I know I only posted some pictures a couple of days ago, but I've come across a couple of real beauties over the last couple of days:

• Felt by lorrainemd is strangely warm and comforting.
• This gallery of images of Hong Kong – The City of Nights (Lights) contains some of the most spectacular night-time cityscapes I've ever seen. The main page holds rather a lot of thumbnails, so it takes a while to load if you're a dial-up user, but it's very much worth the wait. I can't quite say which picture is my favourite: Awesome is the only word I can say is well named, but then there's Moon above a Chinese Temple, and The most beautiful harbour in the world – Victoria Harbour, and Crescent, and Best and last fireworks of the night. How can I pick just one favourite out of that lot?

[Hong Kong photographs via Exclamation Mark, whose cool-links-per-day ratio of late is positively awe-inspiring.]

The criminals who get caught are usually the stupid ones. See, for example, the tale of Myron Tereshchuk:

[...]

Tereshchuk ran a small, competing patent document service that ran into trouble when he was allegedly caught removing files from US Patent and Trademark Office, and was temporarily banned from the facility. Tereshchuk believed he was the victim of corruption at the patent office, and blamed MicroPatent, according to court records. He began penetrating the company's computers, going through its trash, and pseudonymously sending harassing e-mails to its customers and president.

At one point, the company president tried to use a "Web bug" to trace his cyber tormenter, but Tereshchuk detected the ruse. Meanwhile, FBI agents traced some of the emails and intrusions to two homes and a dentist's office in Arlington, Virginia. The residents, and the dentist, made poor suspects, and the agents learned that all three were running unsecured 802.11b networks.

Though he went to some lengths to make himself untraceable technically, past altercations between Tereshchuk and the company made him the prime suspect from the start, according to court records. The clearest sign came when he issued the $17m extortion demand, and instructed the company to "make the check payable to Myron Tereshchuk."

[...]

You couldn't make it up…

[Via Slashdot]

I wonder what the doctors using the ultrasound story in that last post would have thought if they'd scanned this woman.

And yes, this tale has already earned a mention in a Snopes entry. Quelle surprise.

[Via Lots of Co.]

BBC News has some amazing pictures showcasing the capabilities of a new type of ultrasound scan which has already revealed all sorts of baby behaviour which doctors had assumed only began rather later in the child's development.

There's a gallery of even better images here. Never mind trying to spot which end is the head, you can see the expression on the baby's face and whether he's scratching his nose. That said, I'm a little sceptical about claims that one of the pictures shows a smiling baby. Are we sure he's happy, as opposed to, say, about to break wind?

(Though come to think of it, I don't think a baby could break wind in there. Unless of course you know differently…)

[Via die puny humans]

I hadn't realised that the "How to Annoy Me" entries from the sidebar at Dooce were archived. To her new baby:

23 March 2004

Poop so violently that it shoots out your diaper, up your back, and INTO YOUR HAIR. Who taught you that?

Or how about:

21 May 2003

Lick your index finger and then use it to wipe something off my face. Ohmigod, Mom, we're in public, for crying out loud!

[Via Betsy Devine]

Another week, another crop of neat photography:

• Lorrainemd's friend's baby daughter blows a raspberry at the camera.
• I can only assume that Noah Grey's friend Dave is – or aspires to be – some sort of supervillain.
• Sam Javanrouh's daily dose of imagery has been particularly fine this week: see, for example, Mirdamad Avenue, Tehran, or self-reflection in Whitby, or wavy clouds.
• Pixeldiva's lumière se reflétante is simple and classy.
• I'm not at all sure what sort of alien fruit this is. A strawberry, perhaps?
• Migration by welder is a wildlife photo with a difference.
• The Grand Canal of Venice is bigger than I thought. (But still nowhere near big enough for the submarine from the film of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to fit, dammit!) The larger version of the photo is even more spectacular.
• Commute is an atmospheric photoessay depicting the journey into New York city.

[Commute via Boing Boing]

I've come across a couple of nice Mac OS X utilities this week. Preferential Treatment (see link in left-hand frame of site) puts a nice graphical front end on Apple's plutil utility. plutil identifies corrupted .plist files, which can cause all sorts of odd behavioural problems in OS X. Not something I'll use every day, but certainly a program it's worth running once a month or so.

