Posts tagged "Links"

Really beautiful walk to work today!

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::: {.posterous_autopost} {width=“500” height=“667”} ::: {.posterous_quote_citation} via tweetie ::: Posted via web from bsag's posterous :::

New photoblog

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I've been irritated for a while by the setup I had for my photoblog, Wings Open Wide. It looked nice enough, but I had to upload my photos manually, title them, describe them and set the location and so on. That was annoying when I was also uploading to Flickr, and thus duplicating effort, so I started to post fewer photos to my photoblog. I could have just swtiched to Flickr and directed people over there, but it feels a bit impersonal.

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links for 2008-12-15

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::: {.delicious-link} Tweet! Put Twitter on your site with this simple, unobtrusive jQuery widget ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} Useful plugin to list Twitters on your site if you have a static page. ::: ::: {.delicious-tags} (tags: javascript jquery plugins widget twitter) :::

links for 2008-12-07

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::: {.delicious-link} LaunchBar 5 Beta ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} Excellent update to LaunchBar. The clipboard history feature in particular is very nicely done, and the calculator has become much more powerful as it can now be invoked with its own hotkey, and uses the *nix utility bc. ::: ::: {.delicious-tags} (tags: software utility mac productivity launcher) :::

links for 2008-12-03

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::: {.delicious-link} Magic/Replace - Data Cleanup for Everyone from Dabble DB ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} This looks like it would be very handy at times: just paste in date (or upload a CSV, XLS or TSV file), change the format of individual cells and it applies those changes intelligently to all the other rows. At the end, it cleans up the file and lets you submit an email address to get the new file sent to.

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links for 2008-11-29

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::: {.delicious-link} Recreating Robert Howlett's camera ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} Photographer David White recreated the camera that Robert Howlett used to take the famous portrait of Brunel standing if front of a cascade of huge chains. White's series of photographs of Brunel's various works around the country are wonderful and the long exposure times filter out fast moving things leaving only Brunel's wonderful, solid architecture. I'd love to see the prints in person.

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links for 2008-11-22

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::: {.delicious-link} The Smoking Apples Magazine ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} A new e-magazine in PDF format. Great quality design and good articles and reviews. It even introduced me to a few new applications which I hadn't heard of before (rare for me, because I read so many Mac-related sites). ::: ::: {.delicious-tags} (tags: magazine apple review products) :::

links for 2008-11-04

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::: {.delicious-link} GenderAnalyzer - Determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} "We think http://www.rousette.org.uk/blog/ is written by a man." Uh, no. The clue is in the name of the blog, really :-D ::: ::: {.delicious-tags} (tags: web blogs analysis funny) :::

links for 2008-10-29

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::: {.delicious-link} PLoS Biology - PLoS Biology at 5: The Future Is Open Access ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} "On the 13th of October in 2003, with the first issue of PLoS Biology, the Public Library of Science realized its transformation from a grassroots organization of scientists to a publisher. Our fledgling website received over a million hits within its first hour, and major international newspapers and news outlets ran stories about the journal, about science communication in general, and about our founders—working scientists who had the temerity to take on the traditional publishing world and who pledged to lead a revolution in scholarly communication.

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links for 2008-10-15

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::: {.delicious-link} Apple - MacBook - Design, pg. 2 ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} "Take the thumbscoop, for example. It’s the indentation that allows you to open the display. If the scoop is too deep, you put too much pressure on the display to open it. If it’s too shallow, you struggle to open the display. It may seem incidental, but if the thumbscoop is well designed, it makes the difference between a bad experience and a good one.

