Like cooking? Like science? Like mixing them up a bit? Well, the inspirational and insightful Danah Boyd (@zephoria) points us to the interesting looking “Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks and Good Food”. It gets some excellent reviews too.

To paraphrase and pulverise an obscure in-joke (so no worries if you don’t understand – only @dsumner will): but does it have hot-pot?

Danah (along with 4 other MSFT Researchers) has just been named in the 2010 TR35 award which recognises innovators under the age of 35 whose inventions and research are found to be the most exciting. Awesome recognition and well done to them and MSFT Research generally for such a representation.

As we inch closer to the release of Windows Phone 7 then it’s worth recapping on some bits and pieces. Firstly, in the UK both @MikeOrmond and @PaulFo are out and about looking to help you with application testing and deployment. Take a look at this post for details of the drop in clinics. Mike’s blog is also the place to be this year for information on Phone development.

Mike also points at this post by Brandon Watson on the Windows Phone Developer blog.The main thrust of the post is to announce the final release of the developer tools (16th September). There are some other useful resource links in there too.

If you’re one of the people representing the 300,000 downloads of the developer tools so far and thinking about releasing your application into the wild (well, the Marketplace) then the following points from the post will  be highly relevant:

1. Register at the marketplace today

2. Finish you application or game using the Beta tools

3. Download the final Windows Phone Developer Tools when they are released on September 16^th

4. Recompile your app or game using the final tools

5. Have your XAP ready for ingestion into the marketplace in early October when it opens

Apparently the best method to get rid of old marks on a whiteboard is to go over them again with another marker, and then rub them off.

Bizarre but it works as Ben has the most gleamingest whiteboard in the office and I have an old ToDo list from 2006.

The @Microsoft twitter account pointed me at this short post on some editorially placed tags in the September issue of Architectural Digest. The tags themselves are branded with the logo of the magazine, which (see Why Has The Barcode Never Changed? on a similar subject)

In itself, this is an interesting way of linking physical media to virtual media in a continuous way.

The tags themselves can be read by a variety of devices (even the iPhone). There’s more info and download mechanisms at the Tag site.

If you’re interested in Tag, then it’s ridiculously easy to use:

• Go to http://tag.microsoft.com
• Sign in with a Live ID
• Create a tag which might contain a URL, plain text or a phone number to call
• Print/Distribute the resulting tag
• Monitor the success of the tag from the dashboard

Meantime if you want to see a cool video of a very smart kid building a tag with Rubik’s Cubes then look no further (thanks to Mel)

Placehold.it is a nice, simple idea for adding placeholder images to your website. Like this.

Excellent find via swissmiss.

I just ordered an excellent new pair of Air Max 95 customised via the Nike Store. The customisation stuff is excellent (and not exclusive to Nike of course) and breathes new life into shopping for trainers (sneakers to my American friends). I’m a bit of a trainer aficionado but my lack of proximity to London town these days means I don’t get to spend the same amount of time looking for rares.

Anyway, Nike have presumably built quite a lot of infrastructure (besides the little interface) to support this personalised commodity approach so it’s a bit of shame that the best they can offer for me to share my kerrr-azy designs is this bit of embedded code:

Check out the
Nike Air Max 95 iD Shoe
I designed at NIKEiD.com

It’s a fairly low-res image which could have been executed as a Silverlight/Flash object.

So “almost getting it” is where I think we are here – a nice piece of challenge and control offered up, but falling at the final hurdle of really allowing me to share my creations with friends and thus propagate brand awareness and value into my social networks. (Not my designs particularly – which are dull).

Anyway, you can also go to the site and vote for and comment on my design too: Air MEH.

If you’re a student you can take advantage of the DreamSpark offer to submit and deploy apps for free on the Windows Phone Marketplace (alongside getting access to the professional development tools in the first place).

This video is worth a look in which they say “We’ve been working on our android app for two weeks, been working on this one [wp7 app] since 3pm [3 hours] and we’re at about the same stage.”

Mixest XAP #gdgtseattle from Anand Iyer on Vimeo.

It’s been a long week, and I’ve got an hour or two left before the weekend so it’s time to catch up on some noteworthy stuff. First up is this quite exciting release from the XNA Creators Club with a whole slew of tutorials and examples for building games on Windows Phone 7.

Tutorials range from basic programming techniques to gestures, to particles, to physics and sprites. Great resources.

You too could build something as cool as this.

Although our next generation of Office Communicator may be very cool, there’s sometimes no accounting for the actual meeting. Very funny.

A quiet day in the office today, and an unfinished sculpture by @deepfat. I’m not sure if it’s deliberately unfinished or not. That’s art for you.