I don’t understand why Kuvva isn’t more popular. It’s brilliant, simple and free: what more could anybody want?

Each week, Kuvva get an artist to design a series of desktop wallpapers. The free app then changes the desktop wallpaper to a new design each day. Over the course of a week, the wallpapers are all from a single artist, usually in a single style. Then, the following week, it’s a new artist and a new style. Sometimes it’s photography, sometimes it’s digital art, sometimes it’s hand-drawn. It’s a really brilliant idea, and it’s totally free.

Occasionally, the art is bizarre enough for me not to want to display it at work, but there is a function to designate “favourite” artists, and have only their work appearing.

Overall, Kuvva is brilliant, free, and available for Windows and Mac. What are you waiting for?

As Olympic preparations continue apace, the country’s biggest metal Olympic rings have been clamped to the Tyne Bridge to celebrate Newcastle’s status as one of the host cities. They look really quite smart. They are the correct colours, of course, though the contrast with the bright sky in this photo makes that hard to see.

At first glance, from a distance, they didn’t look much different in size to the ones at St Pancras. But closer up, it’s clear that they really are quite huge: 25m wide, in fact, 50% bigger than the ones on The Mound in Edinburgh!

This sculpture of DNA stands in Newcastle’s Times Square, which is the central square of the Centre for Life.

The Centre for Life is a remarkable place, uniquely combining world-leading genetic research, NHS fertility treatment, a public science centre, and a series of bars and nightclubs.

Times Square hosts an outdoor ice rink in the winter, and frequently has other visiting attractions: the Ladyboys of Bangkok seems to be annual visitors! Today, a Renault Twizy assault course had been marked out – I didn’t give it a go!

This is Temenos, the first of five planned Tees Valley Giants by Anish Kapoor – perhaps most famous at the moment for the ArcelorMittal Orbit in London’s Olympic Park.

When all five are completed, the Tees Valley Giants will be the world’s biggest public artwork – although given that each sculpture is destined for a different Tees Valley town, there’s surely a philosophical debate to be had about whether they’re really one artwork.

It’s not really the done thing to write off artists’ work, especially when they’re as well-respected as Kapoor – but I’ve never seen anything of his that doesn’t strike me as a bit soulless and bland. He seems to play with scale and materials, but never actually use them to say anything of note. But heck, I’m barely qualified to have an opinion on this, so just look at the photo and be amazed.

This is “Cook’s Earth”, Andrew Burton’s globe and sextant sculpture outside the South entrance to the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, where I had a meeting this morning. I also did a few of my medical school rotations here.

It, of course, commemorates everybody’s favourite 18th century Middlesborian*, the seafaring discoverer of Australia. The globe used to be more clearly globe-like, with a blue sea, but that seems to have washed off. A replica of his most famous ship is down the road in Stockton, as I showed back in January.

James Cook’s violent death is captured in a famous Zoffany painting; so perhaps it’s appropriate that the hospital named after him is leading the country as a regional specialist trauma centre. Although, given the number of areas in which the hospiral’s highly respected, it’s hard to think of a mode of death for Captain Cook that would preclude me from drawing a tenuous link…!

*Marton, where James Cook was born and his eponymous hospital stands, was actually considered a village in Yorkshire in the 18th century, rather than a suburb of Middlesbrough, so I guess whether or not he was Middlesborian is a bit of a philosophical question!

As I was going about my business this afternoon in Gateshead, this extraordinarily clear rainbow appeared.

This was remarkably co-incidental, as I had already been planning to go and see Yvette Mattern’s Global Rainbow kicking off the Cultural Olympiad in North Shields this evening. It’s also visiting Preston (not far from my family home) and Newtownards (not far from Wendy’s family home) in the next few weeks, and has already visited New York, Berlin, Toulouse, Nantes, and Utrecht. It is a far more impressive sight than the photos here demonstrate, and has been spotted from 15 miles away in Sunderland.

To give a sense of scale, the white smudge on the right of both of these photographs is the famous St Mary’s Lighthouse.

Neither the real nor the Global Rainbow are especially easy to photograph using a mere iPhone, but I don’t think these turned out too disastrously!

I made a quick detour from my usual commute to capture today’s subject, The Angel of the North. It’s not the world’s greatest photo, but I was slightly embarrassed by whipping out my iPhone while surrounded by more photographers with more equipment than seemed reasonable for something that’s already been photographed so much.

Interestingly, a car park has appeared nearby, which wasn’t there last time I visited… although that was probably some years ago! If you’re in the area, I guess it makes it considerably easier to make a quick visit – which is highly recommended!

I’ve been meaning to visit the Wellcome Collection for quite some time – I’ve been received the Trust’s newsletters via post for years. I finally found half an hour to pop in this morning, and would highly recommend it (though 30 minutes is clearly not long enough!). Above is William Cobbing’s Palindrome, an artistic expression of the fact that the pelvis and the skull are thought to share a common evolutionary bony ancestor.

And below, since I just couldn’t choose which photo to use today, is the complete human genome in printed form. Not only is it an impressive display of human achievement, it also provides a slightly depressing reminder of the relative weediness of the Y chromosome!

Both of these exhibits are from the Medicine Now exhibition, which is permanent, free, and well worth a visit.

Heatherwick’s Blue Carpet has long been a source of controversy in Newcastle – not least as it isn’t really blue any more. Some reviewers say that you can be stood in the middle of it and not know it’s an artwork: this was certainly the experience of my girlfriend earlier today!

This awesome oil painting from above our fireplace was by the excellent Gary Funston. He’s started to sell some stuff on eBay recently, which is well worth a look if you’re into that kind of thing.