Via Hack the Planet - Hotwire-Shell: An intelligent hybrid text/graphical shell for developers and system administrators.

Also via HtP - The CADT Model (Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers).

Some nice tools coming out - Managing Exchange 2007 using PowerGUI. The PowerGUI utility looks really useful for Active Directory admins regardless of wether you use Exchange or not.

Humour - trust the French to put a different spin on the rugby scrum. Their Street French Lessons are good too.

Wow - Upgrade a Mac Mini Core Solo to a Core Duo. Looks stressful!

Interesting software if you have kids - Scratch. Lets you create visual applications by assembling blocks of code. Reminds me of HyperCard crossed with Logo.

Google map of the Duke of Edinburgh gaffes. "Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease". Genius.

Wow - Apple Buys CUPS! Puts a new spin on Unix printing.

I'll have to give this a go - Sun ODF Plug-in 1.0 for Microsoft Office Available.

Looks like Sun is going after the high end with their Constellation class systems - Sun Constellation System: Petascale Computing Done Right and their CEO pitches in with Switching Subjects.

I need to get the ROM off my Newton so I can try Open Newton - If iPhone is too closed, try Newton.

Looks like the definitive review - ArsTechnica iPhone Review.

This pack looks to flimsy - Gossamer Whisper Uberlight Pack. Not convinced by the idea of using the sleeping mat for internal structure either. I guess it would suit the wide open spaces or Aus or the US . . .

Visio - Jumbo list of Cisco Visio Stencils. Either grab the lot (90Mb!) or the particular product stencil you need. Annoyingly if you create a Visio diagram with a rack layout stencil which has standard components and U values then the Visio stencils don't quite fit in.

Paper describing how the majority of networks are underutilised and are likely to stay that way.

Interesting - Will Web 2.0 kill IT ? Again with the perception of IT as the barrier to adopting new technologies.

Pretty sure I've linked to these before - awesome business card designs.

Nifty - 'crayon' game. Some other nice games in the sidebar too.

Great web-comic - Girls with Slingshots. Be sure to start at the beginning.

New OS X freebee - FlyGesture. OS wide mouse gestures from FlyingMeat software.

Looks good - The Golden Compass trailer. The 'His Dark Materials' trilogy is a work of genius.

Review of the MicroTech Jnr - a $110 USD SFF computer (or $90 in quantity!). Looks like a great way to run displays and presentations via one of the small Linux distro's (Slax & DSL are mentioned in the review).

Oh . . . apparently a company released some phone gizmo or something - a nice review. Apparently DVD Jon has unlocked it for those wanting just a PDA/MP3 device without the phone.

Fascinating - Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. Summary - 'nice' kids use Facebook; 'bad' kids use MySpace. Related - genius pisstake of Facebook in 40 years.

Finland is cool - In Finland's Footsteps: If We're So Rich and Smart, Why Aren't We More Like Them?.

Notes 8 - My life with Lotus Notes 8. Looks impressive for a beta. Love the integration of some of the OpenOffice stuff too.

Cool - Img2HTML. Convert an image into a web page with 1 x 1 pixel coloured table cells.

Play Windows games on Linux with Cedega.

Genius - Walkman Mellotron.

Interesting - Wellington Grey laments the decline in Physics standards. The sample questions are fine for basic science understanding but by the time you start to specialise you really need to start crunching some numbers.

Nifty - Y-Box a novel widget display hack that fits in an altoid tin. This is the way its meant to look when its done.

Re-inventing ZFS - Btrfs: a copy on write, snapshotting FS.

Free - Java based media server - for Wii & PS3. I'm quite impressed by our Wii.

One of those 'when I were a lad' articles - How children lost the right to roam in four generations. Amazing what a little misplaced fear will do.

The scary French - Is Maman mean or magnifique?

Amusing - flickr stream of Atheists visiting a Creationist museum.

Interesting - US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs. NZ's GDP is the same as Washington DC.

