When my girlfriend and I were in New York last year we found a great Diner where we went back a couple of times for breakfast or coffee. Well, I just heard via some incoming searches to this site, that it’s closing down. We found the Cheyenne Diner as it was opposite the world’s largest photographic store, B&H, and so heavily laden with new lenses etc we staggered in for some pancakes.

It had been there for 19 years, but now the commercial pressure for development is forcing it to close its doors. Even so, the landlord says “I don’t want to knock it down. I want to save the building,” so perhaps it will become a trendy trainer shop (sorry – sneaker store) or something. At least we got some great shots of it while we were there. Click the images here to see more on Flickr…

Last year we also had to come to terms with the closure of the New Piccadilly Café in London, another place we had just started visiting before the owners were priced out of the area. That had been there for half a century and has just been lying derelict ever since it shut down.

Well, if you’re looking for the few remaining places to enjoy an affordable no fuss bite to eat and nice retro cup of tea, there are lots of sites around which can point you to somewhere a little more imaginative than Starbucks. Remember to support your local independent shops and cafés, otherwise pretty soon it will have to be Lattés and Ciabattas all round…

…got a suggestion? Post it here…

I love a good clock screensaver for my Mac, I really do. I’m a sucker for them and so, inspired by the excellent Drop Clock which is doing the rounds at the moment, I thought I’d gather together my favourite ways of telling the on-screen time here in one post. Most of these are available as screensavers for the Mac and PC…

Drop Clock This is the new one, a lovely screensaver which shows the numbers being dropped into water all slowly. It’s from Tha Ltd. the guys behind Ffffound! and Uniqlo.com. Yugo Nakamura strikes again!

Fliqlo A long standing favourite of mine, a faithful recreation of a flip clock, so save your money at Habitat and download this screensaver. Check out the rest of the site too…

Polar Clock from Pixelbreaker, a radial representation of the date and time using ever moving coloured bands.

Pong Clock a great clock made by a never-ending game of Pong. Another one which has burned its way into my screen for many weeks. It’s minutes vs hours and strangely minutes seems to lose 60 times more frequently…

Uniqlock is Japanese bonkers from Uniqlo and great for it. Who needs clocks when you can tell the time through the medium of interpretive dance…?

Drawing the time by multimedia god Yugo Nakamura is another example of his great multimedia work. Sadly you can’t download this one, you just have to load up the webpage and watch it go. You could make a webclip for the OSX dashboard though…?

Barcode Clock no nonsense time telling made using Javascript. No scanner required. You can download widgets of this or watch it tick away on the web page

Nixie Clock a lovely retro way to look at the time, using the tube based display which came before LEDs. This is a Mac Dashboard widget, for PC users there seem to be loads of variations out there…

Wallpaper Clock not strictly one clock this, but rather a way to change your desktop wallpaper at intervals to show a series of images. I haven’t tried it yet, but I guess you can visualise the time any way you like. The site tells you how to do it and you can browse different wallpapers…

That’s it, try them for yourself and do please leave a comment if you know of any I’ve missed out. I’m sure to need to change my screensaver again soon…

Ever wondered what the title sequence to Star Wars would have been like if Saul Bass had done it? No? Well here’s the answer anyway:

Read the rest of this entry…

I’d love one of these Asteroids coffee tables, but yet again, I’ve been seduced by something I can’t buy. Well, I haven’t even got a house I could put it in, so perhaps it’s for the best…

…it is lovely though….

[via]

I’d love one of these iPod cases. As usual, you can’t buy them, but it can’t be too hard to make one – first stop eBay. Shame to break such a lovely retro Walkman though…

Via ffffound, which came via ipodhacks, which came from apple-touch, which came from gearfuse, which came from dvice, which came from gadgetvenue, which seems to have come from sirljohn’s flickr stream. Thought I’d post all the links, I had to follow the trail to the end, kind of like finding one end of a piece of string…

Remember when you used to draw your logos with a pencil? Check out Bob Truby’s Brand Name Pencils if these days you’re more familiar with a mouse or Wacom pen.