Flying and Invisibility

Having flown in and out of Hong Kong many times in the past, I just loved this little entry in the Humour Cafe. I recall the first time I flew into Kaitak and saw people seemingly only a few metres away working at desks in buildings! Some fantastic photos there and the new airport and landing is nothing by comparison. Just the view of Hong Kong Island as you landed was super spectacular.

Couple of other articles recently about invisibility. This one appeared in the New York Times and there is another article from Discover about "How to Build an Invisibility Cloak" - hmmm, what's next? The human Teleport ? Been waiting for that ever since I latched onto the BBC series Blake's 7 many moons ago. Gotta save a load of jetlag!

Stay well!

No Vegemite for You!

The US has banned good old Vegemite ??? I don't like the stuff personally but it's a bit of an Aussie institution - Ok, you lot can keep your McDonalds and KFC within your own borders!

Vegemite is banned because it contains folate which is Ok to put on your cereal but, no no no, not on your toast, brother.

They have to be kidding...everyone knows this stuff is great for fixing holes in asphalt!

More New Sites

Here are a few extra new sites I've stumbled across recently...no theme, just a random ramble!

2.0 Websites
A Boat Show on the Internet
Ainu-English Word List
Anousheh Ansari Space Blog
Death Education
Atomic Bomb: Decision
Become Shopping
NIST-F1 Cesium Fountain Clock
Charlie Chan
Top 10 College Pranks
Planet Audio Australia
The 1421 Myth Exposed
Cruise Critic

Enjoy!

Software - Eudora Zoho Google Virtual PC

Seems like a whole raft of neat software announcements have been made lately - the first was the announcement of Google Docs & Spreadsheets which is a combo job of the Google Spreadsheet and (the ex) Writely. I still find the Google Spreadsheet a bit rudimentary but it has got better over time - if only they'd support a nice red colour for negative values I could almost use it.

Next was Zoho which I mentioned back in June. Looks like Zoho Single Sign On is On - take a look-see, you won't be disappointed with the range of options and things to fiddle with!

Next I read about the news from Qualcomm about Eudora - I'm a huge Eudora fan, have used it since day dot and now it appears it's going Open Source and Free of Charge sometime in 2007. Here's the FAQ.

Lastly, one of software technologies I'm interested in from a big computing point of view, but haven't really embraced personally as yet, is Virtualisation. Microsoft have just announced the Virtual PC 2007 Beta Program which I might take a peek at sometime - it also comes with Vista support now as both host and guest.

Happy Downloading!

HTML Validation and Flash EMBED tag

EMBED, Google video and html validation......a trail littered with one-way streets and dead-ends...

I decided to give Google Video a go on my site. All pretty easy - just view a video in Google Video and click on the "embed html" button and there's your code. Just insert that into your webpage and you're all done....or so I thought!

First problem - I ran the W3C HTML validator and, of course, it bombed out on the EMBED statement. Ok, off to Google and run a search on embed and html validation - up pops a couple of likely looking sites - the first by J.J.SOLARI details a way to include the EMBED into the HTML 4.01 Transitional DTD - must have been having a bad hair day, but I couldn't get the damn thing to work for me - gave up, rationalised my decision by saying I didn't want to butcher the standard anyway.

Ok, back to Google again....

This time I find a forum which basically says "don't use EMBED, use OBJECT instead and your page will validate nicely". Yup, I did, and yup, it did. But...now Firefox downloads the goddam video whether the user wants to run it or not - and I couldn't find any way to stop that happening. So, I don't want to annoy the 11% of my visitors who use Firefox by artificially loading (unwanted) videos and bumping up their transfer rates...so back to the drawing board yet again.

I gave up trying to Validate via W3C - I use CSE HTML Validator across my site before running the W3C validator anyway, so any page with video on it will be validated with that. A small concession to "purity" but I can sleep at night knowing my pages are valid but I'm also not ticking people off! I also had to include the following metatag to keep the validator happy with the generated EMBED code:

meta content="text/css" equiv="Content-Style-Type"

Oh well, what's a few more lost hours lost spent gnashing and cursing at the keyboard!

Happy EMBEDding!

Free Spyware and Antivirus Programs

Featuring two sites today, Grisoft.com and Grc.com.

Grisoft.com features both free anti-virus and anti-spyware programs. Not much else to say - go for it.

The GRC site features many tools and utilities that are really useful as well. In particular, check out Shields Up! and the Freeware page which has loads of goodies.

That lot should keep you busy for another week!