Census stats - some interesting information from the NZ 2006 Census - Who we are part 1 Who we are part 2. Interesting that almost a quarter of the population are immigrants, that marraige and divorce rates are almost the same now and that Hindi, Mandarin, Cantonese feature in the top 10 languages (also German speakers appear to outnumber Tongan speakers).

They just get smaller and smaller - Pico-ITX Review. Check the last page in which some enthusiasts cram a Pico-ITX board into a GameBoy case.

Scarey and depressing - Generation F*cked: How Britain is Eating Its Young. As the comments point out this is a global issue.

Useful - Many Books in different formats.

Panorama - Hugin is an open source photo-stitcher.

The price of an open encyclopedia - Wikigroaning. Probably reflects the high geek to genuine expert ratio. Or the desire to drivel on at length about trivial rubbish in the mistaken belief that like minded individual will read it :-)

Humour - The Armageddon Flowchart. The terminal scenarios are genius.

Chris points to Apple putting User data into DRM encoded tracks. Wil Shiply points out that Adobe does too. "I was shocked! Shocked! They didn't even bother to try to disguise it!" Classic.

Faskinating - Psychopaths among us. "For his first paper, now a classic, Hare had his subjects watch a countdown timer. When it reached zero, they got a "harmless but painful" electric shock while an electrode taped to their fingers measured perspiration. Normal people would start sweating as the countdown proceeded, nervously anticipating the shock. Psychopaths didn't sweat. They didn't fear punishment -- which, presumably, also holds true outside the laboratory."

Amusing - Ultimate Mouse Pointer.

Useful - TPS Report Template. For those burdened with an over-active bureaucracy.

I knew a guy who had a whole stash of altoid tins - Uses for Altoid tins.

Interesting - Presentations on who to scale websites from people like Twitter, Flickr, Bloglines etc.

Something to look forward to - Top 10 Features in Windows Server 2008. A server OS without a GUI - fancy that.

More good stuff - Cognitive Bias: Reasons why what you think is right is wrong.

One to watch - Utu (FYI 'Utu' is a Maori word for revenge). "The Internet needs identity, reputation, and retribution." Should be a fascinating communication tool if it comes to fruition.

Neat - 3D window manager for Windows.

One of the oddest mashups - The Invisible Gnomes and the Invisible Hand: South Park and Libertarian Philosophy.

Interesting tips - Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi ?

Amusing - Science vs Norse Mythology.

Might be something useful here - Open Source Projects: 15 To Watch. Lots of multi-media tools + wireless/video-card management among other things. Nothing overly compelling though.

Scientific American - 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense.

If you're a 2000AD fan then check out Dave Bishops auction of his own collection including Prog 1.

Looks useful - Incra ruler. Wonder if they have a metric version . . .

Amusing - Judge a Book by its Cover. Nascar themed romance novels ?

Check the awesome embroidery on these womens shirts - Lochers Collection. Be sure to view the other designs and zoom to see the stitching. Certainly a twist on the average humourous t-shirt!

Funky - Plane shaped C code for a flight-sim. Details on making it are here.

Useful tips - Top 10 Things Sysadmins Forget To Do. The USB stick paranoia is an odd one - even a floppy disk will store hundreds of documents and can act as a virus vector.

Handy - 10 Simple Knots

Cardboard radio-enabled homeless shelter - Shellhouse.

Interesting figures - Load Testing Virtualisation Performance. A VMWare seminar I attended had many real world examples of people using ESX to host external and internal servers on the same hardware using the internal virtual switches - performance was adequate for their needs. Our new ESX server will be used for dev primarily but we're hoping to get another to host some prod systems.

Looks good - Metasploit. Automated penetration testing tool.

For Domino admins - Best Practise Guides for Lotus Notes. Ed Brill also points to a review of the new SameTime client - Not the same old SameTime.

Crazy - Hydration Allowed: There’s Posh For You. Schools without playgrounds ?

Brilliant - Cools Business Cards.

Watch SpamTrap shred junk email!

Angrifying - Yezidi woman stoned to death in "honour killing". I thought we were in the 21st century ?

Entertainment under 96kb - Brilliant Drunken Sumo.

An author often re-uses character traits over and over again - Feedback and Repetition Compulsion.

