The New South China Mall is the second largest mall in the world and largely empty. (It used to be the largest mall in the World until the Dubai Mall came on line. But it’s still the largest empty mall in the World.) PBS have made a haunting documentary short about the mall that is well worth a look.

QuickCursor is a cool Mac utility that lets you easily edit the text in a web page via a real editor application. You just select the text box in the web page, click the QuickCursor MenuExtra to select an editor, QuickCursor will copy the contents of the text box to a temporary file and open the file in your editor, hack on your text and when you save the text is copied back to the text box in the browser. Doesn’t seem to work in Firefox but Safari works fine. It’s open source too. Very cool. See the…

Playing around with the Sony Ericsson S500c, I tried out the built-in MusicDJ app. Similiar to GarageBand it allows the user to build up a song in blocks. It’s a bit fiddly trying to compose on such a small screen and it’s really something that you need to do either with headphones on or away from other people. MusicDJ uses MIDI rather than real audio clips to keep the file sizes small but it is possible to convert to audio as follows. I transferred the file to my Mac (by emailing it to myself from the phone)…

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The Americans blow in like a whirlwind. Loud. Taking up space. One of them can speak Chinese. We know because he feels the need to give his order in the loud baritone of Americans abroad. In an intense loud, fast exchange we learn of their latest business venture, the gossip, who’s a PITA and a comparison of Starbucks to McDonalds. Then, whoosh! They’re gone. Silence. The insipid jazz and disconnected prose drip from the walls and creep into the remaining vacuum. Equilibrium is restored. Peace.

Pingdom have put together a nice gallery of pictures of early computers starting from 1944 (Colossus and Z4) to 1964 (Univac 1108). Lovely.

In case anyone else is wondering why their utf-8 email is not coming out as it should when using Django…

SVT (the Swedish public service broadcaster) have a nice little iPhone app which they’re waiting (of course) for Apple to approve. To help the processs along they’ve made a site called dearstevejobs.com. Good luck to ‘em.