I’m going to start this week with an apology.  I have an (admittedly rather OCD) urge to get through every single item in my blog reading list every day, or at the very least over the course of the week, but this last week I’ve failed, and the next couple of weeks aren’t looking good either.  I’m sorry, I still love you all, but I’ll catch you around the end of the month!

Anwho, onto the random…

1. Ever feel the need for a great amount of data storage?  (perhaps several weeks’ worth of blog posts ;o) )  Well fret not, Sony have cracked it so that you can back up probably every piece of data you’ve ever possessed – a tape with 185TB of data…

2. From one massive technological leap to another, a Chinese firm has recently 3D printed 10 houses, and no, I don’t mean lego-sized ones, I mean real, live, actual houses.  Probably a bit snug, but at under $5,000 per unit, you could afford to put them together yourself!

3. And if the houses aren’t wacky enough, 3D printed food has also been hitting the headlines.  Just what everyone needs, colourful printed sugar cubes.  If you don’t like the sugar though, they’ve also been printing pizzas…

4. From the high tech to the comfortingly low tech, do you know how the flag for the newly democratic South Africa was signed off?  8 weeks before the new democratic elections were due to take place, state herald Fred Brownell was asked to design a new flag after over 7,000 public competition entries and numerous design agencies had failed.  Fortunately, he’d been thinking about this for a while, and having narrowed it down to a couple of options for submission, along with 3 others, the options went before State President FW De Klerk, who called an impromptu cabinet meeting.  They chose what we now know to be the South African flag, but they felt that the ANC should sign it off.  Their representative didn’t want to make the decision alone, so he faxed it over to Nelson Mandela, who was several hundred miles away.  Someone at the receiving end had to run over to the stationery shop to grab some coloured pencils then colour it all in so that he could see all the colours involved.  Ahh, those were the days when you couldn’t IG someone a photo of something!

5. And finally, looping back to the technological, did you know that Aberdeen Uni has come up with the average face of Doctor Who?  I’m thinking those coloured pencils might have done a more flattering job…

Linking up with my fellow Randomeers: