Latte art is something that i reckon the majority of people have either never heard of or have never given a seconds thought to.  I never did until recently but now i can see the enjoyment of it.  I’m still appalling at it, but it is pretty fun to do.  Wiki How has a good “how to” on learning how to latte art though there are plenty of great guides all over the net which offer their won tips. To be honest, considering the amount of coffee everyone drinks, there is plenty of opportunity to practice.

Why you ask?

Well personally I offer coffee pretty regularly when i have guests. Plus we all know that it’s nice to have something from someone which looks like a little more time and care has been spent preparing it. (I emphasise looks like).  So if you’re using it as something to make that girl you’ve brought home (whey) just that little more impressed, or maybe just making someone you’ve been with for a while feel a little more special.  This kind of thing is fun to learn, takes seconds when you are good, is creative, and is pretty fun to learn.

Go on be a “cool” guy or a “sweet” girl…or you could just do it for fun.

Examples after the jump:

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Sony have already touched on Netbooks with their P-Series.  However, it was received with very mixed feelings.  No doubt about it the P-series is beautiful but it was too small for a netbook both in screen and keyboard size and was more like a completely over the top pocket organiser than anything.  Pretty though, if I had money to burn I’d buy it just for aesthetics.

HOWEVER NOW Sony has come to the netbook scene with their VAIO Mini W-Series and my god did they perform/deliver/ make me really happy.  The W-Series has specifications up with all the best netbooks but once again Sony have done it again and produced something which just oozes quality and class.  The W-series is definitely worth a think if you are making the jump into the netbook market if you are looking for something that is, yes a bit more expensive, but absolutely gorgeous.

This review will cover the features of the VPCW11S1E  /W/T/P (the three available colour themes)

So lets start with some of the features:

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 Metamaterials are materials which have properties which allow them to bend electromagnetic waves to a remarkable level or accuracy.  This technology up until now has been being used to bend visible light to the effort of creating invisibility.  There have been some levels of success in this area but mostly only extremely high frequency electromagnetic waves can exhibit the properties required which shows that “in theory” its totally possible.  However this technology would also be highly effective at other tasks as well, for example, bending the frequency at which you receive phone signal.  The current main problem with this is metamaterials are extremely narrowband whereas phones work over a range of frequencies.  However there is plenty of positive research to combat this problem in the pipeline, indicating this technology may not actually be that far off.

So the aim would be to create broadband metamaterials which would allow one to change the specific frequency at which the manipulation of electromagnetic waves could occur.  Current research has reached the point at which a particular voltage can tune a metamaterial to different frequencies and that that tuning would last for a long period of time.  This means that the production of antennas to different country frequency bands is indeed possible now.  Obviously ideally it would be nice to switch specific frequency at any time however the current solution is certainly one way which this technology could be utilised.

For more details see the full article or journal (if you have access) and maybe read up on the (extremely long) wiki on metamaterials.

New Scientist

With having large amounts of media to hand becoming commonplace amongst most recreational PC users, media centres are being developed all over the place to display our ever expanding collections.  Media centres tend to do the normal thing about listing your media in an “easy to use are access” fashion though a lot now come with extra features such are retrieving movie posters and reviews via IMDB and similar sites.  These extra functions work with varying degrees of success across the board however there is certainly a right, and a wrong choice to make when it comes to deciding which one you will grace with your media mass.  In an effort to help I’m going to run several articles on media centres over the coming weeks in a hope that you’ll try them with me and come to a conclusion as to the best one at the end.

Here’s a rundown on the particularly slick “XBMC Media player”.

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