- The UK alert level has been lowered and hand-luggage can not be taken on planes again Only about half as much can be taken on board, liquids are still verboten and they’re asking people not to bring too much as it takes a long time to search – but generally that’s a pretty positive thing…
- TVTorrent.info seems to have been hacked, collapsed or shut-down… Another move by the copyright infringing people? I can’t find much coverage anywhere
- Male circumcision could halve the rate of HIV transmission in Africa, according to a new study I’m generally highly suspicious of the health benefits of circumcision, but this could change my mind.
Category: Random
- Ryan Carson talks about the value in a premium service for Web Apps Charging $99 for DropSend’s premium service increased their revenue by 30% in two weeks…
- Pictures of beautiful metro stations in Stockholm Absolutely stunning. Beautiful bits of design work. Elegant and atmospheric.
- Feed Icons More for my use than for yours, feedicons.com contains a variety of different colour versions of the various RSS/Atom standard icons
- An SFGate article from a couple of months ago talks about purity balls and chastity “It is one of the great superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.”
- Upsettingly – but perhaps unsurprisingly – Clay Shirky’s moderation strategies wiki has been overrun by revolting porno spam It’s all spurts and holes and sluts now. Very upsetting, but probably predictable. The open wiki is pretty much a thing of the past now already.
- Highly entertaining video of the I/O brush The link went around a couple of months ago, but if you haven’t seen it yet you should have a look immediately. Very cool indeed.
- Understand – a novelette by Ted Chiang Webb sent this to me a while ago – it’s a short novel about the experience of becoming more intelligent and the consequences of it as well. Mostly when people write about being more intelligent than they are, it sucks. This does not suck.
- The guy who represents ‘macs’ in the new adverts talks about his experiences First spotted him in Galaxy Quest, then in Dodgeball. Hot nerds are so awesome.
- Modest Apparel USA Because women just expose too much of themselves and need to be put into large tent-like structures to stop straight men killing and murdering everyone in frustrated rage. Religious people weird me out.
- Rael Dornfest is heading off from O’Reilly to explore new territories Good luck old chap. It was lovely working with you on the ETech programme last year and I look forward to seeing your new projects come to fruition…
- Stewart and Colbert on O’Reilly & Rivera American television is much more entertaining than British television. They get all shouty and aggressive and they make clever jokes about each other. So unfair.
- WiFi Router includes Built-In 160Gig Drive, iTunes, Bittorrent & FTP has just come onto the market I’m going to say it now, this is the first pass of the entertainment system of the future. You’ll stick it under your TV, it’ll connect to the internet and be the hub for your home and all your entertainment.
- My old proposal for an Apple media hub from January 2005 Operates as the router for the home, rips and stores audio and video, can broadcast and be accessed from devices all around the home…
- Gross! Superfast star-nosed mole looks like something you’d find growing on the butt of someone in a David Cronenberg movie How come we’re only now discovering the sheer range of really gross animals that exist? Feels like we should have noticed these things earlier – it’s not like they’re inconspicuous…
- Is cultural diversity the result of parasitic brain infections? This seems like a wonderful line for Republicans to explore – “Well of course they feel that way because of organisms in their brains. It’s obvious really. Poor dears.”
- Imagining the Tenth Dimension – A Flash walkthrough of some of the concepts in the book by Rob Bryanton It’s pretty extraordinary stuff and sort of makes sense. I think I’ll watch it through a couple of times more later this evening
- Hitwise report that del.icio.us’ traffic has doubled since the beginning of the year I get to hang out with Joshua occasionally at work and it’s always good fun. They’ve got so much done recently and there’s lots more to come.
- Apparently the BBC is exploring building devices to plug into iPods that allow them to listen to digital radio If this is true it’s almost certainly something that’s come out of the part of the BBC that I used to work in. It sounds like a really interesting tactic to try and encourage digital radio take-up…
- A study has compared the acceptance rates of evolution across the world, and America is terrifyingly close to the bottom of the list Britain’s actually a surprisingly secular state, so perhaps it’s not surprising it’s done quite well. The most interesting aspect of the study for me? That the link between creationism and pro-life politics is almost total in the US but slight elsewhere.
- Marshmallow Peeps You can’t get them in the UK – even at Cybercandy. It’s very annoying. They’re evil plastic morsels of deliciousness
- zefrank’s episode today rocks my stinking little world Simon: “He fucking rocks. I think I’d sleep with him”. Me: “Simon, my friend, I think we’d all sleep with him…”
- A Flickr slideshow of the Forestiere Underground Gardens in Fresno It looks beautiful. I think I was reading about these gardens somewhere on BoingBoing earlier today. They sounded fascinating. Flickr as ever, provides…
- In the absence of any bloody upgrade instructions for MT 3.3, I should have followed this tutorial Instead fighting with the damn thing for hours and have several completely non-functional new features including feeds.app lite and stylecatcher. Grr. Waste of an evening.
