• banksy

    As I’ve blogged previously, I am a big fan of Banksy – I don’t generally condone graffiti but then I don’t think his work really is graffiti; the humour, style and design lift it a bit higher than mere mindless tagging. Moreover I appreciate his pointed views on (British) politicians: I’ve recently collected a couple…

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  • In the manner of the Late Peter Cook’s E.L.Whisty…

    Quoth my mate Steve, I was cycling in this morning, as you do, when this big limosine turns up flanked by police motorcycles. They stopped right in front of me and made me stop as well. So, I knocked on the window to tell the person inside what I thought of this and he wound…

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  • Google acquires Keyhole

    So Jon writes For those not in the know, our friends at Google purchased Keyhole, an ASP which provides real-time satellite imagery. you can zoom in and see street detail just like a real NSA agent. (We don’t get the details the NSA/NRO agents get, but you can grab the idea.) They also have the…

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  • morbid, but interesting thought

    how much would you pay, in order to extend your life by one hour? It’s an odd thought, but it went through my brain whilst doing a little present-shopping this morning. It’s quite a hard question to answer straightforwardly, because (a) the question implies that you know when your life would end in the first…

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  • Wouldn’t that be a nice extra option for Autoroute? “Avoid Speed Cameras”

    [blogs.motorbiker.org] Many of you don’t use a GPS and to plan your trips you use websites that map out your itinerary. One consistently great site for route planning is viaMichelin (by the producers of the Michelin Red Book and Green Book – Red is for food & hotels, green for tourist information). Well, viaMichelin just…

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  • Cool Link of the Day II: LeapSecond.com

    [www.leapsecond.com] Ten years ago I wanted to build a LED digital analog clock that would be accurate to better than one second per year — so I would have the fun of adjusting it when a leap second occurred. This simple goal resulted in a most interesting journey into electronics, horology, astronomy, test equipment, quartz…

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  • Cool Link of the Day: The Night Sky Live

    [nightskylive.net] – link from Chris Samuel. 😎

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  • FileVault at Fault

    Well, that was an entertaining four hours. I re-orged my e-mail filestore – I use the NMH mail handler as a backend to EXMH – and at a conservative estimate linked, renamed and unlinked some 30,000 files making a total of 90,000 file operations. On Solaris – or on MacOS’s BSD filesystem (apparently deprecated, and…

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  • ‘Democracies don’t fight each other’ sasy Bush. Fish disagree.

    With the above headline the BBC host a fine article on the truths and fallacies about Democracy as practiced by George Bush: Do democracies fight each other? When outlining his vision for peace in the Middle East, President George Bush said “democracies don’t go to war with each other”. Is it true? The president’s comments…

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  • redux: stuff I wouldn’t like for christmas

    I first posted this in 2002 and feel it’s time for review: Just a little reference list as we approach the gift-giving season; the intent is not to be churlish – although no doubt it probably seems that way. I would just rather have something thoughtful that cost 50p, rather than a 8-quid bottle of…

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  • basic comment rss-feed available

    Hi all, As you can see from the changes to the sidebar, I have installed a basic, no-frills RSS feed for accessing dropsafe comments at http://www.crypticide.com/cgi-bin/crss.cgi At the moment it is nothing more than a link to the updated article comments page, saving me the hassle of polling the website to check for comments. More…

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  • Gates declares passwords to be dead; as ever MS is 10 years late.

    Apparently passwords are dead: [it.slashdot.org] Bill Gates has just proclaimed the end of passwords. There’s only one drawback – you have to use .Net (well, what else would you expect?). However, the smart card that is at the centre of it – made by Axalto – is still a great bit of technology. Alas that…

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