This is just beyond awesome: Boing Boing: Meth dealers use model rocket to hide drugs
archive for 2005
I know I’m becoming a total mac-geek when I like t-shirts with mac GUI widgets on them. At work I use a mac while at home I’m in PC/Windows land. I have to say, there are more elements of OS X that I’d like in Windows rather than vice-versa.
The shopping cart system over on panic.com is also awesomely cool and the UI is instantly useable to mac users.
There’s a great article over on rollingstone.com about Justin Frankel, the guy behing winamp, the AOL buy-out of his company and the ensuing fallout. I remember the very first time I ran winamp on a PC, it was and still is a very nice piece of software.
So I’m adding to the general blogosphere buzz by blogging about a blogging tool. A while ago I put my email address into some box on wordpress.com and a few days ago I got an invite to start a blog. WordPress.com offers a free pre-installed wordpress hosting solution much like blogger. So I setup a completely pointless blog just to try it out.
It’s a very neat setup, you can do almost everything you can on a normal wordpress setup except edit the actual page templates. It comes with a choice of eight different themes which is more than adequate for this type of service. I think I’ll stick to my own hosted wordpress install though. The geek in me requires much more customisation than wordpress.com allows.
Google playing catch-up with RSS have release Google Reader, a web based feed reader.
Serenity has been officially released now and I went to see it for a second time last night with The Gang. It was fantastic even on the repeat viewing and has been getting some great reviews in the press. Even Orson Scott Card likes it!
Websites that don’t work without the www at the beginning of the domain name. A typical culrpit is Argos (omg doesn’t work).
Wahey, I’m back on the ‘net. Last Saturday we got cable installed in our new flat complete with 1MB internet (soon to be four!) 😀
Typetester – Compare fonts for the screen, nifty stuff and super useful when creating new text styles for a site.
Wedding was aces, reception was great. Spent most of Sunday recovering from my excesses. Photos to follow at some point. James & Catriona are now in the sun, damn them! 🙂
I can hear those bells already. It’s James & Catriona’s big day tomorrow, my nails are done and my pink shirt is ironed (how metrosexual darling!). I stupidly put my suit in to dry-clean at the last minute and so have got to pick it up first thing in the morning. Of course, my worries pale in comparison to James’. Best of luck mate 🙂
Shiny new things from Google! They’ve finally done something Google-esque with their blogger aquisition, and Google Blog Search is the result.
Your History Here is a very neat use of Google Maps, and from a UK perspective!
One of the guys at work had a copy of the new look Guardian in its Berliner format. It’s a really nice size, bigger than a scrappy tabloid, but smaller than a full-on broadsheet.
Their new overall look is very clean and modern, and the Guardian already looked pretty contemporary. They’ve created a new font aswell “Guardian Egyptian” was is very slick.
The digital version, which is basically pdfs or jpegs and text, is also free until September 26th to tempt you to have a read.
We’ll be moving into out new place in two weeks so the long process of sorting, binning and packing had begun. Today I pulled all the dusty, forgotten boxes out from under the bed. There were three boxes all full of ring-binders which contained my notes from university.
I’m not sure why I’d kept them for so long. After a moments thought I set about ripping all the paper out of them and binning it all. A very liberating experience I tell you. I did keep one binder of Maths 2Y note though, as they “might be useful”.
I often scoff at these “Ten more CSS tricks you may not know” articles due to my supreme knowledge of all things (ha!). But, some of the tricks described in this article I didn’t know about, and number ten is genuinely useful (no, go look yourself).
So I’ve been totally slack and not blogged about the De La Soul (up inna’ hizzy) gig. I went to see them last Friday along with James & Catriona and Alex and they rocked. It was the most fun I’ve had at a gig for ages. They got the crowd totally worked up and everyone was bouncing and having a great time. There was lots of “Hands in the air if you love hip-hop!” and “Is the party on the left? or the right?”. Masterful crowd control stuff. It’s not until they started doing their stuff you realise how much material they’ve done and how consistently awesome it all is. It was a great night. Such a shame Kerry couldn’t make it as she was ill. I had to tone down the “awesomeness” when I got home so she wasn’t too jealous :). There are a few (not brilliant) pics up over in the pictures hizzouse.
I just watched the first episode of the new HBO mega-series Rome. HBO are mostly known for their contemporary stuff like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under & Sex And The City. With Rome and Deadwood they are having a bash at some historical stuff and seem to be doing quite well. Deadwood has had a second series and this first episode of Rome was very engaging.
Rome also got a very British cast with him out of Dog Soliders as a Centurion and a whole bunch of others. Plus, plenty of Gladiator inspired action scenes and some well integrated special effects. It could be a promising series.
Another nifty AJAX application on the block is Kiko, an online calendar and scheduling app. It’s pretty neat.
So, hurricane Katrina turned out to be a lot worse than anyone expected. I know everyone is saying the same thing, (with a lot of passion in some cases) but it is quite amazing that the Bush administration can fund the invasion and occupancy of a country half-way around the world. Yet cannot give sufficient help to people in its own country. Lack of communication and excess red tape seems to be to blame for a lot of the delays. The post 9/11 knee-jerk reactionary Department For Homeland Security just seems to have added another level of bureacracy into the whole governmental apparatus.
A whole bunch of geeks stayed behind and and holed up on the 27th floor of a New Orleans ISP keeping a journal, which is fascinating yet scary reading. I can’t help feeling that the worlds greatest super-power has enough money, but if want to you can donate through the Red Cross.
