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An online gallery dedicated to test cards from the UK
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A gallery of different types of casette tapes
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A gallery of superman comics proving that he is, indeed, a dick. Pure genius
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A gallery of comi covers featuring gorillas. Perfectly normal if you ask me
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Yahoo’s obituary for Hunter S. Thompson(categories: huntersthompson obituaries)
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Support the two imprisoned Iranian bloggers on the 22nd
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More information on advocacy to highlight the plight of jailed iranian bloggers Arash and Mojtaba
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More background on the danger of blogging in Iran
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An overview of shorthand notiation in CSS(categories: css)
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Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough…
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Dumb kids and over-reaction from Apple makes for an emotive topic
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Two of the defendants being sued by Apple in the Tiger leak case
Today has been anounced as a global blogger action day by the Committee to Protect Bloggers, to highlight the pligh of jailed Iranian bloggers Mojtaba Saminejad and Arash Sigarchi. Get involved.
For more background on the dangers of blogging in Iran, the BBC has a good write up.
You know how it goes. Some days you just don’t know what the world is going to throw at you – and at some times of the month all you want is a feeling of comfort and safety, which still gives you the freedom to go roller-blading, cycling, dancing or even base jumping. Before I’d feel bloated – weighed down even. But not now – its small, cute looking, and doesn’t even need an applicator. Best of all, my partner can find it in my bag and not even know what it is!
Feel free, feel light – iPod shuffle
So that was one of the most nerve wracking (IT-related) moments of my life, but after 30 minutes of stressful, body shaking nerves, curses, and general questioning of what I was doing, I was eventually able to part the Mac mini from it’s attractive upper shell and leave it naked under the waning daylight. What followed was simple by comparison, and one false start aside the mini was dressed once again an booting up to show it’s brand new 1GB of memory.
Thanks have to go to an article at macworld, although Russell Beatie gave me a more realistic idea of what to expect, and to be honest without smashword’s video of the feat, I’d be unsure if it was even possible with the tools I had to hand. I’m glad it’s over, and have gone from questioning Apple’s decision to price memory upgrades so exorbitantly to being almost convinced that they made the mini so hard to get into to sell overly expensive upgrades in the first place. Expect a follow up on first impressions of the Mac mini soon.
Warren Ellis:
That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.
This is the problem. My ideas don’t have this kind of affect on me. They’re more the “should I tell anyone about that? Won’t they think I’m nuts?” or the “No, I tried eating that last week, and I’m still getting the stains out” kind.
Yes, it’s true. The all pervading air of Mac Mini hype has finally brought me to my knees – no longer can I hope to stand up to such a barrage of “but it’s so small” or “but its so cheap!” and most importantly “but it’s so cute – you can buy one if you want, but I get to use it!”. The current plan is to twin it with Elgato’s EyeTV 410, and a 20” Apple Cinema display. Sure, after I add that, a DVD burner, more memory, and an Apple Care package it isn’t looking quite so cheap, but what the hey, it is damn cute – those comparing it with similar priced options from Dell are completely missing the point if you ask me.
So what I’ll end up with will be a Freeview-recording, DVD burning, time-shifting monster, in a relatively nice package. Who knows, it might even replace my TiVo. Now I wonder if I’ll be able to use VNC to watch TV on my laptop….hmm….
A quick run-through of the least year at magpiebrain is in order I think:
- January saw me looking at IoC and getting far more interested than I should of. I also found del.icio.us, and the web was a good place again.
- February and I was playing with Spring, XWork and TDD. My article on IoC goes up at java.net – shame on me!
- March and I was writing up stuff on regular expressions before I started my current job.
- April saw me finally sort out permalinks and send a new site design live. A long commute also saw some longer than average posts.
- May and I was playing around with a few things I never came back to.
- June came around and I was playing with Naked Objects, I upgraded this site to Movable Type 3, and I went to Glastonbury.
- July and I started looking beyond the crap a bit more, and purposely started writing things to piss people off. It kind of worked…
- August was a very slow month, as my new client was sapping all ability to even think about interesting (or otherwise) topics.
- September was another slow month, for much the same reason, but I did get to escape from being build-bitch long enough to code for a couple of days, so it wasn’t all bad.
- October – ditto
- November – ditto. It seems being a build-bitch isn’t something which promotes frequent blogging.
- December was much better, thanks in part to managing to make it to a Java meet-up in London, work finally generating some subjects which I thought blogging about would be of interest, and I found out I was off to a new client in the new year.
So happy new year everyone – roll on 2005…
It’s my last day at work, and I’m lacking in inspiration, so I’m jumping on an old meme by way of feeling less useless today (it’s amazing what you can justify to yourself when apathy levels are high)
1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the “shuffle” command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you’d like.
[Update]: I’ve now updated the auto-discovery links to reflect the newly available feeds.
I’ve finally got my act together to offer a full post RSS 2.0 feed, thanks to the template provided by “Horst(The Aardvark Speaks: Alternative RSS 2.0 templates for Movable Type)”:http://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/blog/archives/2003/08/000104.html. I now have the following feeds available:
* A simple RSS 2.0 feed with no HTML, and only a summary of the post – available “here”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/index_real.xml.
* A version of the above feed, but using “FeedBurner”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/ to splice in my del.icio.us links – available “here”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/Magpiebrain.
* A new RSS 2.0 feed with HTML, full posts and a comments link – available “here”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/index_full.xml.
* A “mobile friendly” feed (whatever that means), again thanks to FeedBurner – available “here”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/magpiebrain-mobile.
Give them a try – but please let me know if you have a problem with any of them. These are all listed on my “feeds(magpiebrain – RSS feeds)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/feeds page, which I’ll endeavour to keep up to date. If you have a request for any other types of feed, then feel free to leave a comment.
magpiebrain 