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links for 2008-10-08

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::: {.delicious-link} Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker's Library ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} Drool. Forget your fancy home cinemas, if I had millions of pounds to spend, I'd build a library just like this, assuming that I had a home bigger than this library, which I currently don't. ::: ::: {.delicious-tags} (tags: inspiration books technology geek design) :::

links for 2008-10-07

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::: {.delicious-link} How I Learned to Code - PaulStamatiou.com ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} As a not very well self-taught programmer (I blame the teacher!), I'm always curious about what people learn in an official CS education. ::: ::: {.delicious-tags} (tags: coding development programming) :::

links for 2008-10-04

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::: {.delicious-link} Cocoa Is My Girlfriend » Cocoa Touch Tutorial: iPhone Application Example ::: ::: {.delicious-extended} Beginners tutorial on making iPhone applications. Long live the NDA! It's great that developers can now share these kinds of tips. ::: ::: {.delicious-tags} (tags: apple iphone cocoa development) :::

Tango

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I've been meaning to link to this article by Maciej Ceglowski for ages, but forgetting to do it. I love Maciej's writing: he doesn't post very frequently, but when he does, it's really worth waiting for. He's really funny (I laughed out loud several times while reading this piece), but he also has a wonderful way of evoking the feeling of a place, and making you feel as if you know the characters he writes about.

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slipstream

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I've started a tumblelog at Tumblr, called slipstream. I'm mostly intending to use it a as way of collecting together snippets of things posted in other places (like flickr, Twitter and ma.gnolia), but it's also somewhere I can post things which are too short and inconsequential to post here. You might be wondering -- given the general level of inconsequentiality of stuff on but she's a girl -- what would count as too inconsequential, but still.

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Skitch

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I was lucky enough to get an invitation to the Skitch beta (thanks to Matt Lyon and Alex Payne on Twitter!), and I've been having some fun trying it out. Skitch is a kind of image/snapshot/sketch creation application, which also makes it easy to share those snaps with others. That makes it sound complicated, but it really isn't. In fact, Skitch is a blast to use, and I keep finding myself dragging photos in, making screenshots, and scribbling on my pictures, just for the hell of it.

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Voco clock

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I'm rather tempted by this alarm clock which wakes you with the honeyed tones of Stephen Fry (as Jeeves). Who wouldn't enjoy the illusion of their own personal Gentleman's Gentleman rousing them gently and politely from sleep, bearing a tray of freshly brewed coffee in a silver pot, precision-cut toast, and -- if necessary -- an astonishingly effective hangover cure? Sadly, only the audio part of that illusion is included with the clock.

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Trivia Tag

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I got tagged with the Trivia Tag meme by Matthieu Riou, and it must be getting near Christmas because I thought, ah, why not? Let's think of it as the blogging equivalent of having a glass of wine too many at the office Christmas party and thinking it might be funny to photocopy some hitherto hidden part of your anatomy. So, five little-known things about me: I cry every time I watch the film ET.

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Cheap glasses

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I had an eye test recently, and needed to get a new pair of glasses. Those of you who wear glasses will know how much of a shock it is to find out how much any of the high street chains of opticians want to charge you for even the most basic of frames. I have a very simple single vision prescription, and I find it incredible that a very non-descript pair of glasses would cost me more than £100, without even anti-scratch coating included in the price.

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Oxford Schmap

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A week or so ago, I had a email via flickr from Schmap Guides to tell me that my shortlisted photograph (of the inside of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford) had been selected for the Oxford Guide. Yay! The Schmap Guides are apparently free, downloadable guides with maps, photographs, reviews and so on for places in the UK and beyond. I say 'apparently' because at the moment the viewer is Windows only, so I can't take a look.

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Two Margarines on the Go

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Two margarines on the go It's a Nightmare scenario Two margarines in my fridge It's enough to end a Happy marriage Side effects may include Lemsip shooting from your nose.

Grassroots Channel

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Anyway, I was intrigued, and I'm interested in local issues, so I gave it a listen. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. Grassroots really shows off the benefit of podcasting for community organisations, and some of their features are so well done that national broadcasters would be proud to have produced them. In particular, The Worst Slum in Europe is a fascinating conversation between community activist Natalie Brade, and Birmingham City Councillor, Sir Albert Bore.