Wow, what a weekend. That was a whole heap o’ fun. If you haven’t been keeping track, last weekend was James’ stag trip to Prague in the Czech Republic. We flew out on Friday morning and arrived at about 3 in the afternoon to be greeted by gorgeous weather and an amazing city. Thanks to Adam’s navigations skillz we got a bus and a tram to the hotel but got off slightly too early and treked about 2 ks up a road in the blazing sun. The hotel was nice, basic but clean and friendly.
So….tired. Will blog stuff about the weekend “soon”.
An interesting article by Jason Kottke on GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS? and the general future of applications and the internet.
Last night was the premiere of Serenity which Kerry and I had managed to procure tickets for. The queue when we got there (an hour early) was already at least a hundred people and it continued to grow into the biggest queue I think I’ve ever been in for a film. The film itself was bloody great and I think stands up on its own as a fine sci-fi action film with all the usual glorious Whedon dialogue. Noticeably the entire geek populace of Edinburgh was in attendance, which included most of the regulars from the Hoose. This let to much clapping, not just at the start and the end, but at key moments which was a little strange at first.
I did read one review in Metro last week that said the special effects were “ropey”. I don’t know what crack that reviewer was smoking but I think the style of effects used in Firefly/Serenity is positively refreshing. They use lots of traditional camera effects such as objects being out of focus and rapid panning and zooming which all makes it look like a hand-held camera. Oh and I really liked the soundtrack, might have to buy it.
It looks to be released here in the UK on the 7th of October. I’ll be seeing it again and I’d recommend it to anyone else.
Wow, this is super-cool. The Beastie Boys have put up mp3s of A Capella versions of some of their tracks for personal remixing and such.
They’ve gone all typographic and print-like. I love it!
Wow, this week is a busy one. This morning Kerry and I went to view a flat on Lauriston Street that was really, really nice. We’ve asked for an application form and everything, heres hoping we’re the only ones going for it. Wednesday is Serenity premiere night (if I every get back in touch with Erin) and then on Friday we’re off to sunny Prague for James’ stag weekend!
We though it would be best to actually see something in the festival, seen as how we live in Edinburgh. After reading a cracking review in Metro I’ve booked tickets for “Basic Training by Kahlil Ashanti”. Looks like it will be fun.
We got annoyed at the slowness of the W3C HTML validator today, so I looked around for instructions on installing a local version. As usual the Apple Developer Connection has a very good article on installing and setting up a local validator. It’s much faster with it being local plus its, like, more extreme.
Protopage is a brilliantly useable application of AJAX and Javascript. A useful application for non techy folks who want to create an instantly editable “links page” to set as a home page.
We did some “extreme” programming at work the other day and manged to re-design clan.com in a single day(ish). This wasn’t technically extreme programming but hey, it makes our geeky jobs sound much more active and well, eXtreme. It was nice change for the team to focus on a single project for a whole day.
Toot, toot. De La Soul are playing at Scratch in September and we got tickets.
I had the afternoon off yesterday as it was Kerry and Is second anniversary. We went to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Dean Gallery. Bresson was a photographer who craved anonymity and would never stage photographs; instead he wanted what he famously called the “decisive moment”, when the click of the camera captures a moment of unexpected drama. He was brilliant at catching this decisive moment, illustrated perfectly in the photo to the left. He manages to get the shot when the guy has both feet off the ground above the puddle. The exhibition was good, it wasn’t just photos taken by Bresson. It had photos of him and other biographical photos and items to view. It was a little pricey at £5 but hey, it was a treat. Magnum have all the photos Bresson took whilst working for them online to browse (and buy). After the exhibition we dodged a torrential summer downpour and got expensive ready meals and fizzy blackberry wine from M&S for dinner. A great way to spend an afternoon off.
Update: Looks like Joe beat me to the Cartier exhibition 🙂
We’re having some serious issues with our web hosting over on Google Sightseeing (probably not working). Please bear with us while we work it out.
Holy mackerel batman! The W3C HTML Validator has had an update and a face-lift. It has finally come crawling out of the 90s.
SwankSigns is an ace site “dedicated to the art of mocking public works”. It’s basically a gallery of bizzare and funny signs from around the world, some of which I think (hope) have had a wee bit of photoshop tweaking.
This is a nice article over on particle tree about code commenting strategies. We should do more of this at work.
We were moaning about the lack of CSS bug fixes in beta 1 of IE 7 at work the other day. Reading the IE blog on msdn it’s nice to see that they have actually fixed the majority of CSS bugs, but these will only be fixed in beta 2 for some reason. Lets just hope everyone upgrades.
Dreamhost are doing a crazy discount deal at the moment where you get $110 off any hosting plan. So, if you sign up for their “Crazy Domain Insane” deal for $120/year, you pay…$10! For that 10 bucks you even get a free domain, shell access and all the cgi/php/perl stuff you’ll ever need. I signed up and registered ollyjackson.com, just for the sake of it :).
Wow, Michael Palin has all of his travel books available on his website to read, for free. I’m currently reading (a hardcopy) of Himalya and it’s a very pleasant book, factual yet entertaining aswell.
Spent some time at work tearing my hair out today as IE was rendering a page bizzarely. I eventually tracked it down to the fact that the very first line in the HTML was not the DOCTYPE definition. If IE doesn’t see this first I think it reverts to “quirks” mode AKA “render stuff where every I want” mode. Handy to know.