It’s no secret that I’m a fan of baby animals that are cute. I’m quite specific when it comes to which ones I like, but either way, it doesn’t seem like a sensible idea to take me to a country farm show. Where there are cute baby animals. For sale. No, I didn’t get one. Sadly I didn’t have £75 on my person, but if I did… well, we could be having a very different conversation right now.

I went somewhere recently and saw a chocolate fountain (pictures coming soon). I know that isn’t particularly exciting, but mmm, chocolate. In my travels across the web, I suddenly uncovered a mini chocolate fountain. This is sort of desk sized. A while ago, I talked about things you could have on your desk to brighten up the work day. I think a chocolate fountain would just about do it! I suppose it could get a bit messy, and it would be hard to pick up the phone in a hurry if you were also covered in chocolate. Perhaps it is better off at home, but that’s okay. I found some more great stuff to go with it.

Here we go then, a selection of photos from the amazing A Perfect World of Pandas Flickr Group. Credit: xu ye/Flickr The one one the end so looks like it is sucking its thumb. Credit: hwee__ling/Flickr I’m not actually sure this one is a baby, but so fluffy! Credit: Cheryl/Flickr Ah, the cuteness.

One photo today - busy, busy, busy. ‘Tis a cute one though. Credit: Ben Beard/Flickr

Not only have I just uncovered a new site covering the world of eBooks, but it is a site that is asking for contributions. Yay! Starting from the beginning, I read the Random Acts of Reality blog which is written by an ambulance technician (I’m not sure they’re still called that, sincere apologies), and is a really fascinating read. The author, Tom Reynolds, also compiled a book on the same subject, and is now starting this new venture: Paper Not Included. There isn’t much on the site yet, but just the title got me excited.

The Telegraph has been doing some digging into when Hulu will reach European shores and although it looks like deals are still be negotiated, progress is being made. Of course, they only have “a source” for their article but it claims that ITV are the closest to signing a deal with the online video provider and that would most likely have some exclusivity associated with it. The source says: Hulu has been in talks with all the major British broadcasters but has made the most progress with ITV. It has offered each broadcaster the chance to take equity in the company in exchange for full-length programme rights.

Franck’s official site has updated with thoughts on the race at Sonoma, and confirms what we all thought - a disappointing race but FKM still showed well. We would have loved seeing Franck repeating his last year’s success in Long Beach as he scored a strong second place for his first Champcar race. That was finally not the case this weekend but Franck still did an amazing job getting used to the car so quickly. He scored the 3rd-fastest laptime during the race! Pretty good for rookie!

At the moment, I am pretty good at dreaming up something to write about and getting it done within a few days. For a while, I went through a busy stage, where I created a lot of draft posts for this blog, with the intention of writing them up later. Some of them have come to fruition, others are just getting older and older. I had a week off last week with the intention of catching up a little, but even that didn’t work. So, instead, here are some of my notes that will never make it into full blog posts.

Boo. I can honestly say that I stayed up to watch the race, and then went to bed once Franck had to retire from the race. How disappointing. FKM had been involved in an incident on the very first lap, when the cars in front tangled together leaving little space for those behind to squeeze through unscathed. Although he was now running towards the back, miles away from his 8th place starting position, it was still going okay.

Hello! I know I have been quiet since Franck’s race seat was announced, and I should have been following his performance in testing as well as in qualifying yesterday. Apparently rookie’s get a bit of extra time on track which is a really good thing to see. I saw some of qualifying yesterday, although I never really established which car was Franck on screen, and only caught the last few minutes of Round 2.

I was recently introduced to the Android App Locale and it is really rather good. I thought I would share, although if you are a Google Android user, you have likely found this already. It is basically a fancy way of storing some ‘if statements’ in your phone to make certain things happen. I have only set up one, but will share with you as an example: I get a lot of notifications on my phone for emails, and as quite a lot of the services I use are in the US (LibriVox, for example) these can come in at odd times of the day and night. Rather than be woken up every half hour, I thought about switching the notifications off. But that’s annoying. I thought about putting the phone to silent, but that is also not ideal.