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Names for children inspired by fonts

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Dan Hon has a cracking piece on children's names inspired by fonts on his new blog. Some of them made me laugh out loud: Copperplate (boy's name, ginger hair) Comic Sans MS (only if you're an eccentric celebrity) Monaco (probably already being used by Victoria Beckham or Madonna) Rockwell (cowboy) Schoolhouse Cursive B (exception that quite irritatingly does something to the rule) SimSun (possibly something that would inadvertently either please or dishonour my parents) Snell Roundhand (old money again) Trebuchet (military family) Wide Latin (mean mother making a comment about how her daughter should lose some weight) Tahoma (surname probably Phoenix) Mistral (girl's name) Marker Felt (never going to work as a teacher) Lucida Sans (quite posh girl) Wingdings (see earlier comment about my parents, or possibly suitable for a chicken farmer's son) It had me searching through the Fonts palette to find a few more.

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Kids’ views on scientists

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I'm a very late with this, but I thought it made interesting, funny, illuminating and mildly depressing reading. The Science Learning Centre in London surveyed adolescents on their opinion of science and scientists. Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as 'normal young and attractive men and women' [...] They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did 'very important work' and 70% thought they worked 'creatively and imaginatively'.

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Interesting sign

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{width=“240” height=“151”} I was coming home on the train last night, too tired to even read, and was just staring into space when I noticed this strange sign just below the bus connections map on the wall of the carriage. I just had to get up and take a picture (trying not to look too conspicuous). It's obviously a joke, but I'm wondering if it's one of the spoof signs put up by Dave Askwith and Alex Normanton, and featured on the BBC's website.

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Hands up Tinkers

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Douglas Johnston has been developing a taxonomy of different archetypes of people who are constantly playing with their productivity systems: Tinkers, Tailors, Soldiers and Spies. It was immediately obvious to me which I was--like Douglas, I am a Tinker. To quote him: "The Tinker is the consumate tweaker for tweaking's sake." Oh, that's me all right. "...modify existing setups (even if they already work fine)". Check. "Tinkers are far less concerned about using the system than the idea of creating it.

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I’ll give you a ring on my handy

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This made me laugh like a drain this morning. You really have to wonder if the makers of Trivial Pursuit do any actual research at all. However, given the question about feverfew, it's entirely possible that they think we're still living in the 18th Century, and that 'handy' actually refers to semaphore without the flags.

Unisex Chip Shop

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I owe a huge debt to jb for pointing to this video of Billy Bragg and Bill Bailey singing Bill's Billy Bragg song, Unisex Chip Shop at Glastonbury. I'm sure that I've said so before, but Bill Bailey is a genius. He can be more like Billy Bragg than Billy is, and lines like this are pure comedy gold: [Previous line concerned him dreaming about Debbie from the chip shop running naked through the woods of Rainham.

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Liveplasma.com

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I spotted a link to a site called Liveplasma.com on the Textdrive forum, which claimed that it mapped similarities between bands or artists in a linked-node-and-path-type graphic. I like a lot of rather dissimilar bands, but also some who have particular connections to one another (like Mouthmusic and Talitha MacKenzie and Martyn Bennett, as one example), so I decided to check it out. I problems with it in Safari, but it worked fine in Firefox.

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Springtime in Japan

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It was slightly unfortunate that we left Japan about two weeks before the cherry blossom season really kicked in. We saw one or two isolated (but very beautiful) trees, but there's nothing like the full on effect of blossom en masse to make you feel as if Spring has well and truly sprung. Anyway, I've been really enjoying the flickr tag 'blossom' recently, so I thought it was about time to spread some vernal feeling around.

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The 100 is the top of the 100

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I'm a bit late with this, but the PowerBook 100 made it to number one of Mobile PC magazine's Top 100 Gadgets of all time. Obviously, I have good taste. I've got a PowerBook 100 sitting in a cupboard, and it was the machine — bought second-hand — that I wrote my thesis on. I was very fond of it, despite the persistently squeaky trackball that I never managed to silence.

