January 30, 2004
Darwine - The Darwine project intends to port and develop WINE as well as other supporting tools that will allow Darwin and Mac OS X users to run Windows Applications - crivens! [via Ben Hammersly]
SSCrabble - solitaire Scrabble , with no Flash or Java nonsense. Lovely.
January 29, 2004
EnoQuest#3 - Matt Jones' quest to contact Brian Eno, and test the theory behind Friendster et al, ends in success, after just three days and in two degrees of separation. As the man himself suggests, he and Matt are from 'too-similar' worlds, but then, that's rather the point - you can't quest after someone in this way without picking a target withing your likely social network. I just wish my SIM card hadn't fried last year - my degree of separation from some famed and fascinating folk jumped from one to god knows what in the time it took a dimwit Orange employee to put the SIM in the wrong 'phone!
January 28, 2004
Dovester - A fascinating post on 17th Century dove breeders and their social networking tools. A special trust metric had been established, which allowed each breeder to rate his peers, a process in which each vote carried weight based on the casters own ratings. [via Many To Many]
January 27, 2004
January 26, 2004
Magicplants.co.uk None of your bullshit natural highs here: P. Cubensis mushrooms, Magic Truffles, Salvia, seeds containing DMT, Peyote and San Pedro cactii. By my calculations you could spend around £100 at this site and be spectacularly twatted for a good week. Of course, you'd then be sectioned and spend the rest of your life talking to a giant neon slug called Fantastic Dave.
One city's bold approach to chronic homelessness - at last, someone has worked out that the thing homeless people really need is... homes. [via Boing Boing]
January 24, 2004
Rammellzee: "Iconic Treatise on Gothic Futurism" - crackers, but no more so than Rammellzee's music and art work.
Photographer Helmut Newton Killed in Car Crash
January 23, 2004
ActoRss - a handy widget from Gary at Solitude that provides an RSS feed for any actor in the IMDB. A nice complement to his UGC cinema listings feed generator.
NewsFan - a headline reader for OS X. Some interesting features (you can clip news items for later perusal), and a lot of cack, including a desktop news ticker (eugh!) and a cheeky 'Import from NetNewsWire' option, which doesn't work.
January 22, 2004
Andy Budd: The Business Case for Web Accessibility - a great overview, and this phrase stood out: After all, Google is the largest "blind user" on the web.
Sonof's gabber tribute to Howard Dean isn't the only musical rendition of that Iowa screech
The Scotsman - Comfort of strangers - The most intriguing literary event last year wasn’t the arrival of Harry Potter No5, or the waste of the Booker Prize on DBC Pierre, nor even the potty elevation of JRR Tolkien in The Big Read. It was the rise of the literary weblog.
Torrentz.com - Our purpose here is to find and catalog all the nice torrents from other web sites out there.
A Delicious Way To Personalize The Web - I've been using Delicious since it launched, and I'm nearly as keen on it as this bloke.
January 21, 2004
Suprnova.org RSS feed - is it just me, or is Bittorrent the most ferociously addictive filesharing application since Napster? This will help get you a quick fix.
January 20, 2004
MacSerialJunkie - handy, to say the least. Lord knows how I've managed to live on the internet this long without coming across it before. [via Bunker]
DiscSox DJ Sleeves - look like the ideal storage replacement for the squillions of slip-cased promo CDs I never listen to because it's too much hassle to search through them.
January 19, 2004
Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do) - guilty of numbers three and seven on the list; incredibly, terribly, awfully guilty.
January 18, 2004
MTThreadedComments - way more trouble than it's worth for this place, but interesting.
iChat SMS - throws an error when you try a UK phone number, sadly.
January 17, 2004
MetaCube - hee!
Darling Nikki came back, but no one really noticed - I didn't know the Foo Fighters had covered the song (and I really don't want to hear it), nor did I know that it was Prince's 'masturbating with a magazine' lyric that prompted Tipper Gore to launch the PMRC, the folk behind those semi-literate 'Parental Advisory' stickers. [via Anil Dash, a dab hand at uncovering good Prince links]
January 16, 2004
56K Modem Emulator - ah, memories.