- $212 million dollars was spent last year marketing in the gay press and broadcasting networks “In its annual assessment of media buys advertising agency Prime Access Inc. and gay media representative firm Rivendell Media said that for the first time, advertising with ‘gay-specific’ content comprised slightly over half (50.3%) of all ads in the gay
- Mr Biddulph’s looking for a place to crash and think and hack in San Francisco for September Does anyone have any ideas? He’s rather good company.
- Bruno Giussani reviews and considers “The Long Tail” for The Huffington Post It’s an interesting critique that pulls the Long Tail effect back towards a few digitised assets, but which makes the mistake of saying that Chris Anderson only writes about the US when in fact it’s just starting in the US like many technology trends…
- Behind The Typeface – a stunning biography of “Cooper Black” I hope he’s got a high quality version of this somewhere for the future when the kids want to see it. Awesome. Just awesome.
- The Musty Man talks about travelling, backpacking, hating America and I suppose – sort of getting older The lovely Mr Bergman through this in my direction and I’m bloody glad he did. It’s a thoughtful and interesting piece on what it means to travel and what it means to come home and what the world looks like while you’re doing it…
- Monopoly is moving towards using Debit cards rather than multicoloured cash I wonder how many years we are away from a cashless Monopoly board, and whether we’ll get there before we do so in the real world…
- Ben Hammersley is in Afghanistan, taking amazing pictures that he’s putting onto Flickr There’s something about having a friend in a warzone that makes the conflict very very real. His photography is pretty stunning too
- A spoof of Al Gore that was put on YouTube, allegedly made by a teenager, may have been made by a PR firm with Exxon as a client Wow, this is super low and horrible. Makes the whole Cillit Bang thing seem like a real PR victory in comparison. This is like Ethicopocalypse. I don’t understand how these people sleep at night.
- An interesting article on C|Net about Google’s resolute refusal to play social networking games… For me, ‘social networking’ in the longer term remains a structuring principle rather than a product, but you need a the network to be able to layer it into your products, and Orkut isn’t it. Blogger’s rather been left to rot too…
- Toward a Better Wikipedia “The founder of Wikipedia on Friday urged contributors to the free internet encyclopedia to put more emphasis on quality instead of quantity.”
- Etsy’s browse by colour interface is extremely entertaining and playful Increasingly I think the nature of successfully exploring data on the internet is simply identifying your first order elements and then joining them together with absolutely any plausible data whatsoever…
- The biography of Atia on WIkipedia differs rather dramatically from her character in HBO’s Rome, which I’ve recently started watching on DVD Awesome series – loads of blood and violence and sex and war and stuff. Highly entertaining. Not necessarily enormously accurate, “Atia was a religious and caring matron. Tacitus considered her as an ideal Roman Matron”
- FF Roice‚Ñ¢ font family For some reason I keep coming back to this set of fonts. I keep thinking there’s something lovely about them that might make them fun to work with.
- Zombie Mindy and Buttons on You Tube Awesome cartoon flashback – this time to the early nineties in the first of a series of cartoons from Animaniacs… Okay I love ya, buh-bye!
- Mesozoic Mindy on You Tube The second of the episodes that I could find out You Tube – Unga Munga Not Lady, Tonga Mom!
- The third and final Buttons and Mindy cartoon I could find: Astro Buttons! Good on you Buttons. Finally telling that family where to stick their child-rearing pressures!
- And I’ll wrap it all up with this classic song from Pinky and the Brain… Neo-cortex, frontal lobe – BRAINSTEM! BRAINSTEM!
- Looks like OK/Cancel have been meeting Dan Hill again And that is all…
- Stephen Colbert ‘analyzes’ Wikipedia in this You Tube clip from his US TV Show I can’t even imagine UK TV comedians talking about Wikipedia, which probably explains why the UK remains a second-class net nation. Funny but troubling piece from Colbert, though…
- The history page on Wikipedia for ‘Elephants’ shows how resistant the site is to calculated attacks like the one Colbert proposed It’s more the quiet changes where factual errors seem to me to be likely to creep in – places where the edited fact seems plausible and perhaps uncontroversial. Still, Wikipedia remains my first port of call when I want to know something…