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Bought the T-shirt

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::: {.img-shadow} {width=“220” height=“198”} ::: Remember last year, around Valentine's Day, when I mentioned a rather wonderful geeky Valentine's poem? Probably not, but as you see from the magnificent image here, you can now get it on a T-shirt at ThinkGeek. I like the fact that the hex codes are visually colour coded. I like the fact that they make it in a women's fitted-T style. And I really, really want one.

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Tracks news

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For those of you following the development of my GTD web application, Tracks, I've written a long and rambling article (I'm really selling this, aren't I?) about features I'm thinking about including in the next major version here.

Weirdest and cutest thing I’ve seen all day

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120-year-old tortoise adopts baby hippo: 'When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos,' Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters. I'm ashamed to say that when I first saw the photo, I thought it was a Photoshop job because I hadn't noted the fact that it's a baby hippo and a very old (and therefore very large) tortoise.

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More Getting Things Done

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Matt Henderson has written an interesting entry on Getting Things Done: According to Peter Drucker, one of the defining aspects of our generation is the fact that, as a society of information workers, many of us are responsible for defining both what we do, and how we get it done. Complicating matters, many of us work in environments (i.e. in front of internet-connected desktop computers) that provide us with a continual barrage of inputs (email, chats, browsing, RSS feeds, phone calls, etc.

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Travel writing

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Maciej is a wonderful writer, and never more so than when he writes about his travels. I'm a complete sucker for writing about Britain by non-residents, and this passage had me rolling around with recognition: Great Britain is a deceptively small country; it's very easy to get distracted and find that you've overshot it altogether, which is how I found myself standing near a petrochemical plant in Calais just a few hours after boarding a train in Sheffield, a city that I thought was safely removed from the southern coast.

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Favicon

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I've been meaning to set up a favicon for this site for ages. For the uninitiated, that's the little image some sites load in the address bar in place of the generic globe, lightning flash or whatever your favourite browser uses. However, every time I tried to make a decent 16 x 16 image, it ended up — not to put too fine a point on it — like a muddy blob.

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Hyperlinkomatic

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I've been trying out another bookmark storage service, which is currently in beta: Hyperlinkomatic. It has a great, slick interface, and a fast and flexible search engine to find what you want, which avoids that tricky problem of deciding what folder/category you're going to put a bookmark in. It even has an option for specifying a date range for the creation of the bookmark when you search, which is brilliant for those of us who can't remember anything salient about a bookmark, except that we stored it within the last week.

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Lomo shots

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I've updated Wings Open Wide with a few shots from the last film I took with the Lomo. As sometimes happens with film cameras, I've had this film loitering around for so long that I had forgotten what was on it. This is both a disadvantage and a huge bonus of shooting on film. It's a lovely moment of surprise when you open the packet of prints and look into the past.

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Interesting reading

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My friend — Joe Kissell — has just re-launched his Interesting Thing of the Day. It's got new content and lots of great new features like an Audio Edition; perfect to put on your iPod for the commute in to work. If you haven't visited before, go and take a look. Joe is smart, funny and writes about an eclectic mix of Interesting Things. What more could you want? If you have been before, go and listen to the new Audio Editions — they are brilliantly done, and if it wasn't for the American accent, you'd think he worked for the BBC.

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Fun with links

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There seems to be a rash of social bookmark/link aggregator services being developed lately. I use del.icio.us, as you can see in the Quick links section on the right, but I also recently discovered Spurl.net. Then there's Furl.net. All offer slightly different features, differing interfaces and philosophies. Spurl's philosophy is outlined here, for example. Furl seems to be slanted toward people storing bookmarks for their own purposes (this is the emphasis in the documentation at any rate), though they also provide an RSS feed to share your bookmarks, as well as a bit of JavaScript to display your latest bookmarks on your site.

