Ubiquitous

I've been doing some decorative planning for my flat this weekend, mostly designing stencils and cutting them out. Stanley knives are a real bitch to handle, I have to say. I'm going to trial-run one of them tonight, paint them on my wall to see how it takes. Will put a pic of it up on my blog shortly after. While I'll be spending the rest of my Sunday on translation work and some catching up for my Proper Job, I've found a few Sunday distractions for this week's Sunday Struggle:

1. I think it's important to uphold the whole Sunday tea & cake tradition, and in my mind, there's currently only one place to be for cakes: Tarte Françoise.

Jo'll kill me for writing this on a public forum, but then again, this is a public forum with a highly visible comment section and she's got a "Right of Response" *wink*... Jo managed to eat a WHOLE cake by herself in multiple sittings throughout one weekend. THAT's how fab they are. (Allright, I had a wee sliver too (but twere only wee) and it should be stated that Jo actually clocked up 100k on her bike that visit, so she could defo use the calories).

2. I've blogged about this once before, but I hunted down the site again recently because I simply love the artwork so much. You can now see the entire collection here.

3. I am always looking for alternative ways to represent data. While some forms are more useable than others, this recent find is definitely clever: it uses the color-proportionality on the flags of countries to represent the data. Striking.

4. I'm not about to jump on the CO2 bandwagon, but it's always a clever move to:
(1) save money by keeping your electricity costs low
(2) keep your offices cooler by ensuring all's switched off at night.

This handy power strip was designed to scan your pc's energy usage and knows when to automatically shut off other devices that do not require to stay on, such as printer, scanner, speakers, etc. There are outlet spaces for devices that need to remain on all the time as well. Brilliant.

5. I'm a bit of an instant gratificationist, so I like it when design motivates me to just hold off a wee bit: Superbitus is a one-piece, bomb-shaped ceramic money box. It's supplied with a white marker to write the purpose of the savings on it, like "new bike" or "weekendtrip". To top it all off, you can drop the bomb so it shatters when you've reached your goal, and collect yer money from amidst the shards.