Lone Gunman

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 received 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