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Words, glorious words

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Through Green Fairy, I've just discovered Wordsmith's wonderful Word-a-Day site. She mentioned a couple of brilliant words that I hadn't heard of before. I'm now going to have to find excuses to slip them into casual conversation: Strikhedonia - The pleasure of being able to say 'to hell with it' Sphallolalia - Flirtatious talk that leads nowhere Sphallolalia–it even sounds seductive. I love words, and one of my favourite books is a dictionary of words for which no words exist: the excellent Deeper Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.

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Cue evil laugh

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I found this great (and funny) phrasing of a moral dilemma today (via jb's blog). After I'd read it (and laughed my head off), I remembered that I'd seen something similar ages ago, but I still got suckered in.

Backup organs

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As Professor Farnsworth says in Futurama — Good news everyone! According to Ananova, two Bosnian brothers have been found to have 4 working kidneys each: Josip Galic, 69, from Kucetine in Bosnia said: "I had a car accident and doctors discovered I had four kidneys. That surprised me, but at least it explained why I could drink all my friends under the table, and never had a hangover." He added it was a further surprise when his brother found out after a visit to the doctor that he had four kidneys as well.

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More feathers

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After djn1's comment on yesterday's entry, and the photo he linked to, I remembered that I had taken a photo of a swan's feather a couple of years ago. The madly photoshopped results can be seen here.

Nothing says I love you like hexadecimal

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I love this geeky love poem by KillerHamster which appeared in a comment on Slashdot: Roses are #FF0000 Violets are #0000FF chown -R you ~/base I think it's a tribute to my geekoid status that I a) understand it, and b) would be really touched if someone sent me a poem like this. [via BoingBoing]

Artist’s impression

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Here's an interesting experiment; expose a bunch of hip-hop loving 10 and 11 year old American children to Radiohead, and get them to draw whatever the music suggests to them. Is this a future law suit waiting to happen? Quite possibly, judging by the slightly disturbing results. Daniel's giant ice cream cone and Maddy's Aladdin scenes are innocuous enough (though ice cream isn't the first thing to pop into my head when I listen to Radiohead), but Jeffrey and Adam could be scarred for life.

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London photos

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I've finally got around to posting some Lomo photos I took in London over the summer on to wings open wide. It's quite nice to look at them again now that Autumn is drawing in.

A cappella Prozac

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This fantastic a cappella rendering of the Star Wars theme has just made my day. It's actually quite inventive, but it was the demented gerbil sound-a-like melody line that really did it for me. All I can say is that if you are feeling a bit tired, stressed and fed up with life in general, a couple of repeats of this track is equivalent to a whole course of Prozac. There aren't any side-effects either, other than the tune sticking with alarming tenacity to the inside of your brain.

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Alternative tube map

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This is an extremely useful map showing Tube stations that appear to be far apart on the Tube map, but are actually close enough to enable you to walk between them. This is the reason that I usually carry both a Tube map and a London AtoZ when I travel around London. I don't go up[1] to London very frequently these days, but when I was growing up in Surrey, going to London for the day was a real treat.

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Dock envy

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via "Mac Net Journal and 2lmc spool

CVS

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John Gruber has written a brilliantly clear and helpful tutorial for using CVS with BBEdit. I had been looking around for a good basic tutorial for a while, but most seemed to concentrate on using CVS from a remote location, rather than locally. It really is handy, especially with HTML files, where there's a lot of potential to break something quite badly. What I would really like is a similar system for word processing documents.

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It’s all the Romans’ fault

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I heard an interesting snippet on the Today programme yesterday morning. Apparently, a bronze Roman statue had been found in London depicting a Roman with the usual sandals and--this is the important bit--socks. It seems that the Romans went au naturel in the foot department in Italy, but donned the socks in Britain. The gloss on the story was that this shows the heritage of the Britons' much derided penchant for the socks and sandals look.