Of course, I’m not talking about real life friends (what are they?), I’m talking about the sitcom. This is my favourite TV show ever on earth, and my real life friend (oh!) and I used to spend hours watching and memorising the episodes. I was going to make this a top five list, but then realised firstly that I couldn’t narrow it down or decide which was my overall favourite. Secondly, I was worried that I would have missed an epic moment from somewhere in the ten years, and be annoyed about it later.

Another reason print is dead (to me). Once a month, F1 Racing falls through my letterbox on a Saturday morning at 8am with a massive clonk and wakes me up. PDFs do not do this.

The BBC have teamed up with online video service Blinkbox to deliver some of its TV Shows for a price, plus a few programmes for free that come with ads. It’s important to point out this is BBC Worldwide, which is the commercial arm of the Beeb, and essentially completely separate from the non-advertising public service broadcaster. I have never heard of Blinkbox before, but it looks as though it is a UK version of Hulu, gathering content from all over the web, from many different providers.

An interesting thought about the Kindle that hadn’t occurred to me. I wonder how many people have not only fallen for the sheer alleged convenience of Kindle, but because it has filled their minds with works they would not otherwise have touched. Could Kindle be a way to re-educate the world? Could it help us to bypass those scheming, artsy book designers and finally be true to our own genuine interests?

This is quite a cool game: Can you name the most used passwords of all time? Not a catchy title, I grant you, but it’s fun all the same. You get three minutes to guess the most popular passwords. A couple of them are obvious, and I actually only got five. I am also slightly concerned as to how this data is collected. Either someone is reading and collecting passwords, or people are more than happy to share what their password is.

The BBC have always been good at pushing forward new music, even as the industry changes around them. It used to be supremely hard for unsigned artists to get their music heard, but with MySpace and Podsafe music, it’s easier for word to spread. Although this is better for artists, I imagine it might make the BBC’s life a little harder - there is such a wealth of music out there, you have to wheedle out the good stuff. I can speak from experience and tell you that trawling through podsafe music is not fun!

A Panda Cub’s Prison Break, thanks to Alex for finding this.

Eidos are taking a leaf out of Radiohead’s book, and charging only a processing fee for their new game. Users are requested to pay what they think the game is worth. The Championship Manager 2010 game is available until September 10th, when the full game hits the shops and the price rises to £29.99. There’s a rather snazzy video of the press conference, and Eidos say: We’re keen to see as many people as possible playing Championship Manager, and think this is a great way to get people playing. There is a small transaction fee to cover costs encountered in delivering you the game and a 1p minimum charge, but the cost for the full version of Championship Manager 2010 is yours to choose…

Over in the US, the purchase of digital music over CDs is rising. The NPD Group released some statistics suggesting that digital sales now make up 25% of the overall sale of music, and that figure is only growing. From the press release: Many people are surprised that the CD is still the dominant music delivery format, given the attention to digital music and the shrinking retail footprint for physical products," said Russ Crupnick, vice president of entertainment industry analysis “But with digital music sales growing at 15 to 20 percent, and CDs falling by an equal proportion, digital music sales will nearly equal CD sales by the end of 2010.

I’ve just discovered this really interesting page on Flickr (via The Next Web) which collates information from all its users and shows us which camera is the most popular. The iPhone has made quite the leap, and other graphs on the page, show that it is by far the most popular supplier of photos from cameraphones. All the point & shoot cameras are Canon’s as well, which is just plain wrong, if you ask me. We all know the best P&S camera in the world is from Lumix.

I have been watching a couple of new advertising initiatives that have really worked on me, and I am only talking about them to encourage more of the same from companies in the future (because I have that kind of power, you know?) and not because I necessarily have an opinion on the brand either way. Other [insert product here] are available. Firstly, I’ve been reading Mighty Girl for a long time now. I’ve followed Maggie through plenty of adventures and didn’t really think much of it as she created a list of 100 things she wanted to do before she died. It sounds kinda morbid but is actually quite inspiring really.

