Simon continues to be impressed by Windows Intune (our cloud based desktop management service) - as do the people he talks to about it. He's produced a nice video showing the install process:

Our man @odedran points us to a Windows Phone 7 advert that was shown at #SecretCinema.

Not sure how I missed these videos but discovered them via SwissMiss and they are awesome. I opted for the Sony over the Olympus, but hey ho.

Staying on a gaming tip (sort of - was thinking AI), then I saw someone tweet about Infer.NET a couple of weeks ago (sorry, can't remember who).

"Infer.NET is a framework for running Bayesian inference in graphical models" which means you can model for stuff like the Monty Hall problem (like in this Tutorial).

If you're not familiar with that particular conundrum then it's a probability mindbender that demonstrates (in a particular instance of cars, doors and goats) that you should always change your mind.

Works with F# apparently too.

Great partnership from Bing and Wowhead.com to create a visual search of the hottest loot available in the game. Not that I play WoW all that much. My own real avatar needs around 30 hours a day at the moment, so I'm destined never to ding higher than a level 20. After that it all gets a bit too complicated, so I'll be forever destined to wield the "somewhat less than rare" Sword of the Mangy Donkey (I'm not sure that's a real weapon by the way fact fans).

On an RPG/Gaming tip though: like @mikeormond I'm enjoying getting my head around XNA a tiny bit (I've flirted with it in the past) and I've just wading through RPG Programming Using XNA Game Studio 3.0 which (as the title hints at) is based on XNA Studio 3.0, but should provide a lot of inspiration for a Windows Phone 7 RPG architecture, and - looking at the code - a lot of it is likely to be conceptually transferable to Silverlight too (just minus all the pipelines and so on that XNA uses).

Oh, and have a look at these gaming rigs.

And even better than "Also Available In White". Art on dirty cars. (via Clementine)

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)