Goatse.CX Suspended - a travesty. Or something.
Un Ra - uh, what to say? A big, crazy list of records that are, in some way or another, kissing cousins with the work of Sun Ra. (Who is Woebot anyway? No 'About' page that I can see, but from his posts I know that he knows folk I know)
Sony Ericsson T630 Review (MobileBurn) - Now that simply everyone has a t610 set to the 'Old Phone' ring and standard SMS alert, using one in public is next to impossible. That's my preposterous reason for wanting the t630, anyway. The only lickable feature is the My Friends application, which allows you to check the phone status of your mates (eg. whether they want to be contacted only by SMS, or not at all) just like 'Buddy Lists' in IM apps.
A dare. Matt Jones has had an idea/nervous breakdown: The BBC should devote all their resources to conquering Space. Anything that takes You & Yours off the air gets my vote.
January 15, 2004
Sixes and Hit Wickets! - a cricket weblog based in India.
Register as an organ donor online - if there's a reason not to, I don't know it.
Scottish Community Foundation - a grantmaker and donor services agency [to] match the interests of donors with the needs of communities... - interesting. [via, in a roundabout way, xlab]
Movable Type 2.6 is out - I'm not convinced by the use of redirection to dissuade comment spammers out to boost PageRank, since it (obviously) denies genuine commenters the PageRank they deserve. Throttling floods of spam comments is good though - I had a fun evening just before Christmas deleting 93 of the bloody things.
January 14, 2004
Internet Explorer for Windows, Box Models and More - workarounds, rather than hacks, to avoid box model problems.
Angry Middle-aged Man - Is Larry David funnier than everyone else, or just more annoying? - The former, I'd say. Curb Your Enthusiasm alone makes the price of a Freeview box worthwile.
Creative Commons licences for the UK - good thing too. To be honest, I'd forgotten the US bias of the existing licences. That's the internet for you, I suppose.
Many, many CSS links at thefixor.com [via Etc.]
TunesAtWork lets you listen to your personal iTunes music collection while at your office or lab, even though your iTunes collection resides at home - I wonder if Apple will stomp on this - it looks like you can specify client addresses, and it streams, so it's not opening up your Library for the world to leech.
January 13, 2004
konspire2b/Kast users note: the Submit Response Radio channel is now broadcasting again. Subscribe to this RSS feed to keep up to date.
LaCie's Bigger Disk - a terabyte. Woof.
Bloogz: The Blog Search Engine - been showing up in our logs quite a bit lately, seems nearly useful despite the awful name.
A Big Theory of Culture - a talk with Brian Eno [via Peter Lindberg's Bookmarks]
Burn the witch - Dan Hon strikes out at the latest bit of techno-paedo nonsense in the media. This constant blaming of technology - be it football hooligans using mobiles, or paedofiles using the internet - for the sins of the people using it really gets me down. But, then again, I'm the last to agree with the old 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people' chestnut.
January 12, 2004
HEY! - the story of the net send * Hey! kid, in his own words. For those who don't know the story, Carl was suspended thanks to this absolute halfwit of a teacher over-reacting to a bit of harmless fun in the computer lab.
Vladimir Nabokov: Father of Hypertext? - interesting post on the nature of Pale Fire, suggesting it is a work of proto-hypertext and that it is in some way design-led. I'm not sure about the latter, but it's, um, web of cross-reference and notation certainly calls to mind the experience of following hyperlinks, in that the book points the reader to related fragments and cannot (must not?) be read in the usual linear fashion.
Ordnance Survey One-inch "Popular" edition, Scotland, 1921-28 [via Simon's Skip]
January 08, 2004
iPod mini - er, oh dear. Sure it's pretty and tiny, but the colours are tacky and at $249 for 4GB, there's no reason to buy one over the entry-level full-size iPod.
January 06, 2004
Images of Mars and All Available Satellites
January 01, 2004
BBC NEWS | Scotland | Cities' Hogmanay revels cancelled - bloody hell! Edinburgh's not having much luck these days, what with all the good bits burning down the year before last.