Domain name registration company Melbourne IT Ltd has entered into a conditional agreement to acquire hosting group WebCentral in a deal valued at $61.3 million
Telstra says it can’t put a timeline on a deal with the competition watchdog over the rollout of its proposed $5.7 billion fibre broadband network
Telstra has been forced to admit that mobile phone users in the bush could find themselves without an effective service in late 2008
Pearl Jam released their first music video in quite a while under a Creative Commons licence allowing anyone to legally copy, distribute and share the clip
for noncommercial purposes. Creative Commons thinks this may be the first video produced by a major label ever to be CC-licensed. So although the file is only available as a free download via Google Video through 24 May, fans can continue sharing it online themselves in perpetuity — via Slashdot
Official guidance on how to teach Scottish schoolchildren about gay sex is being issued for the first time since the abolition of laws which banned promoting
homosexuality in schools
Pigtail Pilot Hat as Modelled by Disgruntled Malamute originally uploaded by Red Wolf
Malamute grungingly stepped in as hat model for the occasion. Note that she’s wearing it backwards so the hole locations are better suited to the forward position of her ears.
One of the yarns I bought to sample for the Yorick scarf ended up getting used for the final run of the pigtail pilot hat project. Despite the blue colour of the picture, the yarn is actually varigated turquoise and purple.
As I had no set pattern and was cobbling together my own from a few sources, all of which have no concept of proper yarn descriptions, the result was a bit big. The 8 ply yarn, while suited to mild Australian winters, seemed a bit flimsy for the hat, especially after I added the i-cord that holds its structure together.
So, I felted it. Half an hour in the kitchen sink by hand, then it got turned over to the mercies of the hot/cold cycle of the washing machine. It got brushed when it came out of the wash and is quite fuzzy.
The size is now perfect — for a human head, Malamute was underwhelmed by the fit on her head. The ear flaps just cover my ears instead of curling up and the holes at the top could probably hold my dreadlocks up quite nicely without the additional need of hair bands. But as I have a pair of very cute, purple cat hair bands, far be it from me to leave that step out.
Danish researchers found a simple way to make curiously shaped air holes in a bucket of water. Simply rig the bucket to have a spinning plate at the bottom, and depending on the speed, you can get an ellipse, three-sided star, square, pentagon, or hexagon. The effect may help explain such shapes seen in atmospheric disturbances on Earth and other planets — via Slashdot
Finnish metal band Lordi, who dress in monster masks and outlandish fantasy costumes, have taken the Eurovision Song Contest by storm — via The Pagan Prattle Online
Google has snuck out the much anticipated street mapping data for Australia and New Zealand cities within Google Maps
Apple is suing Creative Technology, raising the stakes in the legal dispute over competing devices. Apple claims Creative Labs, the US division of Creative Technology, infringes four patents in its hand-held digital players — via digg
A new research project at MIT’s Media Lab, entitled RadioActive, aims to turn every mobile phone or PDA carrying member of the public into a podcaster, and every mobile device into a virtual podcasting studio. The project defines a large-scale asynchronous audio messaging system in which voice messages can be threaded like text in a discussion forum as a method of discussion-on-demand
— via Slashdot
Blue Security, a prominent crusader against unsolicited e-mail ads withdrew from an escalating cyberwar with spammers on Wednesday after his Web site and numerous others came under a massive retaliatory attack
Natural allies in the music industry — record labels and a leading satellite service — are on opposing sides in a federal lawsuit over how consumers may legally record songs using next-generation radio devices
Creative Technologies, maker of the Zen media player, has joined the list of companies that have sued Apple for patent infringement. In this case, the technology in question is the interface used to find music on the iPod. Creative has asked a federal judge to issue an injunction blocking the sale of iPods and iPod Nanos in the US
Australia is finally reforming its backwards copyright law, which made it illegal to record shows off the TV and radio, and to rip CDs for personal playback. However, in the process, they proposed a new law that is even more backwards — one that prohibits watching your recorded shows more than once, one that doesn’t allow you to make backups of your CDs, and that doesn’t let you loan them to friends — via Boing Boing
Gmail has crippled its View as HTML
functionality so as to comply with Adobe’s PDF copy-control scheme. In case an email attachment is a DRMed PDF file (a PDF with copying and/or printing restrictions), clicking on the View as HTML
link returns the message displayed in the screenshot — via Boing Boing
Dutch scientists have developed a system for stopping racist chanting
at football matches: they feed back the audio of the chant at a slight delay, and the resulting confusion makes it impossible for mobs of football hooligans to synch up their shouting with one another, leading to chaos — via Boing Boing
Google has opened its new Sydney office with a plan to snap up the top tech graduates from Australia’s universities
Oracle will soon start hosting on-demand software services from data centres in Australia and other places outside the US for the first time
Bonza
, sanga
, and bogan
are just some examples of the Australian vernacular being considered for inclusion in the next version of Microsoft Office 2007
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