A short break here now; I'm off early tomorrow morning to the British Aikido Federation Summer School in Chester for a week, with a record-breaking contingent from Airenjuku Brighton: Steve, Yvonne, Dan, and Mr Helsby. Gis have been washed, bokken stowed, bags packed. Back in 7 days with sore knees, a confused look on my face, and a hangover...

The Shout-O-Phone: "Friends and relatives on opposite sides of the French-Swiss border must exchange greetings across a forbidden zone of seventy feet wide, but that doesn't matter to the well-equipped conversationalist. He talks through a megaphone and listens with ear trumpets like airplane detectors, while his binoculars completed the illusion of nearness."

: ""Matthew Gardiner shows us a way forward from the clutches of paper with the graceful Oribotics Laboratory . Built on idea of phototropism in flowers, Gardiner has put together five robotic flowers that react to SMS messages from cities around the world, opening and closing as satellite beams bounce off their origami petals.""

It’s A Mobile Life at MobHappy: "18 - 24’s text, text, text (no surprises there then), but also dislike Internet shopping. Quite worrying, if you run an Internet store. Could it be that they just prefer chillin’ at the mall, over the more functional online experience?"

Interesting... the generation coming up are mobile fanatics but don't like the web so much, for shopping.

Via JackJack, Empathic painting: "The result is a digital canvas capable of smoothly varying its painterly style at approximately 4 frames per second, providing a novel user interactive experience using only commodity hardware."