Less than 48 hours since I returned home from Brno and Bratislava, the 2008 Travellers’ Choice Destination Awards (pdf) have just been released by one of my favourite travel websites, TripAdvisor (my other two favourites). Already I want another holiday!
However, it will come as no surprise to those who have recieved this in the past that New Zealand holds the top two spots. Always worth a read, just to see which destination in your home country has the highest placing.
Not your usual venue for a singles’ night, but I do like this idea.
Anyone hoping to spot a potential partner can pick up a pink badge signalling their romantic intentions at reception. Then they can stroll the aisles looking for a book, DVD, or something - or someone - else that takes their fancy.
“This is a different type of singles evening because it’s not being held in a bar, restaurant or nightclub. It’ll offer many people looking for a partner an environment they’ll be more comfortable with.“
However I do hope that this idea was born with the intention of bringing the public closer to their publicly funded libraries, and as a way to make ‘public space’ and ‘public libraries’ analogous (as opposed to someone’s ‘wacky’ idea!).
For an interesting video on this topic (libraries as public space), I definitely recommend watching Joshua Prince-Ramus’ 2006 TED Talk on designing the Seattle Central Library.
I’m a huge fan of the MIT Open Courseware site. Full of great material and insightful lectures, it helped me immeasurably when I decided to brush up on my Spanish.
Thanks to the hive mind over at MetaFilter, a great list has now been produced linking to similar collections around the world. Check out the YouTube College Lectures discussion for all the suggestions.
via Lifehacker
Holidaying soon? Avid photographer? Get annoyed by ‘tourists’ ruining your otherwise perfect pictures?
Thanks to a Google Reader glitch this morning that has set the last two years worth of Lifehacker posts as unread, I’ve just spotted a wonderful post from dsphotographic on removing those pesky humans from your otherwise great photos.
Every notable landmark seems to have one thing in common: visitors, and lots of them. But if you want that postcard shot or that image that shows how the location may have once appeared, you have a challenge ahead of you.
via Lifehacker
How did this one sneak in under the radar?
The UK’s Music Business Group is requesting that a tax be levied on technologies that allow ‘format shifting’. To you and me that means that if you can transfer or copy your music from it, to it, or using it, it should be taxed. The reasoning behind this? Let’s have the BPI explain:
Enormous value is derived by those technology companies and manufacturers who enable consumers to copy. UK creators and rights owners are legally entitled to share in this value - as they hold the exclusive right to reproduce their music - but are currently excluded from the value chain.
Hands off Ctrl-C / Apple-C, pay up now!
via BBC dot.life