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Regex tips

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I've always found regular expressions slightly baffling. Since I've been learning Perl, I've made more of an effort to understand them, but I often find myself bashing my forehead on the table in frustration when a regex pattern refuses to do my bidding. So I was interested in this selection of top regex tips, which contains some useful pointers to avoid problems. It seems that the author--Tony Stubblebine (a surname worthy of Thomas Hardy)--has published one of the O'Reilly Pocket References on Regular Expressions, which I might consider getting.

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Amazon Associate links

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For a while, I've been looking for a way to include images of the covers of CDs that I mention or books that I've read, without getting in to copyright issues. I heard about the Amazon Associates Programme, which would allow me to do just this, with the pleasant side-effect that if anyone buys something after following the link to Amazon on my page, I'll get a small percentage of the selling price of the item.

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More bras

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While I'm on the subject of bras, there's a funny little snippet in today's Guardian Society from the Romford Recorder: More than 120 bras have been discarded at a popular pub in Romford, Essex, and now a lost property phoneline has been set up to reunite items with owners. _Romford Recorder, 1/08/03_ There has to be a potential novel lurking in there somewhere...

Discworld flow chart

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I love Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels so I was delighted by this flow chart with information on the optimal reading order, and the temporal and character links between the books. Looking at the map, I realize that I've read almost all of the books. I must really be a fan. [via BoingBoing]

Everything you ever wanted to know about ISO paper sizing…

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...but were afraid to ask. This kind of stuff pleases me more than I can possibly say. And some of it is even useful: If you prepare a letter, you will have to know the weight of the content in order to determine the postal fee. This can be very conveniently calculated with the ISO A series paper sizes. Usual typewriter and laser printer paper weighs 80 g/m^2^. An A0 page has an area of 1 m^2^, and the next smaller A series page has half of this area.

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane…

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...no! It's Ultra-Fast Flying Squirrel Man! Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a plane 30,000 feet over Dover early this morning, then glided at about 135 mph across the English Channel, to land safely in Calais. He used a small carbon fibre wing strapped to his back to turn a plummet straight down into a slightly more controlled glide. Logically, I know that you are travelling pretty fast when you're skydiving, but it really brings it home to you when someone is skydiving horizontally.

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Good job I don't live in Germany

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This news seems so weird it must be a fake, but apparently it is now illegal to kill ants in Germany. I would certainly get locked up. After a prolonged campaign of baiting traps with poison, the numbers of my ants declined a bit, but recently they seem to have staged a bit of a comeback, and once again, I'm finding that my sandwiches are ant-garnished. [via 2lmc.spool]

Bicycle Music

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So there I was, idly wondering what the peloton sounds like, when I see that Radio 4 has broadcast a programme called 'Bicycle Music' (no web page for the programme, but there's a listen again link on this page). It was an interesting — if somewhat odd — programme, with all sorts of musings about music inspired by bikes and the music made by bikes themselves. There was a section on the Tour de France, with an obligatory play of the Kraftwerk song of the same name, and a recording (yes, you've guessed it) of the peloton.

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Wonderful sounds

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Are you tired? Do you need a holiday? Then head on over to quietamerican.org, and go on a one-minute vacation. Every Monday, Aaron Ximm uploads a 60 second recording of somewhere in the world. Put on a good pair of headphones, sit back with a glass of wine and let yourself drift off somewhere. The recordings are absolutely wonderful. There's everything from a woman singing in an oil drum in Antarctica, the sound of the London Underground (Northern Line) and the gentle boom of the Baltic Sea at Ahreshoop.

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Oxford photos

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I've just put up some more Lomo photos at wings open wide. Most were taken in the Covered Market — a wonderful bastion of small independent traders who manage to hold out against the tide of Starbucks and McDonalds outlets. The light levels are rather low in the market, and there are lots of colourful displays, so the Lomo is the perfect tool for taking shots. As usual, the results were wildly variable and somewhat unexpected, but I was quite pleased with the way that some of them turned out — reflections figured prominently.

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Joy of Tech

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The latest Joy of Tech is an absolute classic. If you look carefully, you can see category divisions among the cards which read 'Rebels', 'Dark Sides' and 'Furballs'.