On the other hand, I most certainly will be using KeepAnEye every day. It's a tool which monitors all sorts of computerised files and online information and alerts the user when they've been updated. KeepAnEye can monitor web sites, RSS feeds and web site availability, as well as more specialised types of information such as eBay auctions and Yahoo! Stock Quotes. I don't particularly need most of those features, but I've been looking for a simple way to monitor the web sites I read which lack RSS feeds for a while now and KeepAnEye seems to be up to the job. It's highly customisable, allowing me to set the monitoring interval and the means by which the program will notify me a site has changed – opening a window on the web site, playing a sound, displaying an alert in the Dock or the menu bar. It's not as useful as an RSS feed – it can't distinguish between a new entry appearing on a weblog and the posting of a minor blogroll change – but it's a lot better than trying to remember to visit a site every day.

Wouldn't it be fun if this version of Lost in Translation was included as a bonus on the DVD which is released tomorrow?

[Edited to amend link to point to Internet Archive copy of the original link. Unfortunately it's missing the stills from the film, but the text is still intact. Thanks to Ann for pointing out the broken link. jr 15 Oct 2004]

Koala tunnels.

[Via web-goddess]

I saw Shrek 2 this evening. I hadn't seen the first film, but that didn't cause me any problems in following the story. Not that the plot is the thing with this sort of film.

The CGI work is very impressive, with both the characters and the scenery looking utterly gorgeous. I'm not a huge fan of Mike Myers, but the performances of Antonio Banderas as Puss in Boots, Eddie Murphy as Donkey and Jennifer Saunders as the Fairy Godmother easily made up for Myers' shortcomings. There were plenty of in-jokes, parodies of scenes from other films and background anachronisms to keep the viewer busy; a tactic which will no doubt generate repeat business and, eventually, DVD sales.

Shrek 2 was good fun, albeit lacking the emotional depth and smart writing of Pixar's finest work. But then, that's holding them to a very high standard indeed.

Stephen Downes has devised Nine Rules for Good Technology. His article considers the use of technology in an educational context, where money may be tight and a piece of kit may need to be shared between several groups of users over the course of a day, but many of his notions apply to pretty much any technology user. I do take issue with one of his rules:

5) Good technology is simple. Simplicity is a slippery concept, but the best technologies can be learned by looking at the input device, not by studying a manual.

Here's how I distinguish between good computer programs and bad computer programs: I try to install and run the program without the use of any manual. Installation is much easier today, thanks to a good computer program called "Setup." Running the program is a different matter. When I have to stop and think (and read very small print) about how to get rid of a paperclip icon so that I can type a letter, I know I am dealing with bad technology. Good technology, by contrast, is intuitive. To use an elevator, I press the floor number. Simple. To make a phone call, I dial the number. Easy.

Simplicity goes hand-in-hand with range of function. Features that you never use get in the way, and they make the product complicated and cumbersome.

Look for technology that does exactly what you want: no more, no less.

First of all, for most users software installation is something their PC vendor or IT support department does. Second, a computer program is a tool, and sometimes – not in every case, but quite frequently – it's easier for the end user to have a single tool which pulls together a bunch of related functions rather than have to figure out how to combine half a dozen tools to get the job done. Simplicity is good, but not at the price of hiding away functionality just because not every user will require it. For an extreme example of how simplicity makes a user interface less useful, consider Microsoft Office 97/2000's nasty habit of hiding away menu items that haven't been used for a while. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain to users that the menu item I'm talking about is there, it's just hiding behind that little chevron at the foot of the menu.

For any non-trivial software package, it seems to me that a consistent user interface is more helpful than a simple one.

[Via rebecca's pocket]

David Beckham has decided to do a little homework…

Apple have announced that the European iTunes Music Store has racked up sales of more than 800,000 tracks, with more than half of those downloads to UK customers. Which is a pretty good start, considering that they still haven't signed up the various UK indie labels which – as far as I know – are still holding out for better terms.

(For the record, I've downloaded a grand total of 12 tracks in the first week. I'm going through a burst of music buying, testing the service by picking up odd tracks I've heard on the radio or otherwise been reminded of during the week. Give it another week or so and I expect I'll settle down to a pattern of buying the odd single.)

[Via MacMinute]

Pamie posted a delightful article recounting an evening she spent googling for old school friends, imagining where their lives might have taken them.

