"Stars nearly aligned" says Professor Angell. On the other hand, maybe this will finally give us a leg up all becoming young and thin and energetic again. Or turn us into a race of degenerate fish-men, I guess. Either's good by me. Ia! Etc…

Ding! Correct! This, right here, is why I have never played an ARG. And why I would love to get paid to write one.

Former colleague's JS graph library. Looks handy.

About to start an Objective C/Cocoa spare time project. Don't know if I'll need any of these tools, but it can't hurt to have a reference to find them.

90% of my job is like this. The *other* 90% is making the black triangle look like something pretty.

I shall pick this thing apart at some point over the weekend, see if there's anything I can splice into/shortcut as part of my own efforts.

Yes, I know everyone and their badger has been linking to this. Tough. These are just superb. I think #44, the picture of all the cellphones and cameras is particular telling.

This will be incomprehensible to non developers in the audience, but oh god, this is so painfully, painfully true.

This idea set off fireworks in my head, and I think I've got a spare-time tech project for the foreseeable (I got a proof of concept lashed together in about an hour, but it needs a *lot* more work before it's useable.) I love the idea of being able to get up in the morning and have the overnight reading ready for me to hop on the bus with. Hell, even if I don't ever make the mailbox public, all I have to do is lash it to some RSS-to-email functionality, and presto – a custom POD newspaper every morning.

Also known as the Stoke Newington Eight. Middle-class anarchist terrorists on the early 70s, who are (reportedly) now a bit embarrassed by the whole thing. Making a note of it, because it's a superb name, and I want to remember they existed, because it's bound to be useful one day.

Linking to this rather than the portrait, because I'm nerdy enough to be amused/interested in the EXIF data that tells us about the tools and settings used to take the photo.

Me personally, I don't really like most kittens, and a lot of the cooking here is beyond my capabilities. But I can cheerfully fillet and skin kittens for other people, thanks to my old part-time job.

A fucking huge, and fucking lovely, photo of well, exactly what it says. No particular reason to link to it, it's just pretty, that's all.

My friend Stu is a bit handy with words, and a lot more aware of the word around him than I am, and he occasionally writes up the interesting people he encounters as he commutes or otherwise goes about his business in London. These are a beautifully rendered, and very real, slice of what life is like in the greatest city on earth. Go and read them.

I am so tempted to skip out on family Christmas next year, and produce a set something like this. OK, there's not a chance I would, but still, the set pretty damn impressive anyway.

Like everyone else, I'd never heard of these before. And like all right-thinking people, I do think the entire notion is fascinating. Mouldering hulks of poisonous stone that no longer light up the night. Perfect fodder for a maritime ghost story.

Good round up of various cleaning options to remove sensor dust. My old D70s body is a martyr to it, and the D80 is bound to pick up some at some point.

Some interesting old terms in here I hadn;'t run across before that might be useful in the future.

Not really much to say about this, other than that there are some very nice typefaces in here.

Ostensibly for Rails, but most of these apply to anyone using an MVC framework, and are worth a look.

This is a pet peeve of mine: people who use tinyUrl type services completely needlessly in blog posts and the like. I understand why, say, twitter does it, because of character limits, but it's still shit practice. URLs should clearly indicate the content they are the URL for. So I'll be plugging this in to my browser.

This is an interesting idea – a more environmentally sound font, but will it have any actual impact on ink use at small sizes? I couldn't find any actual maths on the site. Also, I am a slave to Helvetica, and particularly Helvetica Neue, so until someone produces an ecofont variant on them, I don't see myself picking this up.

Can we all please just move on from this now there's some accurate reportage about it?

Quick and dirty tool to grab an LJ archive on any system that has python available, which includes OS X.

SUP have knocked the american tech staff on the head. I don't believe they're going to fuck off tomorrow, or anything, but any way you slice it, this is bad news, and I'm going to have to find a good LJ archiving tool for OS X just so I do have a decent archive somewhere that isn't on LJ, but I should have done that anyway. Still, most of the public content over the least few years is already in databases on my own servers, anyway, but I'd like to get the private/friends locked stuff saved, too. I may also flip back to blogging on my own domain, and just mirroring the content into LJ, just in case.

I may want to take this apart and rebuild it for other services since my tumblr account is used for my not-a-photoblog-honest. Or since the blog is called Dead Air, I might just pipe it in regardless, as it does kind of fit with the theme.

I blog this mostly because I want to use the phrase "spime child", which is agreeably SF sounding. And because, well, it's an interesting application of the technology.