Alasdair Watson

• Stripped: a minimalist WordPress theme
  Nice job of being ultra, ultra minimalist, while still clearly having thought given to the layout and typography. I really like this one.
  (tags: design wordpress theme)

• Clay Shirky on the cognitive surplus
  And what gin and sitcoms have in common. Fascinating thinking.
  (tags: future thinking)
• Bernardo O’Higgins – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  The 2nd supreme director of Chile. Bookmarked for superb name zombie purposes. Don’t ask.
  (tags: gaming awesome_name)

• Jack Parsons
  How have I never turned up this man before? Pioneering rocket scientist and a Crowley devotee who would invoke Pan before every rocket launch…
• Hunter S. Thompson – Wikiquote
  HST on Breakfast. No reason, other than that it made me smile and wish I was in a position to begin each day like that.
  (tags: quote hst)

• Covering Conflict | Magnum in Motion
  An absolutely superb photo essay about war photography. Requires sound for the commentary.
  (tags: photojournalism magnum bbc)
• Vous Pensez – The geekiest pants… ever?
  Is it bad that I would wear these without shame?
  (tags: geek fashion design)

• Amazon.co.uk: Rough Guides – World Music
  On the one hand, this sort of compliation CD seems, I dunno, faintly patronising – to take an entire musical culture, and bung it on one sampler CD. On the other, you’ve got to start somewhere, and there’s loads of music here I know *nothing* about.
  (tags: music)

Sorry, folks, just testing a problem with one of my websites, and I need a public post in an RSS feed to do it. Move along, nothing to see here.

• Improving the internet | The web: some antics | Economist.com
  I was unfair yesterday – turns out the Economist has been talking about the semantic web for longer that I thought. There is another article from 2006 as well, but I can’t link to it because it’s behind a paywall. But still, hooray for the Economist.
  (tags: semantic_web future economist)
• Ideas For Dozens: Automating Firefox for Web Application Integration
  Potentially security-hole-tastic, but also amazing for site admin systems and the like, it’s now possible to install an extension that allows a site to telnet into your copy of Firefox, and do various things to add a whole new layer to what a site can do.
  (tags: firefox javascript ruby jssh shell howto extension)
• BBC iPlayer – Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press
  Just a note to myself – missed this when it was on. I note the BBC still haven’t fixed the iplayer on OSX – because it’s flash based, it does not stop my screen from going dark through lack of mouse movement, like a proper media player does. Grr.
  (tags: bbc typography fry)