Make sure you read the comments as well.

David M Scott makes a compelling case that Mr Spock was a descendant of Sherlock Holmes. On his father's side of the family.

[...]

A Question of Blood

The Vulcans are a thorough and logical people; they would have prepared their emissary to blend in to human society. They would have been aware that minor cuts and scrapes were common and that one would be enough to give a Vulcan away. With their advanced sciences, they would undoubtedly have come up with a way to harmlessly color their green blood red. This substance was perhaps administered intravenously, and explained away as a cocaine habit. Holmes being an above-average chemist, he may in later years have developed an oral version of this drug, as the needle offended Watson. We note Holmes' bleeding knuckles are wrapped up and out of view in The Adventure of the Empty House, and that Holmes will not let Watson treat him in The Adventure of the Dying Detective. In fact, there is no example in the Canon of anyone getting a chance to observe Holmes' internal physiology.

[...]

Fine work. We can but hope that Braga and Berman don't get hold of this idea and turn it into a time-travel episode for Enterprise season 4; you know they'd find a way to bend the idea so that Spock himself – or possibly Sarek – was the Great Detective.

[Via Nomen Luni - I feel slightly guilty about borrowing links from James Holloway's site two days running, but this was too good to pass up.]

Late but worth the wait:

• Noah Grey's View From Fairview Point, Bryce Canyon, December 2003 is a particularly colourful winter landscape.
• This Drive-In Wheel looks like fun.
• A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to some photos from the Hase Dera temple by Martine at frangipani. Now she's added an entire gallery of photos from her visit. I hadn't realised that the statues are in remembrance of deceased babies; this makes a picture like this one, showing some of the statues wearing caps which were presumably left by grieving families, all the more poignant.

Other Timelines is conceptually similar to another alternate history site I mentioned the other day.

Other Timelines seems to make more of an effort to allow visitors to track the various individual timelines back across the years, whereas Today in Alternate History pretty much tells you what 'happened' today and leaves it to the visitor to piece together the various timelines. On the other hand, for my money Today in Alternate History's entries were more intriguing, with some of the snippets of 'history' giving a convincing impression of a strange, at times even quite alien society. Both sites are worth a look.

[Via Interconnected]

Cleolinda, the woman who brought us Troy in Fifteen Minutes, has given the same treatment to The Day After Tomorrow:

New York

BIRDS: *fly south hell for feather leather*

HOMELESS GUY: That ain't good.

TIDAL WAVE: I KEEL YOU!

EVERYBODY EXCEPT LAURA: *runs*

SOME FRENCH WOMAN AND HER KID: Au secours! Nous sommes coincés dans le taxi!

LAURA: Couvrez les yeux et tenez le cul!

POLICE GUY: *smashes the taxi window*

SAM: OMGWTFLAURA!

LAURA: Hang on, I have to get the bag this French woman I don't even know left behind!

RICHIE MCRIVAL: *makes a halfhearted attempt to sort of go after Laura*

SAM: *drags Laura across the street, up the steps, and into the library through sheer willpower*

TIDAL WAVE: *keels everyone else*

[Via Barbelith Underground]

Brian Eno gave a talk last year in which he described the thinking behind his work with the Long Now Foundation, followed by a Q&A session.

Q: Can you give us some examples of long now thinking, historical that we are reaping the benefits of now?

BE: Well there's one very famous example, it's an English example, there's a college in Oxford called New College, which was built about five hundred years ago. The college is a big high building and it has very thick oak beams to support the ceiling. About twenty years ago those beams started to appear to be in such bad condition that it was necessary to replace them, so the dean of the college said to the head gardener – because Oxford has a lot of lands and forests, actually all over England – "We need a lot of oaks – what shall we do?" And the gardener said when they built that college they planted a grove of oaks, to replace those beams, and so they had been planted five hundred years in advance of their need – so that's a kind of long term thinking. I don't know that anybody is doing that kind of thing now.

Fascinating stuff. Eno does a good job of explaining the benefits of truly long-term thinking, regardless of whether the project's end product lives up to the plan.

[Via Nomen Luni]

The deep fried Mars bar has been deposed as king of the unhealthy snacks: long live the chocolate salo.

Chocolate on the outside, pork fat on the inside. Yum!

[Via die puny humans]