_I was actually going to record this as a kind of video blog, but am missing a rather crucial USB cable that without it means I have to crawl around under desks and dismantle Mr C’s rather tidy cabling. I don’t think he’d thank me for that, but I feel the stories are worth sharing before they get too old, so I’ll post the transcript instead. _ This is also my way of teasing the fact that there may be more in the way of video coming soon.

Mashable posted an article a couple of days ago, with a rundown of 12 Things Newspapers Should Do to Survive. The majority of the pointers seem to reiterate the notion of not trying to fight the web, to embrace it, and to go niche to protect your brand in print. This makes perfect sense, because the best way to keep newspapers and magazines going is to ensure they provide something that the internet cannot. Glossy pictures and feature articles work better on paper, whilst up to date news doesn’t fit the print model any more.

Whilst I’ve been getting more and more attached to my T-Mobile G1, it looks as though the Android development team are going through the opposite emotions. According to this story on Engadget, G1 users really need to make the most of their recent Cupcake software update, because it will probably be their last! Supposedly, HTC put a limited amount of internal flash space into the G1, and the Android operating system will soon outgrow it. There is plenty of information emerging about the next ‘Donut’ update, but there’s not much point in going through it here, as I still have months and months to go on my G1 contract and won’t be able to enjoy any of the new stuff until I can get my hands on an updated handset.

The tomatoes did turn red in the end, and they were delicious.

Part two of a media-related post on our sister site Sidepodcast. Do some keywords fare better than others? Which headlines provided the most interest? Everything is completely transparent, it’s quick and easy to tailor things on the fly and straightforward to vary advertisements according to budget. We have, in the past, run an advertising campaign purely for the live commenting of races. At most that means running ads for a maximum of four hours before closing them again. Try doing that in print.

Part one of a media-related post on our sister site Sidepodcast. Linking makes the social, well, more sociable and without it conversation takes considerably more effort. Which is why we know print is dead. It’s been a long time coming, but social networking has finally rendered the printed page obsolete. Remaining marginally rational for a moment, it’s probably worth adding that the length of the printed material and the type of content held within appears to have a bearing on just how dead it might be. Short passages of content would seem to be first on the chopping block. Quick snippets of content are easily replicated online. Longer pieces may earn a reprieve, and a novel’s worth of content might hang on for a long time to come. Equally print’s lifespan could be categorised by type, with news being the first to suffer, while fictional content may survive in print format for many years.

If you work in an office it can be quite a grind, but there are loads of toys and gadgets out there to help the day go a little bit faster. Here are some of my favourite ones at the moment. The Desktop Henry Hoover is an ideal gadget because not only is it cute and a talking point, but it also cleans your desk! It takes a couple of batteries, and apparently the suction has been greatly improved from when it was first released. If you’re worried about getting biscuit crumbs on your desk, then the Henry Hoover might help. There is also a Hetty Hoover in pink, for anyone who wants a woman’s touch. Part of me really wants one of these, but then I wonder how noisy they are?

Two Pandas Credit: La Rusa Loca/Flickr Baby Panda Eyes Credit: Elaine Gast/Flickr

This is singularly the best moment from Never Mind the Buzzcocks ever. In my opinion, Buzzcocks got better when Simon Amstell took over, although some of his humour was, it’s fair to say, evil. Bill Bailey also made a great addition, and his weird moments could be very amusing.

LibriVox is an organisation with a simple goal - to make all public domain works accessible in audiobook form. I’ve been involved for a long while now, part of an enormous group of volunteers who record chapters, poems and entire books to attempt to reach this goal. My latest solo book has been catalogued: Grace Harlowe’s Plebe Year at High School. It’s one of those books that is probably aimed at young adults, but is secretly interesting to all. It reminds me of the Famous Five books, although perhaps the adventures are a little less mysterious and more humble. The story follows Grace and her friends as they navigate their first year through High School.

