Explanation of Firewire and how best to use it. Also explains why its superior to USB.

Reading - Michael Palins travel books are online and available to read for free.

The first in a series - Arrival of NX.

Programming - Getting started with Ruby.

Nice music review site covers one of my favourite albums - Techno Animal - Brotherhood of the Bomb.

Wikipedia article on Plan9.

Flash - XYNTService open source admin tool for Window.

Yahoo buys Konfabulator and releases it for free. Originally OSX only there has been a Windows release for a few months now too (seeing as how Apple took the 'widget' space with their Dashboard in Tiger).

Arlo Rose (one of the Konfabulator prime movers) also has a long history with Mac Classic GUI enhancements - primarily with Kaliedoscope. Which was developed in conjunction with another Mac Classic GUI genius - Greg Landweber. Greg bought cool 3D buttons, font smoothing and nifty window-dressing to Mac Classic OS 7/8/9 throughout the 90's.

Digital Identity is going to be huge in the very near future - Passel seems to be a new open-source offering in this area. I guess until it gains some measure of support it might end up going nowhere - afterall how popular is PGP or digital signing - both of these have been available as add-ons or built in to popular mail clients for several years now.

Someone finally adds basic voting buttons into the Notes mail template. Not really a big item IMHO but it will at least stop the whiners coming from Outlook that say 'Outlook used to do this; how do I send out my super vital Karaoke venue survey to the social committee without them ?'. Now if someone could fix the unread mail count bug and do a better out of office assistant...

Another great article by Joel Spoelsky on how quality beats quantity when it comes to programmer/software quality (or many other things). It'd be interesting to see the quality of the code produced as a result of jobs that have gone 'offshore'.

On a musical tack Popmatters has an interview with Bob Mould of Husker Du fame. Interesting to see his move into DJ-ing / Techno.

Rather brilliant Rollflat Camping Cup/Bowl/Dish.

PGP creator looks to encrypt voice-over-ip.

An American perspective - Too Much Work-Life Balance? New Zealand Thinks So.

(bands on my little Rio500 for the week ending 29 July 2005) -

Post inspired by Jesse.

Strange use for a mail filter - Can a Bayesian spam filter play chess?.

Alan Moores V for Vendetta is to be released shortly as a film.

Cool but pointless - Phonograph which records onto a styrofoam cup.

DrunkenBlog interviews ex-Omni founder and current Delicious Monster founder Wil Shipley. Wils company wrote the awesome Delicious Library media catalog application.

Movies re-enacted in 30 seconds by rabbits - Angry Alien Productions.

Dave Winer (of More, ThinkTank, Frontier, Manila and RSS fame) has released his new OPML Editor into the wild.

Nothing like a company with a sense of humour - Zoom right in with the highest magnification to see what the moon is really made of over on Google Moon.

IBM continue to host excellent training material - PHP Tutorial - Part 1 of 3.

Another useful tool from Microsoft - Port Reporter.

On Wired - Chess 960 is a Bobby Fischer devised chess variant. Looks interesting.

As seen on Slashdot - Foldable GUI Windows.

As seen on Tinyapps - RunFast a nice CLI Launcher and IPSniffer a network troubleshooting tool.

These guys make some excellent freeware Windows utilities (Treesize is incredibly useful) - Jam Software Freeware.

Gotta read this - Restoring Exchange on different hardware. Not as simple as Lotus Notes I suspect.

Procrastination - Calendar on a pentagon dodecahedron.

Picked up from this fantastic list of Online Generators.

English - Common errors. Hundreds of alphabetised use-case examples.

Wiring - Handbook of hardware pinouts, cables schemes and connectors layouts.

iSCSI - iSCSI on the Cheap. Looks like a great way to learn about this technology.

Useful for testing - Hello World in 196 different computer languages.

Luddite - Why I bought a typewriter on eBay. Everytime word crashes I'm always tempted . . .

Stop - An IT spending manefesto. Instead of Office and Mail spend on collaboration and mobile tools.

Single Sign On - Sun have open sourced their SSO solution.

Open BSD - building a OpenBSD LiveCD.

