan over a low heat, stirring until the butter melts and the sugar dissolves. Add the condensed milk and bring gently to the boil, stirring continuously to make the caramel. As soon as it thickens, remove from the heat. Spread the filling over the biscuit base, cool, and then leave to chill for about 1 hour, until firm.

To serve:
Remove the pie from the tin and place on a serving plate. Slice the bananas; fold half of them into the softly whipped cream and spoon over the toffee base. Decorate with the remaining bananas and dust liberally with the cocoa, add crushed flake pieces if required.

While I am not sure if this is quite the recipe that was on the back of the nestle tin, I have added some of our modifications to it and Judy will be making it again soon so I can get a photo.