Just a quick link, I’m working half days as I am doing some life drawing classes in the mornings this week. I waltz into work at 2pm and there’s a tonne of work sitting in my email. Sigh!
I like Adam Polselli’s 2005 Color Forecast. I love the purple palette, we can only hope that designers choose purple this year.
Firefox has nibbled away more ground from Microsoft over the past month and now has a market share of nearly 5%
Google has released free software called Picasa 2 for organising and finding the hundreds or thousands of digital photos often stored on a computer’s hard drive. The program tries to do away with such complexities as file names and folders. Photos are dumped into one bucket and sorted by date, but the software can quickly pull photos from date ranges or events as requested. The new version lets users mark their favourite photos with a gold star and search only for those
A generation ago they were considered part of an underworld frequented by criminals and bikers. Now, the UK’s tattooists, whose customers range from royalty to film stars, have ultimate proof of their mainstream status — a union card. The first trade union for Britain’s 1,500 tattooists and body-piercers was announced yesterday after the GMB said it was setting up a branch to represent their interests
Google is looking for Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network. Dark fibre refers to fibre optic cable that’s already been laid, but is not yet in use. Thousands of miles of dark fibre is available in the United States, but there have been few takers due to the high costs of making it operational
Tiny robots powered by living muscle have been created by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles. The devices were formed by growing
rat cells on microscopic silicon chips, the researchers report in the journal Nature Materials. Less than a millimetre long, the miniscule robots can move themselves without any external source of power. Muscles like these could be used in a host of microscopic devices — even to drive miniature electrical generators to power computer chips
ISPs could be forced to protect gullible Australians, with the ASIC proposing a filtering system to block access to fraudulent web sites
Not so very long after the Ig Nobel event at the University of Tasmania, students there engaged in a nano-lecture competition. Wayne Goninon reports that The idea was that students would describe their school in seven words
:
Agricultural Science: We take cows and make ’em better
Aquaculture: Red fish, blue fish, breeding new fish
Architecture: The unholy union of art and engineering
Chemistry: Too much acid, explosives and stinky stuff
Computing: Coffee and pizza make for happy coding
Earth Sciences: Geology is not geography, you cretaceous cretin!
Engineering: Bridges are good but beer is better
Geography & Environmental Science: Geography is not geology, cabbage for brains!
Maths & Physics: Evaluating pi — Galactic nuclei — why oh why?
Plant Science: It’s okay officer, it’s for scientific use
Psychology: It’s all about getting a girlfriend, mate!
Zoology: We know who heads the food chain
The Engineering entry is frighteningly accurate
A New York ISP is working to recover its hijacked domain name and e-mail services, according to a posting on its site Sunday in the US. A Panix.com representative said ownership of the domain had been moved sometime Friday evening to a company in Australia, the DNS records had been moved to the United Kingdom and that the company’s mail had been redirected to a company in Canada
For the DIY set, a home made mp3 player built into a little tin box for around $50
India’s state-run telecom giants launched what they described as one of the world’s cheapest broadband services. Which just goes to prove that privatisation never works
The LiveJournal data centre Internap suffered a critical power failure, leaving all of LiveJournal and its content temporarily offline and requiring the revival of 100+ servers. This isn’t the first time Internap has screwed over LiveJournal, I can’t see it being a terribly good publicity move for them
The amount of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface has declined significantly between the 1950s and the 1990s, apparently due to particulate air pollution. Scientists are worried that this global dimming may be disrupting the pattern of the world’s rainfall. Most alarmingly, it may have led us to greatly underestimate the greenhouse effect: with particulate pollution being brought under control, a global temperature rise of 10°C by 2100 could be on the cards, rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable
Two men were arrested for telling lawyer jokes while standing in line leading into First District Court. A spokesman for the Nassau courts said the men were causing a stir and that their exercise of their First Amendment rights to free speech was impeding the rights of others at the court
A Polish woman who pretended to be a ghost and haunted
an Alpine castle was sentenced to four months in prison by an Italian court. Police were called in to investigate mysterious creaking doors and other unexplained nocturnal noises heard in 15th century Castel Coldrano, near the Swiss and Austrian borders, by a female occupant who ran the castle’s cultural centre. Video cameras placed by investigators revealed the noises to be man — or woman — made, and arrested the 42-year-old Pole, whose husband worked for the centre. Police said she was motivated by a personal rancour
against the manager, and charged her with harassment and incidental damage to the castle — via Warren Ellis
Newly declassified documents reveal that the Pentagon examined the possibility of developing an aphrodisiac bomb that would cause enemy troops to find one another sexually irresistible
Ben Edelman has published a list of major investors in spyware companies totaling over $139 million in venture capital
The software is aimed at making encrypted e-mail communications simple enough for even computer novices to use. Ciphire, developed by Ciphire Labs in Munich, Germany, uses a technique called public key cryptography
to sign and encrypt e-mail messages. Once loaded on to a computer hard drive the software performs all of the complex tasks involved behind the scenes. Ciphire also works with almost any e-mail software client — like Microsoft Outlook, for example — without requiring prior configuration
The attorney general of Texas has sued two men — one of them a 22-year-old University of Texas student — accused of running one of the world’s largest spam operations
Maricopa County Sheriff’s deputies began using fluorescent pink handcuffs Thursday to transport inmates. Sheriff Joe Arpaio said he introduced the pink handcuffs because he was tired of losing them to his own deputies and other law enforcement agencies. Arpaio said he assumes nobody else has pink handcuffs, so they will be easy to spot. Maricopa County inmates wear pink boxers and sleep on pink sheets — via Warren Ellis
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