I didn’t know this (via Neatorama)

Supposedly the pedestrian buttons on robots (traffic lights for foreigners) in the US don’t do anything and neither do the “Close Doors” buttons in elevators/lifts. I guessed the closed door button didn’t do anything as the interval between pressing the button and the doors closing always appears to be random.

I have seen that giving people a control for an aircon, even if it doesn’t do anything, completely changes what they think the?temperature?is.

The placebo affect is very cool…

Found this while scrolling through my feed reader (from here)…

Who needs a Leatherman if you have a paper clip, I loved this show… its probably because of MacGyver that I have a habit of carrying paper clips and other weird things in my pockets.

Kodachrome curtains, originally uploaded by yarnzombie.

Found this via MakeZine, its an awesome idea. The curtains are made out of slides that have been joined together with little aluminium chainmail rings.

I love this idea, although I would’ve perhaps made some kind of mosaic image using the slides. I’m guessing though that the slides will fade quickly in the sun.

I found this awesome mash-up between Google Maps and Weather Underground, its a full screen Google map with the weather on it, here is an example of Cape Town.

It’s actually a rather nice way of displaying the weather, its simple, clean and just works. I love some of these mash-ups that people have done.

Nice article on Colour theory and the subtle meaning of colour and how to use it effectively in website design, from Smashing Magazine.

I’ve been thinking about a re-design of this site which is how I stumbled across this article, still not sure what direction to go with the colours for the site though. At the moment I like the idea of a minimalistic black & white theme.

If you’ve got the time you should poke around the rest of the Smashing Magazine site, there are quiet a few nice articles on there.

This is so cool, this women (I’m assuming shes a women, could be a guy… don’t know for sure.) hacked a sewing machine to improve it. I can totally understand how frustrating it is owning something that doesn’t do exactly what you want and then deciding to make it do it.

I have a long list of items at home that I would love to do this too…

DIY Sewing Machine Retrofit

Sketchpad – Online Paint/Drawing Application – This is all done in HTML5 no flash which is actually pretty awesome, I really need to do some reading up about HTML5.

As more people switch to the new versions of browsers that support HTML5 I’ve been seeing more and more sites adopting it instead of Flash, while this is not going to happen overnight it appears more people like the “openness” of HTML5. Flash has a few problems, most notably its a closed?proprietary?system that we have no real control or influence over, I don’t think that Adobe is actually an evil company or anything but having no open standard for flash means that we’ll only see Flash on a particular operating system and architecture if Adobe decide its worth while porting to it.

Which is a problem if you’re hoping to see Flash on some of the more exotic operating systems and hardware combinations.

I’ve finally gotten round to uploading the official photo’s from the wedding, they’ve been on my machine since early December but Christmas and the holidays and my laziness got in the way.

They’re in a OVI Gallery again, same as the honeymoon photo’s so once you’re on the official site you can click through to the gallery, please leave us a comment and let us know what you think.

You can go find the official photo’s on the wedding website.

Sunday Lunch – Improved Grilled Cheese – 15/02/2010, originally uploaded by Dale Nunns.

Sunday I was determined to improve on the grilled cheese sandwich. This time I started off by slicing the cheese rather than grating it which meant I had better control over how much cheese what put onto the sandwich which would hopefully combat the oilyness. I took a small amount of butter, melted it and brushed it on the outside of the bread, just enough to get the bread to go golden brown, but not enough that you could actually taste it.

Then I decided to add some pastrami to the cheese to add something to the flavour, this made a huge difference to the sandwich.

The next trick was ensuring the?temperature?of the stove was kept at medium-low and then putting a lid on the top so that everything is nicely toasted and turning the sandwich after a short period of time.

I’ll call this experiment a success, it was as sickening oily/fatty as the first and thanks to the pastrami tasted a lot better. I will though need to experiment with a few other cheeses, if anyone knows of a good “cheap” cheese that melts nicely and doesn’t go like rubber available at Pick n Pay or Woolworths please let me know in the comments.