- Pro-God buses for London streets – Anyone feel like complaining about these Christian ads on the ground that they make unsubstantiated claims?
- House Approves Whitelist of People Who Aren’t Terrorists – The solution to the errors and inconvenience of the no-fly list is… drum roll… another database! How could that possibly go wrong?
- Exclusive: ID cards are here – but police can’t read them – After spending shed-loads of money on ID cards, apparently the police and immigration officers can’t read them.
In south-west London the snow of the past few days has given way to grey skies and rain, and the snow that still lies on the ground is more icy than crisp. I much preferred the snow.
Still, the melting allowed for photographs like the above. This is actually a shot through my living room window.
- Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge – “A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.”
- The Palm Pre’s possible Achilles heel: battery life – All the glitz you see in the Pre demo and videos may come at a price.
- Tags: Database schemas – Interesting article on how sites like delicious might handle tagging. Yummy until v2.0 uses the “Scuttle” method. Subsequent versions modify this a little for performance reasons.
Most readers will be aware that here in London we’re experiencing the worst winter for many years. We woke up this morning with a layer of snow that went past my ankle, which, sure, isn’t going to get any Norwegians worrying but is quite dramatic by SW19 standards.
Unlike many people, I actually made it into the office but, rather than get stranded there, I came home at lunch time and took a few pictures before sitting back in front of my laptop.
I didn’t have an exact picture in mind for this weeks PhotoFriday, “Costume,” but I did have an event: on the Norwegian Constitution Day there’s a huge parade in most major cities, including the biggest which is in Oslo.
So I fired up iPhoto to see which was the best image to use and… they weren’t there. So I spent much of this afternoon finding my negatives and scanning the whole, missing roll of film in. I’d forgotten why I’d moved to digital!
Did you see today’s press release from the Home Office about how great ID cards are? Despite any evidence that this actually happens, they keep asserting that people can’t wait to get their hands on them. Everyone is so keen that they’re going to start issuing them to volunteers before the 2012 official start.
It seems that they’re backing off a little on the anti-terrorist claims, but here is the new list of benefits.
- China ‘Strikes Hard’ in Tibet – Not good.
- Creativity and stretching the sweatshirt – “For me, creativity is the stuff you do at the edges. But the edges are different for everyone, and the edges change over time.”
- Red Dwarf voyages back to Earth – I’ve been watching the reruns and, well, the episodes I’ve seen so far just haven’t been as good as I remembered them to be. I’ll probably still watch the new ones of course…
- Banks now refusing to lend pens – Only funny because it’s true. Ish.
Petra and its Treasury are justly considered travel icons, which, I think, makes it a great candidate for this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Icon.” Shots like this are used almost everywhere Petra is mentioned (the other is the Treasury with a camel sat in front of it), which kind of makes it an iconic — in the sense of having a conventional formulaic style — photo, too.
- NetNewsWire and iPhone-Sized Data – “Lesson learned: It’s not enough for an iPhone app to sport an iPhone-optimized user interface. It needs iPhone-sized data, too.” I agree with this in principle but I’ve been thinking how I’d apply it to my iPhone application, Yummy, and coming up with a blank. How can you decide in advance which bookmarks you’ll want to see? Most recent? Those with a particular tag? I can’t think of an option other than ‘all.’
- The Inauguration of President Barack Obama – In case you’re not sick of the inauguration already, here are some great images of the day.
- Gordon Brown withdraws plan to keep details of MPs’ expenses secret – “The PM said proposals for reforms of MPs’ expenses would provide ‘more transparency’ than in most other parliaments around the world.” I’m not convinced that this is a standard we should aspire to. Let’s face it, our parliament is more open that North Korea and less tyrannical than Iran’s but really that’s not much of an achievement.
I’ve started to get “into” Twitter, the micro-blogging site, in the last month or so. One trend that I picked up on is that of “hashtags” where you put a hash (pound) symbol followed by a word somewhere in your message. This makes is searchable. The most recent that I’ve participated in is #firstmac, for which my contribution was: