Interview with a Jonathan 'The Wolf' Rentzsch - Mac Hacker over at DrunkenBlog. Great ideas - nice comments on the crappiness of the OSX Finder too.

A nice article over at the Independant whereby some current authors list their favourite literary characters.

Pictorial view of current events at 10 x 10. 100 pictures reflecting whats going on in the world news.

Very slow progress but CenterStage is an attempt at an opensource OSX media center. Note its only really at the alpha stage.

This has appeared on several sites already but Klienhenz RJ45 PC is a ARM based linux PC in a formfactor only slightly larger than an RJ45 jack. Some nice information on the LinuxDevices site too.

Interesting secuurity idea - Restricting Brute Force Attacks through Resource Metering.

Cool self configuring robot - Mtran.

Snake like robot - Snake-like robot conquers obstacles.

The origin of one of the Macs classic alerts - Sosumi.

I stick to Vi but many of these tips are still applicable - Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing.

Interesting demo of an application which can turn natural language into psuedo-code - Bartender simulation. The related paper is available here. These types of experiments underline the types of things that will be required to assist in machine learning and AI.

Computer accessory company with a sense of humour.

Little tidbits of Zen philosopy.

Some interesting game links for those that like real time strategy

• 3D fleet based space combat - Nexus.
• 3D fleet based space combat -Homeworld 2.
• Tabletop wargame conversion - Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War.
• What is it all about - RTSC Introduction.

Destroy your favourite websites with Netdisaster.

Although my number-crunching days are long past I still admire the quality of HP Calculators.

Don't mess with Charles Darwin. He has a posse :-)

How to turn an old rotary phone into a modern cellphone.

I wonder when these things will be armoured and the crane/grappler mount will be fitted with a 20mm chain-gun ?

This product - Mirrorfolder looks useful as a server/workstation backup tool. Shame its not free but I guess its a step up from the usual nightly rsync or robocopy.

I have an Acorn PocketBook II - essentially a rebadged Psion 3a.

Even though Psion got out of the PDA business a couple of years ago it is interesting to see that they are still held in fairly high regard and still seem to sell well on the web.

Psion devices fall into three broad categories

• 1. Basic Organisers (Organiser/OrganiserII)
• 2. SIBO Devices (Series 3/3a/3c/3mx/Sienna)
• 3. EPOC Devices (Revo/Revo+/5/5mx/NetBook)

Of which the EPOC devices were the last and most powerful. In fact EPOC still exists via the Symbian collective and features in a few cellphone operating systems.

A comprehensive history of Psion PDA's is available here.

Eric Lindsay has a nice roundup of Psion PDA's, software and links.

The Psience5 site has more links to articles and discontinued software for the Psion range.

New Scientist has an article on 13 things that do not make sense.

The RepRap Project is a 'Replicating Rapid Prototyper' in other words a device which could theoretically built itself. As also featured in this Engadget post about a robot created using this device.

Interesting - 30 Secrets of Atari.

Freeware - TinySpell spellchecks anywhere.

From the same place that brings us orange cheddar - Quebec margerine must be white.

Great reading A Few Notes on the Culture by Iain M Banks.

On a related note heres a good list of Culture Ship Names as featured in his novels.

Find related bands using LivePlasma.

Fantastic - trace links between any two bands using Band to Band.

Catalog your collection or just rate your favourite albums with Rate Your Music.

Some humour

To much thinking here - Toilet Paper Algorithm.

Hours of fun - Virtual Stan.

To much time on his hands - Darth Vader in my shoes for 24 hours.

The ultimate alarm clock - Clocky! rolls around and hides when the alarm goes off forcing you to get out of bed to shut it off.

I was impressed by Web of Letters but this is funkier AmazType. Both use open API's provided by Google and Amazon respectively.

Serious stuff

Exploring the Mac OSX Firewall.

A great look at the non-technical side of securing a network - Dumb and Dumber.

A collection of OSX Quickies primarily related to coding and scripting. From the fantastically named Borkware.

Very cool - someone has stripped back the Win32 Apache to the basics with MiniApache. Clocks in at under a meg zipped and theres even a PHP enabled version.

Now this is taking audio-philia to far - a tube amp for an iPod.

Another straight lift from Gizmodo - two interesting augmented reality links - one from HITLabNZ and one from MIT Tech Review. Very interesting stuff.