New section in sidebar

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I've added a new section to my sidebar — 'Friends and family'. As I'm sure the mentally agile among you have already guessed from the name, it's a place for links to sites run by people I know. So, Mr. Bsag's site is up there, as is my friend Joe's new site, Interesting Thing of the Day. It is — as the name suggests — a fantastic mine of excellent writing about interesting things.

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Finally, it’s done

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After what seems like an unbelievably long and painful gestation, Mr. Bsag's gallery site has finally been born. I feel slightly awkward about advertising it here, but I'm hoping that no-one will object too much to what Lisa called "a plug for something in the family". It isn't perfect by any means. I had to make a lot of compromises in all kinds of areas to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

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More Brummie photos

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I've put up some more photographs from my Brummie excursion, to go with my earlier entry.

It might be because I'm tired, but...

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...this is the funniest thing I've seen all weekend. But then I have been hacking Mr. Bsag's website for two full days. Your mileage may vary. [via BoingBoing]

Piles

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I just had to link to this: Joy of Tech's take on the rumoured Panther 'piles'.

Apple linkage

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Some Apple-related interested news today: New iBooks — Apple have announced a speed bump for the iBook. They now have 900 chunks worth of megahertzy goodness, plus larger hard drives. I love the new AlBooks, but I'm still very fond of the iBook. I think it's something about the shiny, snowy look. And the Linux geeks love 'em. [via MacNetJournal] Panther rumours — some interesting speculation about what might appear in the next revision of MacOSX.

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Florida pictures

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I've uploaded the first batch of pictures I took in Florida to wings open wide -- all of which were taken with the digital camera. When I get a chance, I'll scan in some of the pictures I took with the Lomo. I also discovered that I could set more than one category for each image, so that it would appear in more than one gallery. So, for instance, some of this batch appears in both the Florida 2003 album and also in fauna or flora.

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British comedy and its Transatlantic viability

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I read a review of the sitcom ‘The Office' by Dean Allen with great interest. I've always been fascinated by how humour translates (in both directions) across the Atlantic. About 5 years ago, British comedy was in a pitiful state. Native sitcoms were dreary, formulaic and completely unfunny. Instead, we had a series of re-runs of classic shows like ‘Dad's Army' and no end of American imports like ‘Frasier', ‘Seinfeld' and ‘The Larry Sanders Show'.

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Blank minds

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I've just picked up on this discussion on Textism concerning what you think about when you're not thinking of anything else. There are some great answers: my favourite was, "What would happen if I started a Slinky going down the up esclator?", and the scariest was, "Sex and viral vector purification via [HPLC]{.caps}". On the bus coming home yesterday, my thinking about nothing ran thusly. "Why has that guy got dark hair and a grey moustache?

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More nice pictures

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I know that this is the second link I've posted recently to a photography site, but I came upon this one via Zeldman, and I just had to share it because the images are so extraordinary: Lost America Night Photography. The pictures are all taken around the full moon on a really long exposure. The colours make the abandoned diners and gas stations look totally other-worldly. I'm really excited waiting the next full moon now, as I'm going to dash out with a camera, a tripod and a lot of patience, and give it a go.

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Saturday linkage

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A couple of things which caught my eye: Asia Grace by Kevin Kelly â€" some really stunning photographs taken all over Asia. I only wish I could take photos like this. [via BoingBoing] Ladies Against Feminism. It looks like a total wind up, but apparently it isn't, which makes me laugh and despair at the same time. Evidently, I am not a "lady". At about the age of 5, I found out that girls were allowed to wear trousers.

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Pointless invention of the day award goes to…

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Just what the world needs: a new eating utensil for people who can't coordinate their bowl-mouth popcorn action. Actually if you can't get popcorn in your mouth without a utensil, you probably shouldn't be trusted with pointy plastic objects — you'll have our eye out. From the publicity blurb: Hi, I'm Don Sothman. Now you, too, can say good-bye to greasy fingers and paper napkins. With new finger foods coming to market almost daily, the least I can do is help clean up this delicious mess!

