‘Whats Wrong with The BBC Website’ Wiki (add your peeves)

Various sources are a reporting a growing trend in people getting robbed of their iPods – the distinctive white headphones being a bit of a giveaway that an expensive and desirable gadget is stuffed into a pocket. To counter this trend, I’d be tempted to walk around with a pair of white headphones attached to my 1989 Aiwa WS-232 personal stereo with the hope of disappointing some wouldbe mugger. Maybe Apple could employ a number of these stooge ‘iPod’ users to wander round cities, then muggers would maybe think twice before brandishing a knife.

If I were to buy an iPod, I think I’d discard the earbuds anyway; I’d consign them to my desk draw to sit alongside the ‘hockey puck’ mouse that came with my iMac. I’ve never liked in-ear headphones, and the new ones that plug directly into your ear canal seem even more uncomfortable. Instead, I’d go for a nice pair of Grado SR60s. Grados have the advantage of being the best sounding headphones money can buy whilst looking, from a distance at least, like they might have been picked up at a car boot sale. Now that’s trendy.

The Book of Pallalink (via t-melt)

Apologies for the interruptions in service. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to set up a network router for most of the day. It’s a relatively old Netgear RP114 I picked up cheaply on eBay at the weekend. It’s a nice piece of kit, although getting the dern thing to work is proving to be more difficult than it should.

Sir Peter Ustinov 1921 – 2004

The Guardian has a piece on How Nasa looks to change Mars into a garden of Earthly delights – probably at the behest of Bush; they must have discovered ‘Texas Tea’.

Only a certain percentage of the planet’s population experience these ‘Earthly delights’; wouldn’t it be better to terraform a few countries in Africa first?

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture (I know the book’s available for free and everything, but an HTML version would be nice) (via Cloven Hoof)

John Ronson on the Kubrick Archive

As a tonic to the last post, The Panda’s Thumb is a weblog “dedicated to explaining the theory of evolution, critiquing the claims of the anti-evolution movement, and defending the integrity of science and science education in America and around the world.” (via Metafilter)

This site will answer all your questions:

• Where Did Dinosaurs Come From?
• Why Did God Create Dinosaurs?
• Why Did Dinosaurs Become Extinct? (a very thorough answer here)
• What Was Life Like with Dinosaurs, At First?

I feel sorry for the millions of children who are forced to learn rubbish like this. (via plasticbag.org)

Digital Photography Now has a preview of Epson’s unique Digital Rangefinder camera, the RD-1. A collaboration between Epson and traditional Rangefinder maker Cosina, it’s a triumph of function over form. Aimed at staunch traditionalists who want to dip a toe into the world of digital photography, it’s a camera that looks as if it’s been pulled from the 1960s and reluctantly modified with digital components. Strangely, it has what looks like a film advance lever which cocks the shutter before every shot, as well as a film rewind knob which is really a jog dial for changing camera settings. Priced at around 2000 however, its retro design and functionality do not come cheap. (via Photography Blog)

Python Film to Challenge Passion

Life on Mars – but ‘we sent it’

Coinciding with the hoo-haa surrounding the announcement of Six Apart’s Typekey – a centralised weblog comment system aimed at reducing comment spam for MT and Typepad users – I had my own comment spam attack last night. It occured in this post about meta-tags from July 2002, and, in amongst the flood of messages, the spammer suggested that I was a nerd. A deep insult I think you’ll agree; geek maybe, but not a nerd.

Anyway, as I doubt I’ll be using Typekey in the future, I’m sticking to a more ‘nuts & bolts’ method of deterring spammers. Through a bit of detective work using Refer and my Apache access logs, I found the spammer’s IP address and country (Australia). Then with a bit of .htaccess jiggerypokery I blocked the spammer and sent them to this 403 page. Um… maybe I am a nerd :-/

Beating the Photography Blues

Sony E-book Reader (the buttons on it remind me of my old Casio VL-tone) (via /.)

NASA to announce another significant discovery on Mars

What’s The Point… An Over-emphasis on Technique?

Vintage Mac Collector Finds Douglas Adams’ Mac IIfx (via LMG)

Dive into Markdown (John Gruber on weblog software)

Christopher Eccleston is the new Doctor (good to see the Beeb take some bold decisions like this rather than casting the likes of Alan Davies or Eddie Izzard into the role)

Phil Plait has thoroughly debunked Richard Hoagland’s claims of civilisations on Mars on his excellent site Bad Astronomy. My favourite has to be the tower blocks on Mars, which are really just JPEG artefacts blown up a thousand times.

Phil also addresses the famous Face and links to a high resolution image of it taken by Mars Global Surveyor. If you squint your eyes while looking at this image, the face becomes more apparent, illustrating the fact that it was caused more by the poor resolution of the Viking image rather than anything else.

While Plait’s article is, like the rest of his work, well worth reading, I do wonder why he’s gone to so much effort to debunk Hoagland’s claims. Looking at Hoagland’s site from a web design point of view, the multi-colored text on a black ‘star field’ background, the new-age graphics and the general sensationalist tone do tend signify the work of a conspiracy theorist, new age cultist type whose claims almost always have no scientific basis whatsoever. That said, I have found one site that seems to buck this trend: The Campaign for Philosophical Freedom is well designed (with CSS!) with nicely presented articles on a variety of subjects. Delve deeper and things start to get a bit weird as you discover that its founder has “scientific proof” for life after death and the key aim of the site is to deliver his case for this. Right.

