Dropsafe

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Old News: [washingtontimes.com] Washington, DC, Nov. 15 (UPI) — A European Space Agency rocket entered moon orbit Monday in a unique mission using a pioneering power plant. […] The engine does not combust fuel; rather it splits atoms with electricity to get ions, accelerates them at high speed, and then ejects them, driving the spacecraft…

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Tim Bray thinks that Iapetus’ median ridge shows that the moon is a Silly Putty egg. I have a different theory. [ed: Non-Brits, see Rainbow.]

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One, two, three, four, five, six … as you can read, on Saturday evening the BBC showed Jerry Springer, The Opera in full, colourful colour. It was good. Possibly superb, but I am slow to use that epithet for media events. One statement that I can definitively make is that it will never get aired…

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…the most fun I had at the weekend was in laminating three sheets of cardboard together. Really. I came over all Blue Peter. The aim is to create a prototype for the adaptor plate I’m fabricating to connect my old Nonfango 852 topbox, to the BMW. Since I lack the space, resources, or patience of…

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Dedicated Mac-head I may be, but I also occasionally mess around with at least two X86 Unix operating systems: Linux, and Solaris; this lets me mess with Gimp, Wireless Sniffing, faff around with Kernel drivers, and generally make a mess, allowing me to keep my Macs nice and clean for day-to-day use. I have Gilles’…

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I’m just watching The Hairy Bikers’ Cookbook on BBC2. It’s a crossover food program, somewhere inbetween Jamie Oliver, Two Fat Ladies, The Long Way Round, Nick Sanders and every cheap gearhead program that the Granada Men&Motors ever made. Really. I mean it. In fact they’re doing Portugal and just visiting an Ossuary. Sound familiar? The…

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So I am working on planning my next bike vacation, as regular readers will know. I want to have a big European map, and draw movable arrows onto it, which I can revisit, tweak, and move, whilst seeing the map unchanged underneath. I also want to “stack” arrows so that I can sorta animate/walk through…

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My beloved colleague Chris Gerhard, excusing his inability to spell my name correctly, writes: [blogs.sun.com] Alec Muffet has just told us what he likes about his bike. Now I have two comments about this. First what I really like about my bike (any one of them) is that that they are silent. All except the…

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When I was young – perhaps 9 or 10, in the mid 1970s, on family vacation in Canada – I distinctly remember my Dad telling me a story, I believe he said from WW1, where a message had to be passed rapidly from the front, back to London, over phone lines that were certainly tapped…

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Well, this raises some interesting possibilities: [gigaom.com] Six Apart to buy Live Journal EXCLUSIVE: Folks have been predicting a big year for mergers and acquisitions in 2005, and we are starting the year with a bang. I have learnt exclusively that Six Apart, the parent company behind hosted blogging service TypePad, and Moveable Type is…

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The phenomenon of “ye-gods-you-mean-you’re-actually-allowed-to-do-that?” strikes once more, when – following the leads of “Company-Confidential“, “Proprietary-Information“, “Internal-Use-Only“, “Top-Secret“, and “UK-Eyes-Only” – someone twigs that you can use Google to search for open-access webcams Note the way I phrase that – “open access” does not necessarily equare with “unsecured”, although that may be the case. As ever,…

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