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Friday nonsense

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If you fancy a bit of a laugh, take a look at this site. There's all manner of bizarre and unusual recordings -- Muhammad Ali singing about tooth decay, anyone? My favourite is "Beatle Barkers". Give "Love Me Do" a listen, and marvel at the close harmony sheep on backing vocals. [via BoingBoing]

The Two Towers as you’ve never read it before

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Lemonlye has written a brilliantly funny (and affectionate) parody of The Two Towers. The three-way telepathy call is particularly hilarious. It's just the kind of thing I would have written if I was witty and intelligent.

Besieged

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Tom Coates has a link to an interesting UpMyStreet conversation in Hackney, London. The UpMyStreet conversations are an interesting concept anyway: our communities are now so fragmented that it's easier to talk to someone in the next street online than in person. In this case, that's because there's a crazed gunman besieging the street. The last time I tried UpMyStreet out for my own area, I found an advert for a flat in the very same block that I live in.

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Eyes in the back of your head (and other places)

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I was convinced that this [via BoingBoing] was a wind up. Can you see yourself wearing the Heartcam? Sure, it might prevent you being the victim of crime, but that would be because potential attackers are paralysed with laughter. Still, it might be amusing for those "Hello, I'm up here" moments (women - you know what I'm talking about).

The Sound of Denmark

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If you want to relax and chill out this weekend, have a look at Danish Soundscapes [via BoingBoing]. I particularly reccomend "Koeer/Gallop" (Galloping cows) or "Naaleskov" (pine forest). Koeer Gallop reminds me of being on the Isle of Mull. I worked there for a summer, helping out with whale watching tours. I was the scientific officer (very exciting for a just-graduated biologist), but in practice I did the science stuff, drove the "whalies" around, and made the tea.

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Turkish Star Trek

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I have no idea whether this video [via BoingBoing] is real or not, but if it isn't it should be. I really, really want to see it. The "beaming down" effects sound like they would be worth the price on their own. Let's face it, anything would be better than the blandness that is Enterprise. One question: why is Fidel Castro chatting to Spock in the poster for the video at the top of the page?

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Bush Clippy

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This is just fantastic! And completely and utterly true, I suspect. [Via Boing Boing]

Mittens

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What you really need on a Friday night is some Spicy Brains. Don't be put off by the twee beginnings -- trust me, it gets very weird. Hehehehe. I'm evidently in dire need of brains of some sort. I managed to burn my hand badly on the oven door this evening. Arse. Oven. Hot. Burns.

Found objects

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This site exhibits a plethora of strange found objects (photographs, notes and so on), which give tantalizing or bizzare glimpses into other people's lives. The photographs are particularly poignant. Strangely addictive. Some of the photographs reminded me of those we found at my great aunt's after she died. She was a spinster (what a truly awful word) in her nineties when she died, and to us children was a slightly fierce old lady.

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What did I tell you?

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So I'm not the only one who speculates about the appeal of blue leds (via Boing Boing). I had no idea that it partially originated with what would be maximally visible to the ageing eyes of middle-aged men, though! Not being rich enough to afford hi-fi classy enough to sport the blue 'uns, I've got a Rega Planet with a rather nice, retro 70's calculator red display.

House prices

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This is totally nuts: the sooner house prices return to some kind of sanity, the better. Otherwise, Mr. Butshesagirl and I face a lifetime of renting, with the full horror of other people's taste in chintzy soft furnishings that this entails. What really got me was the quote from the local estate agent: "It is a nice little place and at the price you can't really go wrong." Now, just read that quote again slowly to yourself with a cool flannel applied soothingly to your forehead.

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Entertainificationitude

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This is more fun than anyone should be allowed to have on a Thursday night. Rearrange Bush's speeches into something with more clarificationitude. My theory is that this is an actual White House speech writing tool. Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.