Pretty fascinating stuff - DIY Quantum Eraser. Can't see anyone reproducing this but it seems simple enough.

WordPress - Commodore64 Theme. Seriously retro.

Interesting - Optical nets easier to hack than copper.

Tumbleweed Tiny Houses strike again - Small houses challenge our notions of need as well as minimum-size standards. Definitely to small for me but just a little bit bigger and I'd happily spend time in one.

I eat to much rubbish - What do 300 calorie meals look like ?

Handy - Common Latin Phrases Explained. I always wondered what 'ie' & 'eg' meant . . .

Nifty - 3D Window Manager for Windows. Eye candy is always entertaining but long term they can be a real drain on resources.

As a Vi fan I can appreciate the geeky usefulness of a Vi mug.

Amusing - How to interview. The 'Feynman interviews for Microsoft' is brilliant.

Office 2007 is pretty awesome - the ribbon interface is genuinely innovative. However it looks like there are tools to tame the ribbon and give you the classic look 'n feel.

Interesting - Is Data ONTAP Based on Unix ? Intriguing to see them move to using FreeBSD for their ONTAP GX product.

Lift Improvements - New elevator technology. Makes sense - I wonder how much effort manufacturers put into optimising lift management ?

Aargh - While working on a particle accelerator, Anatoli Bugorski accidentally put his head into the proton stream.

Some more interesting storage tidbits - Is iSCSI a SAN or NAS ? (depends where you want to send the bill :-) and it turns out EMC also have a simulator - EMC’s Celerra Simulator.

Joel Spolsky is looking at another office space - Moveable Walls. Interesting the financial hoops that need to be jumped through just to setup shop.

According to New Scientist it looks like wealthy people will help the poor and the poor enjoy punishing the rich - Money game reveals our inner Robin Hood.

Fascinating - Infographic of American Gun Deaths - looks like guns in the US are primarily used for murder and suicide. I can never work out if the NY Times has a paywall or not - hopefully this will stay accessible for awhile.

Nice eyecandy - wonderful desktop images.

A little pop-psychology - The Ideological Animal. "Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns."

Jason Kottke always links to interesting stuff (definitely recommend subscribing to his rss feed) - eco friendly web pallette. Someone calculated the power saving potential of a 'black' Google which has been moderated somewhat by this post. Still if you have a high volume page it does sound like an interesting idea.

If you're a fan of the brilliant anime/manga Akira you can check out the soundtrack. My favourite is probably the opening track - Kaneda - which features some brilliant tribal drumming.

Things to do with a Single Sheet of Paper. If you enjoy collections of humour goto the site root - quite an accumulation of stuff.

Brilliant but crazy - print your own film. Digitise some film (of the analog variety), split it into its constituent frames and then print onto acetate strips to play back.

Wow - the hoops Unix co-creater went through to insert a back-door into 'login' - Ken Thompson and the Self-referencing C Compiler.

I hope this succeeds - Crushpad. Sounds like a new user interface device but its actually a way to get intimately involved in the wine production process. Wonder if someone will do the same for batch-brew beers ?

Brilliant - Good vs. Evil Foosball. Surprising someone didn't do a Subbuteo version.

Nice Linux home-server appliance - Bubba – The Mini Server. Nice form-factor. Apparently not much bigger than a 3.5" disk.

Some useful tools to recover your PC - PC Repair System - 32Mb USB.

Looks interesting - Shape your traffic with trickle. Our Telco has a Packeteer device we have read-only access to and it looks like packet-shaping will let you do some pretty nifty things.

The audio-only games sound fascinating - Five Japanese Gameboy Advance games worth importing.

Maybe its time to rethink the RAID concept - The Problem with RAID. A good counter-argument in the comments too.

What is it with America and Guns ? Love the guy who got cancer so logically needed a gun (or three) for protection.

Like many broadcasters TVNZ is starting to put some of its classic clips online - TVNZ Ondemand. 'Eating Media Lunch' is wonderfully offensive.