A nice timeline - History of Communication from 35000BC to 1998AD.

A look at Profile & Folder Redirection.

Troubleshooting Group Policy with the GP Management Console.

Understanding Administrative Templates.

Another look at the Open Source Asterisk PABX.

The Least Priviliged Model in Solaris 10. Allows you to assign role based privileges.

As if gadgets weren't desirable enough - Colorware will custom paint your computer/ipod/console to give it that custom finish. For that real custom look how about a wooden laptop ?

Or a custom mini-itx case-mod made completely out of fans ?

A nice overview of the Sharp Zaurus C3000. More like a PDA sized computer (palmtop) than a standard PDA.

To prevent you destroying your keyboard how about an airbag ?

Some classic 'tips' to clear someone out of your office from Slacker Manager.

Useful bash tips - or the Unix Swiss Army Knife.

Mike Shea has a fairly comprehensive and personal guide to Pens and Paper.

I've linked to these sites before but I always have to google for them everytime I need to find something so here they are in their own blosxom category:

• GUIde Book
• GUI Gallery

Another use for the PowerBook accelerometer - iTunes tilt controller.

Funny look at software engineering - Software Engineering Explained.

A fairly non-biased look at the benefits of moving Lotus Notes Domino Servers - Moving from "It Should Work" to "It Just Works".

A useful OSX tip - Recover a dead hard drive using dd.

Origami - Diagrammed Models.

A nice Wired article on The Long Tail. Goes to show that the Top 10 doesn't necessarily translate into top sales long term.

As seen on Slashdot - Building your own PBX with Asterisk. Open source has certainly come a long way. Shame the article doesn't really cover connecting your PABX to the outside world.

Warren Ellis gives his views on the new DOCTOR WHO.

Interesting use for cats - KOMPAKT KITTENS. Use your keyboard to kick off some minimalist techno.

Computer Forensics - apparently these guys have a paper on how they can trace a PC on the internet using its unique 'Device Fingerprint'. I would have thought anything unique like that would be filtered out as information gets passed from device to device - then again perhaps thats part of a detectable traffic pattern that contributes to the fingerprint ?

Nice retrospective of Key moments in the Past 10 Years of Yahoo and the way Yahoo looked 10 Years Ago.

Another guide to SSH and Keychains. I've never had much luck getting this working but I think thats just me as it seems to work fine for everyone else :-)

This is so nifty I'm sure it'll be all over the web soon - Investigating uses for the PowerBook Motion Sensor. I think IBM has had this technology for a couple of years now but no one seems to have done anything interesting with it (other than protect your drive if the laptop drops).

This is old news but Steghide lets you encode text into pictures and audio for secure transmission. A good overview of how it works is covered here.

Nostalgia - Old Computer Museum.

Tim Bray of Ongoing is keeping a Diary of notes relating to his move to Solaris after many years of using a variety of Unix and Linux flavours. He does work for Sun afterall :-)

Some interesting tidbits in there - its really interesting to see even the Sun guys plugging the Blastwave pkg-get system for getting open source apps onto their machines. Pkg-get works just like the Debian apt-get which makes it a very useful addition to a System Admins arsenal.

Visited Real Groovy recently which is generally a fatal move in terms of placing a significant drain on my bank account and picked up the debut album from Jesu. Contrary to the name they're not a choir or religious group - the creative mind behind Jesu is Justin Brodrick of Napalm Death, Head of David, Godflesh, God, Final and Techno Animal fame.

Its very good - like a super slow detuned Godflesh crossed with the 'sunburnt' electronica from his Final ambient project.

I'm having a play with the Blosxom 3 alpha but so far getting it to do what I'd like seems like more hassle than its worth. I'll stick with v2 for awhile to come I think.

Fantastic overview of microscopy and the basics of image manipulation via some simple interactive java demonstrations at Molecular Expressions.

I'd love some of these on our roof - Solar Roof Tiles.

Serious nostalgia at Lemon64 which offers plenty of Commodore64 information and downloads.

I spent many hours trying to work out how to over-ride global directory listing prevention in apache via a php or perl script only to find that you can use a local .htaccess option to accomplish this on a directory by directory basis. Interesting site and its amazing that after googling all over it turns out the article is written by a kiwi :-)