Vinyl Data (about the Spectrum programs that were recorded onto pop records in the 1980s) (via City of Sound)

Jeffrey Veen: I don’t Care About Accessibility (speaking notes from his panel at SxSW and one of the best pieces I’ve read on the subject of web design for a long time) (via del.icio.us)

BBC article on Steve Grand and Lucy

The Megapixel Myth – A Pixel Too Far? (via del.icio.us)

Alex Brodie is another talented British designer doing great work for Apple

National Geographic > New Theory: Universe Created by an Intelligent Being (via 0xDECAFBAD)

Details are emerging of the so-called 10th planet, named Sedna:

• NASA Press Release
• Related Media
  • An artist’s impression
  • Comparison with other bodies in the Solar System
  • Its position in the night-sky (you may have to squint to see it

Original Star Trek influences current gadget design (via Engadget)

Cover Art for ‘Revisions’, An Anthology of Alternative History (via Boing Boing)

“I hope to bring into existence in five years time a robot which can communicate so naturally that it is indistinguishable from man” – Toshitada Doi, Sony

Yahoo! News > Sony to set up intelligent robot lab

How long before they produce a robot that looks indistinguishable from man?

Mini Cooper Robot (a clever viral marketing campaign from BMW?)

The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld

“Societal attitudes toward computers have changed greatly since our early days of trying for the first time to use computers to make various kinds of art (images, music, etc) a mere couple of decades ago. Whereas back then we were most commonly accused of attempting to completely dehumanize the arts, at this point there has become such widespread acceptance of these machines in the arts that there is now a good bit of interest in how this came to be.”

Wednesday’s Late Junction featured a piece of electronic music made by Laurie Spiegel while she was at Bell Labs in the early 70s. Our changing attitude to the use of computers in the arts may not be surprising considering the access to technology we now have, but what amazes me about Spiegel’s piece is how it sonically transcends both the period in which it was made and the mass of chunky 70s hardware for which it was composed. The piece, called Appalachian Grove, is about 22:30 minutes into this RealPlayer stream, which will be available until the 17th of March 2004.

Spiegel’s home page is well worth checking out (as long as your browser supports tables . It appears that she was making music with Apple computers almost as soon as they’d left Wozniak’s garage.

Robot Builder Could ‘Print’ Houses (stick that on your USB hub)

This preview of GNOME 2.6 discusses an interesting development in its file manager, Nautilus.

Like the OS X Finder and Windows’ file manager, Nautilus currently has a browser-like user interface, meaning you use backward and forward buttons to navigate through the hierarchy of folders. In the new version, Nautilus has a spatial finder mode, making it much more like the user interface found on the original Macintosh operating system. Rather than using one window to browse files, multiple windows are used, each representing a single folder. Many Mac users criticised Apple for the OS X Finder (which was based on the NeXT file manager), as its new navigational metaphor meant the Mac Finder had – in some peoples opinion – lost its ease of use.

What’s most interesting about this new feature in GNOME 2.6 is that Nautilus was originally designed and developed by a company called Eazel, which was founded by Andy Hertzfeld, co-designer of the original Macintosh user interface. Eazel has since collapsed but its clear that Nautilus continues to be developed in the direction that he and his team sent it.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image of 10,000 Galaxies (I recommend the 60MB Jpeg version for the full effect)

Dave Winer proposes a merge between Atom and RSS (crikey)

By way of Jesse Ruderman’s Toggle Google Look bookmarklet, I’ve been using Google’s redesigned interface for a few days now. At first, the changes didn’t seem enough to warrant a blog post, but the more I use it, the more I notice the many subtle re-arrangements that have been made.

The before and after screen grabs below show that the changes are more about what Google have taken away rather than added. Click to enlarge…

Tuning Apache and PHP for Speed on UNIX

Portable music players are ‘a tool whereby users manage space, time and the boundaries around the self.‘

Robot Stories (via t-melt)

There’s No Place Like 127.0.0.1 (a door mat for geeks)

Banryu the Robot Guard Dragon (lives by a house)

A Working Terminology for Minimal Music

A Nice Cup of Tea, by George Orwell (via LMG)

Mars Arctic Rover (inspired by Tumbleweeds… and The Prisoner)

Digital Rolleiflex (can’t figure out whether this is good or bad)

Recently, I’ve been using Steve Minutillo’s server side RSS / Atom aggregator Feed on Feeds for all my news gathering needs. Having become used to using 3-pane desktop aggregators like NetNewsWire and more recently Pears (a cross-platform desktop aggregator written in Python), I assumed that browser based readers would offer a poorer user experience. However, using Feed on Feeds, it’s clear that the browser window is a great place to check your news subscriptions, mainly because you can access them from any web enabled device. Having your aggregator set up on a publicly accessible server does mean that it’s open to abuse, so you do have password protect the folder it’s sitting in, but limitations aside, it’s a great piece of software. This page has instructions on how to install Feed on Feeds as well as how to set up a Cron job to periodically check your subscriptions.

Low Life Labs’ Robotic Walkers (Quicktime MPEG4)

Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites

Internet Archive > Moving Images > Prelinger Archives > Futurism

Internet Archive > Moving Images > Open Source Movies

Opportunity’s hole-in-one and the large crater it’s going to investigate next

NASA’s press briefing on the ‘significant findings’ on Mars will be broadcast on NASA TV at 7PM GMT (2PM EST).

The Commodore 64 is still being used for commercial purposes

Scientists drop a bowling ball from a plane to simulate a meteor impact (now that’s science!)

Creatures hit by Mother Nature’s Ugly Stick

“Every day the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman meets with a small coterie of political journalists known as ‘the lobby’ for a topical chat, or ‘briefing’. We’ve built a site that lets you: read summaries of these briefings, add your own comments, find what other websites are saying about the issues discussed.”

DowningStreetSays.com. Excellent.

Evidence mounts of water and possibly microbial life on Mars (Update: NASA is to announce news of a ‘significant finding’ on Tuesday 2nd of March)