[RealPlayer Audio] The Fleet’s Lit Up!
_{Tommy Woodroffe commentates the 1937 Naval review on BBC Radio whilst being very, very drunk.}

I left this comment on the BBC Cult site on news that it will be shut down and most of the content will be removed.

Whoever took the decision to remove all this great content from the web just doesn’t get it. When you remove pages like this, you are breaking the web. There are probably tens of thousands of web pages out there that link to content on this site, all of which will now have dead links thanks to this stupid decision. Sure, the BBC can save money by removing the resource going into the maintenance of these pages, but what saving is there in removing the pages themselves? A bit of bandwidth? A gig or two of server space?

If the content is to be removed why not incorporate it into the BBC Creative Archive, allowing people to copy and share it under a Creative Commons license?

Free and Open Source Software at Silverorange
_{Stephen Garrity examines how they use Free and Open Source software at his web development company}

Richard Whiteley 1943 – 2005
P.R.I.

Artist’s concept video of the Deep Impact’s encounter with comet Tempel

Flooding causes Glastonbury chaos
_{It’s going to be a nother mud bath.
Update: Pictures of the floods.}

Philip K. Dick returns as an Android
_{Does he dream of electric sheep?}

If you have a clear view of the low, southeastern sky tonight, be sure to have a look in that direction where the full moon will appear just above the horizon looking oddly oversized due to oculomotor macropsia.

New review of Epson RD-1 Rangefinder on The Register
_{It’s already been out for 12 months.}

Giancarlo Neri’s The Writer
_{One of those sculptures that blends in with its surroundings, you could easily miss it.}

Cosmos 1 Weblog
_{The mission to put the first solar sail powered space craft into operation has, it seems, failed.}

Alfred’s Camera Page
_{I’ve linked to this site at least twice before, but what the hell, it’s a fine example of a personal site that’s not a weblog but a resource of information about a specific subject, in this case obscure Russian and European cameras.}

The Guardian conducts a survey to find the best and worst University websites.
_{Not sure that a survey of 13 students should carry much weight, but it’s interesting nonetheless.}

In 1998, I did some experimentation with SoundEdit 16 to make some glitchy audio pieces. Well I call it experimentation, it was more like messing around with the software’s audio filters to make as horrible a noise as I possibly could.

I recorded the results to Minidisc and that’s where they stayed until I recently copied them to my computer and uploaded them to The Freesound Project – a community driven database of sounds licensed under the Creative Commons. Maybe someone will find a use for them.

Dirac is the BBC’s open source video codec to be launched later in 2005
_{I presume they’ll be using the codec’s audio layer for BBC Radio on Demand. No more RealPlayer and WMP.}

I’m trying to work out whether the fact that the UK version of Google Maps, by default, focuses on my town of birth – Crewe – is down to Google knowing information about me that I don’t remember telling it, or just a coincidence. If the latter, then I suppose it’s something else Crewe is known for, other than Rolls Royce cars, its Railway Station, and Crewe Alexandra football club.

According to Wikipedia, there’s a crater on Mars named after Crewe, not sure what that says about the place.

Kodak to End the Production of B+W Paper
_{As the big companies pull out of supplying traditional photography materials, I’m hoping smaller companies will be successful in supplying paper and film to a specialist market. Traditional photographic processes and skills need to be kept alive, in my opinion.}

Over the course of National Architecture Week, I shall be taking pictures of my favourite North East buildings and uploading them to Flickr using the tag “architecture week”.

First off is the Engineering Research Station, a Grade II listed building in Killingworth, a small town situated a few miles north of Newcastle and a treasure trove of Brutalist style architecture.

Designed by Newcastle based Ryder & Yates in the mid 60s, the building won numerous awards at the time. The Twentieth Century Society website has some good information about the the ERS. More buildings – other than ones used for public transport – should be called ‘stations’, in my opinion.

Casting the del.icio.us net wider
_{You can browse for a genre, for example Jazz, by editing the url. Via Submit Response.}

Touch screens jog social memories
_{It’s such an injustice for people suffering from old age to just waste away with nothing to engage or exercise their minds. This is a great project.}

Architecture Week – North East Events
_{Judy Thomas’ photographic exhibition in her own Byker Wall flat seems the most intriguing.}

Tag Cloud – an automated Folksonomy tool
_{Everyone needs a Folksonomic Zeitgeist on their site, surely?}

Every Futurama title card
_{My favourite: Please turn off all cell phones and tricorders}

Nokia’s new browser is based on Apple Webkit
_{After Opera, another decent browser engine is being used for mobile applications. This can only be a good thing.}

Smarty Template Engine
_{Used this to re-code the site. Has a neat caching system which means pages should be loading a little faster.}

I felt it was about time I started writing more again, so, not particularly happy with the old design, I’ve given helium3 a new look.

The latest day’s content appears above the dotted line and the layout changes depending on what’s been posted; links are displayed horizontally unless an article has been added at which point they’re put in the right hand column.

The seven previous posts are displayed below the dotted line with articles on the left and links on the right. If few of those seven posts are articles, then an odd looking gap appears, giving me incentive to write longer posts!

I feel very rusty with my writing at the moment, so bear with me while I get back into the swing of things.

Google Advanced Operators Cheat Sheet
_{Here’s one that doesn’t seem to be listed: fred/bloggs is a faster way to find the exact string “fred bloggs”.}

[PDF] The Memoir Class

I’ve been using the typesetting program LaTeX to produce documents recently. This is not only a guide to using the Memoir class to typeset books and articles, but a great resource of general information about how books are designed.

Why We Love Aliens
_{As the release of Spielberg’s version draws near, Peter Conrad examines the many versions of H.G. Wells’ classic story The War of The Worlds.}

Supercollider – real time audio synthesis programming
_{Only recently discovered this. Works nicely with Emacs, all I need to do now is figure out how to programme it. Here are some good introductory tutorials}

• Get the comments system up and running again
• ‘Fix’ for IE
• Work on the design a bit more

Bring on The Blue Dudes
_{Apple are going ‘Intel Inside’.}