What is the thing you enjoy hoovering most. That is, what is the situation where it isn't a total pain to pull out the hoover? Dirty jokes and Dyson aside, I love hoovering spilled sugar, salt, cereals, sand... any powdered substance really.
Why? Because I find the sound it makes going up the hose quite satisfying; as opposed to hoovering hair or invisible elements. When you pass the hoover in your flat's entrance after a walk on the beach, you can hear the dust.

Updated. The city has just become more exciting!
We built what we thought was most missing in our city of Tokyo: an Art and Design amplifier. We know there are hundreds of artists and venues broadcasting in the city, yet so few ways to hear about them.
Now there is Tokyo Art Beat.

Yet another article (in Wired this time) about tags and folksonomies and yet another article that fails to mention any potential problems associated with a taxonomy uncontrolled by people (a folksonomy).
Tags work very well on a personal basis, you tag the data that's of interest to you, da_way-youWant. But what happens when the sites need to harvest the potential of those tags to empower the users?

[MP3 Insider] Synaptics wasn't offering its technology to any other MP3 player companies until recently, and it still doesn't offer the round version found on the iPod to anyone but Apple. However, as mentioned above, the company made a straightened-out version of it for Creative's Zen Touch, which evidently doesn't violate whatever agreement Synaptics has with Apple. It makes a bit more sense conceptually, since song lists run up and down instead of in circles, but the scrollwheel lets you scroll faster, because your finger can go around continuously instead of returning to the top of the strip. To make the Zen Touch even more competitive with the iPod, I recommended to Creative that it implement a new feature that would scroll down one screen.

[SvN] All items in a list are not created equally. That’s the idea behind weighted lists that, via font size, emphasize popular items and minimize unpopular ones. The cool thing is that by merely altering font sizes, these lists suddenly gain a dimension; You can still find items alphabetically but you can also use visual weight to find the most requested items. My guess is we’ll be seeing a lot more of these weighted lists.

Indeed, since this post, 2 months ago, Technorati and Metafilter have added tags to their sites and launched their own weighted lists.
And I did too!

[Mouseradio] The mouseradio is a fully functioning radio without buttons. The idea was to use the mouse navigation and to implement it in a radio.
Moving the radio vertically changes the volume, moving the radio on the horizontal axis changes the frequency. The radio is on, when the black speaker points up in the air. (1998)

[PhysOrg.com] Samsung Electronics unveiled the world's first "3D movement recognition" mobile phone SCH-S310. 'Accelerometer' is built in to accurately calculate and ascertain movement in three dimensional space and then carry out commands according to those calculations.
Mobile phone input devices to date include the keypad, touch screen and voice recognition. In the future, however, 3D movement recognition technology will become an important user interface and revolutionize mobile phone designs and features.
This technology will do away with the need for complex keypads on mobile phones, MP3 players, digital cameras and other handheld products. This will particularly effect the way games are played on a mobile phone. Many functions will be controlled by movement instead of buttons.

Seen on Cool Hunting last week is the Jimi, a plastic card case that is a little unconventional in its function and looks for people who don't like traditional wallets. The website is kinda overdone too but it was nice to see such an insignificant object get some functional attention. For my part, I bought a similar plastic card case in Amsterdam last April and have been using it happilly ever since.

[CNN.com] A GameBoy Advance title "Boktai" uses sunlight as an essential part of the game. The amount of light determines the amount of power your hero has to defeat his enemies.

The content of the game changes according to time:
- the Undead come out at night and stay in dungeons during the day

and according to sunlight:
- Solar Gun power is charged by sunlight.
- Puddles dry up if exposed to sunlight continuously.
- The stronger the sunlight, the stronger the wind in certain areas.
- There are enemies that reveal themselves when the sunlight is weak.
- There are enemies that slow down when the sunlight is weak.
- The Pile Driver becomes more powerful.

[37signals] The Seattle Post-Intelligencer launched an innovative home page redesign today. The layout changes based on the time of day.

[Widgetopia] As sites have grown larger and more complex, ways to navigate them is changing. The hyperbolic tree shows promise. The one found at the XRCE website is particularly easy to understand and navigate.

[Social Circles by Marcos Weskamp] Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists. The idea was to visualize in near real-time the social hierarchies and the main subjects they address.

TIME Magazine: What's Next?

I was looking forward to playing with this. Ready. Set. Go...
Erik Benson's Weblog: idea database

Cooper: Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data
Adaptive Path: Finding the Righ Users

[CNN] Name tags, [Scott] says, serve as a modern-day front porch. They're a welcoming invitation for people to be sociable.

HELLO, my name is Scott! website

Granted, it might not land the company a load of cash to sell products that people will stop losing or misplacing, but they look great and the little girl in me (??!!) wants the whole collection.

[kottke.org] Greg Elin had the best idea at the LazyWeb as Competitive Sport BOF last night. He wants a way to dump calendar items, tasks, and the like out of his calendaring system (iCal, Outlook, etc.) and have those items display as ads on the web sites that he visits. So, when he goes to Slashdot, a banner ad tells him to stop for orange juice on the way home. When he goes to news.com, there's an ad telling him that his mother's birthday is coming up.

A game designed by the Swiss Federal Office for Public Health. It is one of the examples given by BJ Fogg from the Captology dept. of Stanford University to explain what Persuasive Technology can do. They argue that the game is designed to persuade sexually active people that unprotected sex is dangerous, the ultimate goal being to motivate condom use.
While I can see that, in this case, the chosen media makes it easy to reach more (younger) people that videos or brochures could, I am only mildly convinced by its possible effects.

TecO: Ubiquitous Computing. A great collection of publications. Even recent ones!

The coming of age of calm technology is a really simple to understand article about the importance of products which designs are empowering us through a subtle and multi-level flow of informations rather than all in our faces at once.
Thanks to Adam for the heads-up. ;-)

AskTog, 2001. How to Deliver a Report Without Getting Lynched
(via rM)