Over on RedFerret - IYHY - converts a website into a mobile site by stripping out extraneous formatting and graphics.

Aeronix have built the ZipIt handheld IM client (featured previously in a hack that provides a way to look through an Aibo cam) - details here.

An excellent feature on the Post Rock - Lost Generation. I have several of these records - highly recommend early Tortoise, any Stereolab (although I have a thing for their early drone), Seefeel, Slint etc etc.

A couple of interesting perspective on recent terrorist activity in London - A letter to the terrorists from London, The emanation of the Giant Albion, Tim Bray - Just ignore them.

And of course this is Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.

Forensic tools - Forensic Acquisition Utilities for Windows. Includes netcat, wipe, md5, dd etc.

A Firefox extension which lets you save and load form entries as files - Scribe.

A basic guide to writing Firewall rules with IPTables including using a GUI frontend to simplify rule creation.

A look at Xen Virtualisation.

Another Unix course for beginners - How to look like a UNIX Guru.

Storage - Risks and Threats to Storage Area Networks.

Privacy - Virtual Privacy Machine is another Linux on USB key system running in Qemu giving you secure/private email/web/network access via Tor. Similar to the Metropipe VPM which at least has a free download available.

Windows - Log Parser looks like a handy tool for getting something useful from Windows Event Logs.

I've wondered this too - Why are movies so bad ?.

As seen on Metafilter - Frank Herbert (Dune) Interview from 1969.

I've been poking around looking at Document Management Systems and came across the Open Source KnowledgeTree. Looks like it covers the basics.

Visual code profiler for Linux - Rapido. Useful tool for developers.

YALOS (Yet Another List of Software) - 'Must Have' Windows Software.

The Zapper has that 'As Seen on TV look to it (especially after clicking through the Redferret link) but if it actually works it would seem to be pretty handy.

Another disk eraser - DBAN - Dariks Boot and Nuke. Handy for disposing of hardware.

Yet more on the craptastic nature of Microsoft Exchange clustering as compared to Lotus Notes/Domino.

I am printing these off now. Darwin Rules!

This looks hilarious - Kingdom of Loathing is a lo-fi multi-player role playing game.

Finished Charles Stross 'Singularity Sky' - highly recommended sci-fi. My Pelican finally arrived and I've decided its a lot like Mogwai if Mogwai were American Metal fans - its not quite the uber-heavy drone the Amazon reviews make out - its still worth checking out as its kind of instrumental metal without vocals and twiddly solos. If you are after super slo-mo heavy drone you really can't go past Earths 'Earth 2' album.

Mostly newbie Unix stuff but still some useful tips - OS X Unix Tutorials.

Windows 2000 being put on life-support as of June 30th - Last Rites for W2K.

Windows software to allow you to 'backup' your DVD's - DVDShrink. Also allows you to strip off region encoding and re-record the DVD as region free.

Useful SGI Pinouts.

Software for Cobalt hardware over at PKGMaster.

As seen on slashdot - Windows Software: Ugly, Boring & Uninspired.

OK OK I'll try my hand at more informative Post Titles...

An excellent review of the latest 'definitive' Velvet Underground compilation - Velvet Underground Gold.

Article on Easy Windows Scripting. The Helpomatic and Scriptomatic tools look like they warrant further investigation.

John Gruber (aka Daring Fireball) covers the latest iPod line-up change and explains why Apples iPod competitors don't really understand why the iPod is doing so well.

Over at DrunkenBlog there is Part 3 in a series covering peoples ongoing quest to understand Apples switch to x86. On a related note this Engadget post covers IBM's late claim that they could deliver the chips Apple were after - which begs the question of "if they can, why didn't they ?"

In a quest to find a half-decent DVD Burning application I came across two excellent freeware packages which do the job with minimal fuss (*rant on* which can't be said of Iomegas excerable Hotburn software - how can a vendors own software not see its hardware? *rant off*)- Deepburner and CDBurnerXP.

Humour - Excellent corporate signage to use in your workplace :-)

Rugby - Theres plenty of Red Lions shirts in town today for the big game. Should be an awesome match.