Heh - Web 2.0 & Death of the Network Engineer. As someone involved in provisioning both Prod & DR data-centers this type of thing rings all to true - its very easy to say you'll stick your environment somewhere else (so someone else can feed & water your kit) but planning the interconnects is definitely non-trivial!

My old Uni actually comes up with something useful - Solar Power Breakthrough: Solar Dyes Could Be Put In Windows, Clothing. Not bad for a place with a reputation for turning out Ag students & Vets.

Impressive - How to Write a Spelling Corrector - in 20 lines of Python no less!

Interesting - Richard Dawkins on why Jurys don't work. Having sat on a Jury before I think I can vouch for what he says.

Interesting (again) - Classical violinist busks in Washington. I have to admit I wouldn't have given the guy a second look regardless of his musical prowess. Even before the iPod or Walkman I just tend to zone-out when walking anywhere.

NZ gets two entries in the top 20 - Top 100 Liveable Cities. Can't speak for some of the european cities but I'd rate Melbourne higher than Sydney and Wellington higher than Auckland (Auck & Syd are to big and sterile IMHO). Also interesting that in the top 20 the North American cities are all in Canada.

Fantastic - 3D Images (hand) painted on layers of glass.

More art - Photos of crumpled books. Believe me its more interesting than it sounds.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) OLPC Live ISO CD. Take it for a spin and check out the interface gallery

Grammar - Top 10 Grammatical Mistakes (that make you look stupid). In a world where TXT is acceptable in English exams who cares ?

Nifty - Mozilla Coop. Browser add-in lets you share/collaborate with friends on the interweb. Looks promising.

About time this got easier to do - Tivoli Directory Integrator demo: Active Directory and Domino synchronization on YouTube. It was pretty rudimentary back in the Domino 6/6.5 days. Nice to see them bundle a basic Directory Integrator tool and leverage their wider product line.

Wow - 3 & 9mm thick OLED screens in the works from Sony. Makes me glad to have resisted the temptation to get a TFT or Plasma TV (not that I could afford either).

My ShuttleXPC is getting on in years - I'm sorely tempted to get a Mac Mini - Intel MacMinis - The OS X Blade Server.

Spooky - Map of how and where evolution is tought in the US. StangeMaps is awesome.

I should have guessed someone would have already coined a term for these carbuncles - McMansion. They seem to be cropping up all over the coast in NZ spoiling the scenery.

Dave is one of NetApps head-honchos - a couple of interesting posts relating to Power in the Datacenter and Rules of Management. The management rules in particular were pretty concise -

1. Who owns the problem?
2. Do I trust them?
3. How do I find an owner I trust?

Useful tools - LifeHackers Top 10 Free Windows Tools.

I'm always on the search for free system-wide autocomplete tool - recently I've come across LetMeType and Texter. Texter seemed a little sluggish so I'm giving LetMeType a go. LetMeType actually learns as you go which is nifty (but you may want to put in exclusions for commonly typed passwords!).

Geeky - Wallet made from a keyboard.

Bizarre - Goldfish living in a deep fat fryer. Only in Japan of course.

Site to share recipes - Nibblous. I'm a terrible cook but they have some pretty good stuff here and theres an rss feed so you can get a new idea delivered to your feedreader almost every day.

Heh - Ribena Rumbled. GSK laid low by some Kiwi school kids.

Dave Bishop (of 2000AD fame) is reviewing all of them - Films of Michael Caine. So far he's up to 73 movies!

Because I'm a sad geek I enjoy reminiscing about the old days - Dans 20th Century Abandoneware. Check out some of those old applications

Awesome - 10 Most Magnificent Trees. I'm not sure about the best in the world but they're all pretty impressive.

Interesting - XML Based IT Management Spec. Wonder if anything interesting will come out of this standard ?

For 2000AD fans - Progslog. A guy blogs about rereading 2000AD from Prog 1.

OS X - Some wonderful OS X screensavers.

Useful - PC Deployment with WindowsPE.

I was almost going to post this in the humour section but then I had these nagging suspicion that these guys are for real - A banana is apparently a sign that we're the product of divine creation. And GodTube ? WTF.