• Macromedia Attention Rights Management – Your Eyeballs Will Be Propped Open

    Adobe unveils Flash video control Adobe has unveiled a version of its Flash media software to let copyright holders embed ads and control usage. The new software should also allow video to be played offline, whether on computers or portable devices. Flash is used on websites such as YouTube, the Google-owned video sharing site dogged

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  • Four Goslings Named ‘James’

    Sun’s Guillemont Park campus has for several months been host to a pair of Egyptian Geese – presumably feral escapes from somewhere – and only one of them had been seen much for the past few weeks so I had supposed the other’d been taken by a fox. Not so! On sunday I stopped into

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  • Pretty Video du jour: The Kaye Effect

    I’ve seen this effect with baby shampoo, though I never stopped to ask what causes it; my tragic loss. In slow-mo it’s lovely though. http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/2007/04/16/the-kaye-effect/ via Charlie in Colorado

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  • How They Make Video Game Sound Effects

    Alan once told me about a horror-game he worked on in a previous life, which involved attacking chicken carcasses with secateurs in order to get the requisite sound effects of cutting-off peoples’ fingers… Seems nothing much is changed, ‘cept nowadays they use vegeatables. (via Bart.)

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  • Quote of the Day

    laureen hudson: Very few people have twigged to the reality that much of my passion for things is driven by nothing more complex than sleep-deprivation.

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  • Nokia N800 Arrival

    The Nokia’s arrived as mentioned :- …and the keyboard is working nicely; as for the OS, it is everything I expect of a Debian-based distribution – underpowered by default, peppered with corrupt downloadable packages which require manual intervention using apt-get and dpkg to fix the package database which they’ve silently corrupted (hint: avoid the ‘zsh’

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  • Eye Of Argon in Print

    The Eye Of Argon – from the Amazon review: This is not a hoax. Jim Theis was a real person, who wrote The Eye of Argon in all seriousness as a teenager, and published it in a fanzine, Osfan in 1970. But the story did not pass into the oblivion that awaits most amateur fiction.

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  • New Toys On Order

    Nokia N800 Internet Tablet as-per my friends Alan Cox … …and Richard Hughes, plus (hopefully) a iGo Stowaway Bluetooth Sierra Keyboard to aid with bulk input and mobile blogging. I carry a purse (which Valerie delightfully refers to as a man-bag; perhaps American women believe that real men ought really to keep all their ‘stuff’

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  • Bean-Sprouts: One family’s search for the good life

    If you’ve ever considered chucking it all and getting back to the earth a-la The Good Life, check out my friend Mel Rimmer’s blog Bean Sprouts: Now Picking: Daffodils (not to eat), young dandelion leaves, primrose flowers (to eat in salads), nettles (to eat in soup), rhubarb, free-range eggs and beansprouts (of course). Yes it’s

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  • Upon being six foot four

    A few years ago I attended a They Might Be Giants gig in central London; it was a good evening with lots of people but one little detail annoyed me. I remember it to this day. I queued for ages, I was front and near centre of the stage, and some German student-types came up

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  • American Express

    I have one thing I can say about American Express’ Corporate Cards group – they are wonderful to deal with on the phone. The card may be a pain to use in the UK, but if you are a traveller and then something goes wrong with the bill, or if anything needs sorting out, the

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