September 20 - Lying Camera

Someone once told the camera never lied - and like most people, I don't like most photos that are taken of me....and make up your own mind what that means.

Two sites that may be of interest - check the HP Slimming Photo camera ! Hey, way to diet folks!

...and here's a whole bunch more lying photos!

Gotta fly and get me a HP R967...cya

September 15 - Mixture

Thrill-riders? ... the Segway to my latest blog entries is Segway Stumbles in Europe and Glitch Leads to Segway Recall. Ooh-ah, expensive way to possibly hurt yourself!

Be careful ! - Phishing exploit sort of via Google.

Would you believe it ? Finally Get Smart is almost here!

..and Pirate Pete sez talk like him on September 19! Yohoho...

Avast me hearties!

September 6 - Word

Be on the lookout for nasty Word documents in the next few days. Here is an FAQ on this issue.

More info in these sites:
Trojan.Mdropper.Q
Trojan.Mdropper.Q / Email Attachment Practices
Security Focus
Secunia


Happy Blocking!

September 3 - Phoneboxes and Skating

Phones these days can just about do everything except slice bread - but for a blast from the past check out the Payphone Project. Still some good old payphones around - I like the one from the Bay of Islands in New Zealand -looks like Dr Who could step right out!

Lots of more interesting sights in the gallery.

For something different check out the inline skating Speed World Championships being held in Anyang, Korea this week. Exciting stuff and little bit of danger too - Aussie Andy Finster crashes in his first race breaking both wrists, getting 8 stitches and a dislocated finger to boot ! All that training, just to do that.

Happy skating!

August 29 - Still Ugly

Wow, we must be sooo Ugly! - have fought our way right back up the chart to Number 1 position after dropping out of the Top 20 momentarily. Like I said before, happy being ugly!

One of the sites I like to use these days is Bloglines. I mentioned a while ago that I'm a big advocate and user of Web Watcher but Bloglines is a great complement to this for watching your favourite RSS feeds - in fact, I find Bloglines easier to use when "watching" sites like ResourceShelf which gets updated a lot and sometimes hard to track all the changes.

ResourceShelf is a terrific site, by the way, to find out about lots of new things and happenings on the Net. A couple of other good sites for finding new things are the Librarians' Internet Index and the Scout Report.

Happy Surfing!

August 22 Site Advisor

Hi Folks,

Two sites worth taking a peek at today - the first is the McAfee Site Advisor which some of you might find useful. SiteAdvisor is a downloadable tool that works with the browser to help you stay a bit safer whilst browsing. (and I'd appreciate if anyone felt the inclination to rate the Black Stump site, but that's entirely up to you, of course).

The second site is a bit of a fun site (at least I'm taking it that way!) - the Hot or Not Designs site is rating all sorts of sites (sights?) from hot to ugly. I'm pleased to say the Black Stump site has featured quite high on the list (well, Ok, in the ugly section!) - but I can tell you I'm Ok with that as the site is designed for information help and quality resources not to look like every other blogsite out there. And yes, I know it's a bit of an anachronism from the 90's, but there you go!

Happy being Ugly!

August 14 Sites

Oh well, the feedback was a bit light on !!

Here's a random selection of a few more new sites I fell over this week.....

Wildcam Grizzlies ...world's largest gathering of brown bears in Alaska

An Inconvenient Truth ...Climate

The Infamous AOL Data and NYT Locates One AOL Searcher

The BBC News Styleguide ...pip pip

Caddy Map ...next round of golf??

How to Present to Investors

Yodel Anecdotal ...a look inside Yahoo!

The List of Proverbs

Star of Bethlehem

Games, Simulations and Quizzes

Happy Linking!

August 7 Wimps?

Hmmm, well the broken arm needed to be "reset" - don't like to think too much about the word "reset" or "re-align" for that matter in this context - ouch...and they say we might be A Nation of Wimps ? Well, maybe, but if you ask my kids, I don't think they'd agree just at the moment. Three hospital visits in 10 days is way, way too often for me!

Onto matters more useful and interesting....a couple of neat sites for finding out stuff - the first being DNS Stuff - quite a tidy lot of tools. Take a look, you'll be glad you did.

Second site is Karen's Powertools. I use a number of these little freebie programs of which the Replicator is the best - it is a very easy way to backup my *really* important files from one hard drive to another each day. Also take a look at the Whois and URL Discombobulator as well which I also use regularly (but there are a lot more, and sure to be something of interest for you).

Now, a request - what do you you want to see here ? Any feedback ?

Take it easy!

August 2 Mix

Well, the hospital saga continued this week with another child in hospital having his appendix removed - been a week and a half!

