Al Gore Beams DIY TV To The UK
The former US vice president and eco-warrior, Al Gore, is to launch his TV
channel in the UK where programmes made by the viewers will be aired.
Called Current TV, the channel already reaches 40 million people in the
US, mainly in the 18-34-year old bracket, and 10 million UK viewers will now
have access too.
Available through Sky and Virgin
Media, Current TV will feature short, non-fiction content from three to eight
minutes long, called Pods, many made by viewers. 
The majority of the content
will come from sources not generally tapped by regular TV stations. For
instance, a third will come from video subscriptions via the Internet which are
first cleared by the TV execs, while the rest is voted on by the general public.
There will be news bulletins on the half-hour and Google will be
providing access to its top searches. Gore has assured people that the channel
will not push the green agenda, nor will it endorse any political stance.
He was quoted as saying: “This is not going to be a political or
ideological channel - it's more revolutionary than that.”
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Future Home Of The 1950s
We might have all the gadgets in the world to enhance
our digital lives but our actual homes themselves have, sadly, not really
changed all that much.
Where are those dream homes from the 1940s and 50s that
promised all manner of time-saving and comfort-related changes with just the
push of a button. Over 50 years ago, one man was doing it all for himself and
here’s a taste of what he got up too.
After a youth in the 1930s building his own gadgets,
including an electric doorbell out of five cake tins and a magnetic clapper, Emil Mathias of Jackson, Micigan, moved into his own home around 1950 and set about creating that push-button
dream.
There’s 7,000 metres of electric underpinning the lot,
hooked up to motors and switches all over the place. There’s a homemade
elevator using barn door tracks and a rectangular steel platform. The curtains
in each room are switch controlled, as are the windows. The radio downstairs
can be controlled from the bedroom and set to go on or off at different times,
while the automatic alarm system he devised goes on automatically at night and
off in the morning. Remember, this is 1950, and earlier, when there was no
B&Q.
Go here to read more, and ask yourselves if the modern
homes being thrown up cheap in massive estates around the country today have anything
to do with that modern dream?
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