Archive for the 'General' Category
Fork Structure 17 May 2010
Is there a more true saying than ‘you learn something new every day’? For example, I didn’t know the pointy bits on forks are called tines. I’ve just referred to them as prongs which, to be fair, is how a tine is described.
Lord of The Rings fan makes miniature Frodo Baggins’ home 20 Apr 2010
It’s a fairly twee article of the sort you would expect to see in a local paper rather than the Telegraph but there’s one thing in this article about a Lord of The Rings fan who has made a miniature hobbit hole that shows it’s wasn’t written by a fan: The kitchen is stocked with [...]
The Ultimate Late Fee 18 Apr 2010
I’ve paid some late fees in my time but even I think $300,000 is a bit steep. The first president of the United States of America borrowed two books from the New York Society Library in 1789 but failed to return them. Adjusted for inflation, he has since racked up $300,000 (£195,000) in fines for [...]
SubTropolis 17 Apr 2010
SubTropolis wasn’t the first to make use of the underground environs of a disused mine. During WWII many precious cultural artefacts were stored in old mines, for example. It does seem to be the largest and most modernised though. I do wonder why we don’t make use of what’s below ground more often (especially in [...]
Hollywood sign under threat 25 Mar 2010
So the famous Hollywood sign is under threat. The irony is there was a story only a couple of weeks ago about how Peter Jackson (director of Lord of the Rings) might get sued if he tried to put up a similar sign saying ‘Wellywood’ in his home town of Wellington. Funny if the real [...]
The Consumer’s Voice 16 Mar 2010
Jason makes some interesting points in his article about ‘new rules for reviewing media’ where he discusses some of the reviews he’s seen on Amazon recently that were not about the product but were about the format it was supplied in (for example, not available on the Kindle and the theatrical release available before directors [...]
Snooping at School 18 Feb 2010
I thought this sort of thing was limited to storylines in books by overly paranoid others, but where you hear about how a school used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home you have to worry.
Kicking Off the Computer Age 4 Feb 2010
The BBC has a couple of interesting articles about the start of the computer age in the UK. The first is on the Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM, more commonly known as Baby), developed at Manchester University and the world’s first programmable computer. The second covers the Edsac computer developed in Cambridge with funding from [...]
The Eye of a Futurist 25 Jan 2010
I was looking at it and thinking I could quite happily read all the RSS feeds I subscribe to (short posts I read directly in the RSS reader, only if the article is interesting do I move on). This would be a great way to do it without the hassle of firing up the PC, [...]
Weighing in on Tablet PCs 21 Jan 2010
Jason Bradbury’s view that (specifically) Apple’s new tablet PC will ‘change publishing forever’ is interesting, if not a little premature I think. First off, we’re all focused on Apple’s upcoming announcement about what we assume is their tablet entry (it’ll be interesting if it’s not), but other manufacturers are already offering the devices and 2010 [...]