Might have to get around the fire and have a game of Monopoly - I see times have moved in Monopoly and new versions can be played with a credit card!!

If any of you have websites, you should probably read Matt Cutts blog. Obviously very Google oriented, but well worth the effort. He's addressed a whole bunch of new questions on video this time around. Interesting!

And, to finish with today, here's information and a newsletter on interactive television when you get bored of playing Monopoly (or max out your credit card!)

Happy playing!

July 29 Hospital

Ok, well I've moved on from the big birthday celebrations into enjoying a week off from my main place of toil (not the Black Stump). Enjoying, momentarily...

First day, I come down with a goddam virus - Ok, it's just a sore throat, headache, feeling lazy, all the usual crap - I'll live, I guess. Two days later....rude interruption - school calls "Your son has dislocated or broken his wrist"...bah, humbug, off the the Casualty department of the nearest hospital for the rest of the day. Eleven hours, waiting, x-rays, waiting, discussions, waiting, surgery, recovery, waiting....eventually go home around 3am, leaving my son in hospital at least overnight, possibly longer. Turns out he made (or someone helped him make) a big mess of his Radius bone and now has plaster from fingers to shoulder.

Of course, the football season at school and with his local club have just completed and finals are just about to start - no, no, no, not for him - 6 weeks minimum, no sport. Happiness, all round...

The Black Stump has Medical and First Aid pages with loads of information if you care to look this, or other medical ailments, up.

Can someone remind me this time next year that birthdays are cancelled from now on?

Happy Medicals!

July 24 Birthday

Sorry about the lack of posts lately but I've been a little distracted with a milestone birthday and, well, celebrating it!

Lots of things happened on my birthday through history and I share the date with Alexander Dumas and Amelia Earhart to name just two. One day they might be as famous as me...

If you want to know what happened on your birthday, or other dates in history, there are a few sites to check out like the History Channel or Famous Birthdays or Any Day in History or maybe Those Were the Days

Don't forget to check the Daily Fun page on The Black Stump for various "of the day/week" type sites!

Happy Surfing!

July 18 Weird

A few sites I run across are rather odd. I post quite a few of them on the Bizarro page but I find more than I can post on that page! Either there are just a lot of odd posters out there or I just happen to gravitate to and across them...

For example...

Ink Blot Tests with Faces in them

Extreme Pumpkins

How long will I live?

Destination Day

Nostradamus Fulfilled

The Excuse-O-Mat

Error Wear

Restroom Ratings

Taos Hum

Moggy Silly Sleeping Pose Olympics

Happy Weirdness!

July 14 Tools Part 3

People often ask me where I find the sites I list on The Black Stump and the answer is "all over the place". Mainly online, but I also scan newspapers for anything interesting as well just to get something a bit different.

Online site scanning is made fairly easy these days with a Software tool called WebSite-Watcher - basically you list the sites you want to monitor and the frequency and it really does the rest. It can watch all or only parts of sites, it highlights all the changes and it's very flexible and highly configurable - it's a great time saver for me.

With a site like The Black Stump where all the sites are personally selected (no auto submissions here!), the link quality is very important. Not just the quality and appropriateness of the content, but the link itself must be valid. Now, with a site of just over 20,000 links it's a rather difficult (in fact, impossible) task to keep everything in order at any point in time so I depend on two link checking tools - LinkBot and Xenu. I don't think LinkBot exists any more but the last version still works OK, but these days I prefer to use Xenu anyway. Xenu works pretty quickly and has some nice little features enabling you to quickly check "down" sites in the Google cache and in the Wayback Machine.

To get back to the opening question about where I find the sites, that's the subject for another day - most of the sites I scan are listed on the Black Stump, most probably in the Cool Sights page. There are probably 20-25 of the sites there which I monitor fairly closely.

Happy Linking!

July 10 Encarta

Quick post today...

A two-hour free pass to the content of Encarta is available. Just follow the instructions contained in the link....

An extract follows...

How to get your free pass
Your Microsoft Encarta free pass is available from any Encartalink on MSN Search.

For example:
Above the search box, click Encarta, or click the arrow next to the Searchbutton, and then click Encarta.
Click any Encartalink on your results page within an hour of running your search.
Click an Encartadirect answer link. Direct answers are identified by this symbol .
When your two-hour free pass expires, you can return to MSN Search, run another search or click an Encartalink. Your two-hour free pass is instantly renewable whenever you click an Encartalink from MSN Search.

Encarta Free Pass Details

Happy Researching!