If you’ve ever wanted a boar-skin rug, but thought that perhaps pink was the colour for you, you may want to check out the DIY tips from Hemi*Housewife’s recent craft project.
I have to wonder if you can statically charge and stick balloons to the result for a more festive look — via BoingBoing
Microsoft escalated its efforts to crack down on Internet fraud, announcing that it filed 117 civil lawsuits against unnamed individuals in federal district court in Seattle, hoping to learn the identities of those behind a rash of e-mail phishing scams identified over the past six months that specifically targeted customers of Microsoft’s MSN Internet and Hotmail e-mail services
John Gillatt of Bolton, Manchester, managed to get lost in the Malaysian rain forest for five days without a map or compass, or any other basic survival material. To cap it all he said that he did not realise there were leopards in the jungle, poisonous snakes and tarantulas
. Not bad for someone describes as an English biologist
— via Improbable Research
Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner’s finger to get round the Mercedes S-class’ fingerprint recognition system
Belgian trainers helping police to understand body language have caused a controversy by likening the retarded monkey boy‘s facial expressions to a chimpanzee’s. I’m guessing the chimps complained
WordPress, an incredibly popular Open Source Blogging system was found to be spamming Google by inserting hidden links to junk content on high paying Adsense keywords such as mesothelioma and debt consolidation. Following Threadwatch picking up the story an anonymous Google rep appeared in the original thread admonishing bloggers not to use sneaky tactics to rank highly for duplicate content
such as the 100,000 hidden articles on the WordPress site. The articles have now dissapeared from Google and it remains to be seen whether Google will ban WordPress outright as they tend to do when SEO’s and web dev’s pull these kinds of stunts — via Slashdot
The day after the BBC confirmed there will be a second Doctor Who series next year, as well as a Christmas special, new Dr Who actor Christopher Eccleston has revealed he will not continue in the role, for fears of being typecast. Billie Piper, who plays his assistant Rose, will probably continue in her role
Google has enabled results prefetching for Mozilla based browsers, which means that the top results of queries are being loaded in the background and pages will load faster. It can be turned off
One of the many complaints about the GIMP is that of its user interface and how it should be more like Photoshop. If you feel that this is true then Scott Moschella has hacked together GimpShop which turns GIMP’s user interface into something more akin to Photoshop for OSX. However, if you’re not running that operating system, fret not, because there is are ports for Linux and Windows too — via Slashdot
While Jon Johansen ported PyMusique to C#, now called SharpMusique, a head of IFPI Norway says they don’t care about PyMusique and that all the blame is on Apple and its proprietary DRM — via CoCo
Bob Cringley takes an interesting look at one possible future for television, and he’s looking to the past to do it
A year after unveiling a free e-mail service with a full gigabyte of storage, Google is doubling the capacity of each account and plans to keep bumping up the limit in the future
A red-faced BBC has apologised for requesting an interview with Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae legend who died 24 years ago. BBC Three, one of the public broadcaster’s digital TV channels, sent an e-mail to the Bob Marley Foundation saying it wanted to do a documentary about his hit song No Woman No Cry. It said the project would involve Marley — who died of cancer in May 1981 at the age of 36 — spending one or two days with us
, and that it would only work with some participation from Bob Marley himself
. A BBC press officer, contacted by AFP in London on Friday, confirmed that the gaffe was not an April Fool’s joke — via BoingBoing
An Australian mosquito-borne virus has become the basis of a possible vaccine for cancer and HIV. The Queensland Institute of Medical Research, the University of Queensland and the Department of Health have launched a company that hopes to one day market the vaccines. QIMR laboratory head Andreas Suhrbier says the Kunjin virus, which is found in northern Australia, has been modified to cure cancerous cells in mice. The Scots are also working on a vaccine
Toshiba has developed prototype batteries that can be recharged about 60 times faster than conventional lithium ion batteries, and the technology could be commercialised for portable electronics products in about three years
Qiu Chengwei, an online game player from Shanghai, stabbed competitor Zhu Caoyuan repeatedly in the chest after he was told Zhu had sold his cyber sword for real money. The sale created a legal dilemma because China has no law covering the ownership of virtual weapons
Scott Richter, self-confessed Spam King and one-time peddler of ladies’ underwear, has filed for bankruptcy, with Microsoft cited as the main reason
Young Belyaev foxes, or kits, scamper in a cage in Siberia, Russia, where they are part of a 45-year research project to domesticate foxes. Each generation has been selectively bred for tameness—fearlessness and nonaggression toward humans. By now the foxes in the project behave like pet dogs, barking and wagging their tails at humans.
Also like pet dogs, the domesticated foxes can read
human cues much better than their wild cousins or even tame chimpanzees. The study authors call such behaviour social intelligence. They say its appearance in domesticated foxes may help us better understand how intelligence developed in humans and other animals — via boingboing
BBC author Paul Rubens tried out amateur computer repair and wrote about it. All of the software was for Windows, and he finds what most of us do: Most of the problems I’ve been called to look at have been caused by viruses and spyware, some by strange software [conflicts], and only one by faulty hardware
A report [PDF] by Homeland Security Department Acting Inspector General Richard Skinner, said the agency misinformed individuals, the press and Congress in 2003 and 2004. It stopped short of saying TSA lied, Bruce Schneier didn’t
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