Pocket Noodle - Eventually, everything connects

Loving the ‘Star Wars ABC’. Fantastic illustrations from Michael Fleming aka tweedlebop!

Coming to London next week, the 2008 Bicycle Film Festival. Looks like there’s some great films and activities going on. Highlights include showings of Road to Roubaix, Les Ninja du Japon and The Way Bobby Sees It.

Browser chrome is a term used to describe the borders of a web browsers window, menu, toolbar and scrollbar but it will now become more familiar as the name for Google’s new product, Google Chrome, an open-source browser based on the WebKit rendering engine and Google Gears.

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Not only have Damon Alban and Jamie Hewlett been busy working on the opera ‘Monkey: Journey to the West‘, but they’ve also put together the new animated campaign for the BBC’s coverage of the Olympics. There’s also loads of goodies on the BBC site including an interactive screensaver, and Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy masks. Great stuff especially if you were a fan of the cult 70′s TV series.

I’m not a massive user of Twitter but I do find it useful for a couple of things, one of them being NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander twitter feed which today paid off with probably the best tweet ever regarding the discovery of ice on Mars.

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!

There’s more on the discovery here.

Today must mark an important day in the history of car manfacturing. Honda have begun the first commercial production of a zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell powered car, the FCX Clarity. Okay you still need fossil fuels to generate hydrogen plus a network of fueling stations to keep you going but it’s a start. With a limited production run of 200 cars over the next three years, the car’s initially only available on lease (California and Japan later this year), similar to how the the ill-fated General Motor’s EV1 was offered. Let’s hope it fares better.

The Telectroscope – A secret tunnel between London and New York and a means of seeing people across the Atlantic in real time. It’s the latest project from Artichoke, the group responsible for 2006′s amazing ‘The Sultan’s Elephant’. Opening on the 22 May, follow the progress of tunneler Paul St George as he completes work on the transatlantic tunnel and the telectroscopes.

2008 marks the 40th anniversary of Hot Wheels. As part of the celebrations Hot Wheels are releasing a set of cars based on concepts from designers of some major car manufacturing companies including Honda, Lotus, Mitsubishi, Ford, Dodge and Chevrolet. There’s a full set of images over at autoblog.com. In addition they’ve supplied 40 1:18 scale VW Buses for artists to customise, the results of which can be seen at an exhibition at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles including this Jon Burgerman bus and my favourite by Betso. There’s video of the exhibition over at Trueveo. Fantastic stuff!

Think we’re going to see a lot more of these. QR code’s or two-dimensional barcodes can contain URL’s as well as other information (text, music, voice, logos) and can be scanned using mobile devices with appropriate reader software. Easy to generate and pretty much used for everything in Japan, expect to see these being used widely in marketing and advertising over here. There’s more over at Kaywa and 2D Code.

No Google Phone but they have released Android – an open source platform as part of the Open Handset Alliance Project. Download the SDK or check out some video.