• Eldon Square (Slight Return)
• The Crippling of iTunes 4.01
• A Report from Graduate Fashion Week
• Chimps

“I think politically we are out on a limb at the moment. As a country I think we paid the price last night”

So says Martin Isherwood, writer of this years nul points UK entry into the Eurovision Song Contest. If the Eurovision results table is a measure of country unpopularity – the songs being of secondary importance – then it seems the UK is not well liked at the moment. That said, the lack of points could simply be due to the song being crap, in which case it’s about time John Shuttleworth got his chance to represent us with his haunting ballad ‘Pigeons in Flight’.

Steven Garrity has written up his experiences of spending a week using a Mac as a long time Windows user. Apart from the ‘hockey puck’ mouse which was consigned to the desk drawer even before my Mac was prised from its polystyrene packaging, his set up of a Graphite iMac 400MHz running Jaguar is exactly the same as mine. This model is probably the lowest specced Mac you could get away with running Jaguar on and I’m pleased to say, four years after I bought it, it’s doing a pretty good job. Applications such as Photoshop are a little sluggish but for web browsing and web developing (which are my main uses for my Mac), there’s still life in the old gum-drop yet. [via Minimal]

I’m pretty sure that the repeated playing of Metallica tracks to break the will of Iraqi prisoners of war constitutes torture. There’s something so repulsive to the human brain about a single song, looped indefinitely so that particular patterns of sound cause mental anguish, especially when lack of sleep is involved.

When I was a student, a housemate came back late one night, slightly intoxicated by alcohol. Unfortunately, the extent of her drunkenness made her put her much liked Finley Quaye CD single on repeat-play before promptly falling asleep for the night. I awoke to the wall-muffled bass lines of ‘Even After All’ caught in a hellish infinite loop of light reggae.

No-one should have to go through that.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I find watching grown-up journalists bicker about the merits (or lack thereof) of weblogs to be lunchtime reading of the highest order. Read the original Onlineblog post here.

Read John Gruber’s excellent review at Daring Fireball.

The first production robot vacuum cleaner has gone on sale in the UK today. Here’s a promotional Flash presentation complete with annoying R2-D2-like sound effects.

So it seems that something I watched on a 1982 edition of Tomorrow’s World has finally come to fruition. Apparently, next years model will be able to knock on your front door and sell itself to you.

• Oldspeak > The Reverend Billy Wants You to Stop Shopping

Back in November, when proper news was at a premium, the BBC reported that a Grandfather had ruthlessly shot down a Squirrel that had been terrorising innocent by-standers in, of all places, Knutsford.

Now it seems the Badgers are at it; maybe they’ll gang up with the Squirrels and go around causing more trouble. Anyway, on my return to the BBC article about the terror squirrel, I noticed Scary Squirrel World, a site set up to document this disturbing trend in rodent hooliganism. Watch out for the Red-Eyed Cyclopic Tree Chaser.
[via t-melt]

I’m not sure if this is Andrew Orlowski having another snipe at weblogs or there is real substance in his suggestion that Google will be removing blog content from its main search results.

In 1999, Google bought Deja.com and in doing so acquired a database containing 20 years worth of Usenet conversation which it then made searchable via the ‘groups’ tab. Deja.com was a site that enabled users to search through and post to the Usenet; in effect it was a web based interface to a technology that was 20 years older than the web itself. This distinction between the web and the Usenet is important, because it has bearing on Orlowski’s assertion that because Google have acquired Blogger, they will – as in the case of the Deja acquisition – index blog content seperately and give it its own unique search form. Weblogs are not another subsection of the Internet as in the case of the Usenet, they are a dynamic part of the web itself and are valuable as a means with which the web of information can be kept relevant and interesting.

I think compartmentalising the web by removing blog generated content from the Google search results is a very bad idea and I’m hoping that this suggestion is mere sensationalism on behalf of Orlowski.

In 1994, my English Literature tutor gave me a battered copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Nine years later, I’m still trying to get through it. While reading it is like beating your way through thick jungle growth to find a path, the process of doing so is made enjoyable by Pynchon’s incredible use of language.

• Gravity’s Rainbow – An Ever-Expanding Web-Guide
• Guardian Unlimited | Arts Features | Have you seen this man?

Another new feature in iTunes 4 is the ability share individual track URLs.

• With sharing enabled in the preferences panel, control-click on a track in your library to bring up its contextual menu.
• Select ‘Copy Sharing URL’ and paste it into an HTML document or an email.

This is particularly useful if you produce your own music; you can publish track URLs and serve them up from your own iTunes library.

”As Mac users who failed to “authorize” another Mac in advance of a catastrophic disk crash will discover, the music you bought doesn’t belong to you. With CDs we have a limited licence, but in DRM it’s even more limited. Users who trill that the DRM is ‘harmless’ or give us bland assurances that it will be, touch wood, circumvented miss the point. DRM hands control from the technologists to the dying labels: the terms will henceforth be set by them.”

Maybe he has a point this time.

iTunes’ new music sharing feature is very cool indeed. After enabling sharing from behind a firewall in the system preferences – as documented in this Knowledge Base article – Kev and I were able to view each others playlists and stream music remotely with ease. Sharing options can be found in the iTunes preferences and if you know the IP address of a shared playlist, you can connect to it in the iTunes Advanced menu. Let me know if you would like to share some music.

The Prince of Wales is very good at choosing scientific developments which are on the edge of public awareness and using the media to raise fear about them. Of course, Charles is an expert on nanotechnology and therefore the right person to warn us all of the imminent threat of so-called Grey Goo and I’d hate to think that this was all some kind of publicity stunt. If only such a figure publicised the benefits of science in order to get themselves in the papers, but I guess good news doesn’t sell. Grey Goo exists purely in the realm of science fiction (I can recommend Blood Music by Greg Bear) and I’m sure that this is where it will stay.

• Nanodot > ‘Grey Goo’ Scares Prince Charles

I’m in the process of writing a business plan for a web related venture I’m hoping to set up. I have basic knowledge of how to go about this thanks to a short business course I went on, but if anyone has any experience of this, a few tips would be very welcome.