What unbelievably good weather we had in the UK this past weekend! Mr C and I were so impressed we actually headed outside. We found our way to the river, and ended up on a boat. I didn’t want to take the wheel to start with, but after a while I was desperate to take over, so I drove us up and down, whilst Mr C took some pictures and video.

There has been some speculation recently that Franck would be signed up by AGR to race for them in a forthcoming IRL event, and now it has been confirmed. FKM will take to the wheel of the No. 25 on the 22-23rd of August, in his IRL debut. He says: I am certainly looking forward to my IndyCar debut in Sonoma with AFS and Andretti Green Racing. I was able to test one of the team’s IndyCars last year and very much enjoyed driving it. Being able to test the track later this week will be very helpful for me to learn the circuit and prepare for the race. We have a lot of work to do to get ready, but I believe we are up to the challenge.

I actually didn’t discover this song until quite recently, one of those ones that I’ve heard plenty of times but never really knew what it was. As ever, Mr C was more than happy to educate me, and now I really, really like it. It’s not so much the song that I like, but the fact that this song, and more importantly the video, creates amazing conversations. For the record, I think he did it, and Mr C thinks he was framed. We will continue to have this debate every single time we hear the song, and it never gets old.

I mentioned the Best Job in the World previously, worrying that the successful candidate - Ben Southall - will find it difficult to top his six months in Australia. What has occured to me now is that I can’t bring myself to read the blog. I subscribed to it as soon as the blog went live, because I was one of those who followed the selection process with interest. The tourism department who dreamed up this idea did an amazing job because finding the right candidate for the dream job created a media frenzy and plenty of the desired marketing.

Sony has announced two new ebook Readers - the Pocket and the Touch. Specs, more pictures, and a brief review available on CNET. At least this one is available in the UK. Are you listening Amazon?

Rupert Murdoch and his many, many media enterprises announced huge losses recently, and that has prompted the newspaper giant to announce that their online news presence will not be free for much longer. Murdoch says he is aware that this will cause copyright problems, and they’ll tighten up on that considerably. However, he is looking forward to cashing in on the celebrity gossip hunters who visit such sites as The Sun and The News of the World.

Recently, we were enjoying a relaxing weekend and decided cooking wasn’t part of the plan. On Saturday, we wanted an Indian restaurant. We didn’t know where the nearest one was, so I pulled out my G1 and googled the area we were in, plus the type of restaurant we were looking for. As it turns out, we were just round the corner from one, that we had walked past several times. It was on the top floor, with a simple sign on the window that you would only have seen by looking up. The door was round another corner, we went up the stairs, and lo and behold, Google doesn’t lie. The restaurant was lovely and the food was delicious.

Here we are, then, eleven weeks on, and my gardening adventure has come to its conclusion. Most of the stuff died. The lettuce seemed to expire. I cleared out the strawberry pot, and I was left with a weird Jekyll & Hyde tomato plant. The tomatoes are at least trying to turn red now. I am not sure whether I should pull them off and ripen them, or if I am supposed to leave them on there until they are red and beautiful.

This is my last blog entry about the safari park trip, I promise. The thing is, as we were going around the park, we realised that there was one fundamental problem with the whole premise. Why are we driving? Our experience of the safari park was: turning off the main road to get to the ticket booths, queuing to buy the tickets, then driving excruciatingly slowly round the park. Thankfully, there were two lanes to allow some cars to stop and take pictures of the animals, whilst others could pass if they wanted to move on. This idea failed as soon as we got to the popular exhibits, though.

It’s no secret that Radiohead aren’t afraid to try something new with their distribution models, particularly in the scope of online delivery. Their free release of In Rainbows, where consumers were encouraged to pay what they felt it was worth, garnered them a lot of media (if not money). Now, Thom Yorke has spoken out in Believer magazine, admitting that CDs were never his favourite: There’s a process of natural selection going on right now. The music business was waiting to die in its current form about 20 years ago. But then, hallelujah, the CD turned up and kept it going for a bit. But basically, it was dead.

A report out this week suggests that TV viewers in the UK are now consuming more ads than ever before. This is purely taking into account actual television viewing, and not online TV, and the stats line up something like this: 16.7 hours of commercial TV per week on average in the first half of 2009 that’s up 9.9 minutes on 2008, which isn’t a lot, but who was expecting it to go up? commercial TV is now 63.7% of all broadcast TV viewing that’s up 3.2% on the last five years (still only counting the first half of the year) the Beeb accounts for the rest, naturally That’s good news for ITV, who had to sell their Friends Reunited site at a loss of almost £100 million, and I forget where I read it, but were also advised that going pay TV would be the best way to protect their future.

I have just found out about a new park opened in New York called the High Line. I don’t ever intend on travelling to New York, but if I did I would want to go and see this. The High Line railway opened back in the 1930s, as a way to stop pedestrians getting knocked over by freight trains. The tracks ran alongside the big warehouses, allowing buildings to have openings straight onto the trains. Loading and unloading was supremely easy.

Of course, after saying I had not experimented with the share feature on Google Reader, I went and clicked on the button and now I’m hooked. It’s like bookmarking things on Delicious but so much easier! I’ve only been using it for about 12 hours, but already it’s the best thing since the last best thing and before the next best thing. There’s even a selection of my latest shared items in the column to your right - displayed in all their Wordpress Widgety wonder.

I was converted to Google Reader a while ago, after I decided I needed to be able to check my RSS feeds while I was out and about. Until then, I had happily used FeedDemon, which then became Net News Wire when I switched to a Mac. It didn’t take long for me to be convinced that Google reading is the way to go, because: If you’re on a site, you can click the subscribe to feed button, add to Google and you’re done. Easy. You can rename feed subscriptions. I don’t think this is an unusual trait for a feed reader, but I have come across many issues with trying to rename feeds, particularly with them being overwritten every time you hit refresh. Google doesn’t seem to have this problem. My favourite thing about the Google reader is that you can have it only show you the items that are unread, thus eliminating the need to scroll through feeds that aren’t updating very often. It’s also very handy that you can look back through unread items if you so desire, going back even before you subscribed to the feed in the first place. To my knowledge, it also manages to go back in time further than what is on the feed itself, which blows my mind a little bit. I am not sure about the whole new sharing thing, but it seems kinda cool. I haven’t used it to any degree, but it looks like a new way of sharing somewhat equivalent to Delicious. Perhaps I’ll take a look soon. Given these reasons, I am very unlikely to go back to a desktop only version of feed reading. However, I did look for a way to sync my feeds back to a desktop app, because I do feel more comfortable using apps when at home, rather than a browser.

As heard on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud, EMI are apparently backing out of deals with smaller retailers in the US, preferring to only sell to the big stores, such as Walmart and Best Buy. I don’t know why they’d stop, surely it is the same price to deliver to one store as it is to another, however, this is bad news for physical music sales. Independent CD shops tend to have a much wider selection, buy and sell used music, and can track down relatively unknown artists. I don’t remember the last time I bought a CD, and I won’t notice when these shops disappear. I think a lot of people will though.

I have been waiting for a decent way to sync my feeds to the desktop from Google Reader, whilst still being able to keep up with them out and about. My only problem with this so far is that I forgot I already had NNW installed, and my two sets of feeds have merged somewhat. It’ll take a while to sort, but I have a feeling it will be worth it.

Here are some more of my favourite photos from our visit to the West Midlands Safari Park: As I alluded to in the previous post, the lions were quite popular, and the traffic backed up as we got towards the corner of the park where they were all resting. Considering how long it took to get near them, it’s only fair to come away with a great picture like that.

Apparently the successor to the somewhat aging USB 2.0 interface will be known as Super Speed USB. The current interface answers to the name High Speed, leaving little wiggle room for 3.0 to go bigger, but bless it for trying anyhow. I cannot wait to learn what comes next. Should we take suggestions now? I’m pitching Supercalifragilistic USB. You? Written by Mr C.