Thoughts and wanderings around the internet, e-government and geekdom.
Excellent idea: Password generator lets you use one master password and then generate related but unbreakable passwords for other sites. Neato.
[Update] there appears to be the mother of all versions available. There’s no reason not to use this (unless you’re on IE, of course).
Useful hints on Thinking and Paper to sucessfully run a paper-only task management strategy. Scroll down to see the details.
Great news - they’re building a giant trebuchet with a 300m range to operate daily in Warwick Castle. Time to plan a visit, I think.
Apparently the UK is way ahead in value terms for public sector IT spend at one quarter of EU spend. We’re not top per capita, so this figure isn’t as crazy as it sounds.
It’s tax freedom day. We’re now working for ourselves, not Gordon. Hurrah!
A frankly disappoinging look at words that aren’t in Merriam-Webster Online. Woot is the only one that I have seen in common use (among geeks).
Went to see The Consequences of Love, a slightly arthouse Italian film in our slightly arthouse local cinoche. The film was great, except for the unexpectedly overblown ending. The film is beautifully constructed, both in terms of photography but also content - working up very gently through a crescendo, but without ever saying too much. The dark humour in it is very funny - there’s a particularly fine man-runs-into-lampost-while-ogling-girl moment.
An interesting matrix relating tacit vs explicit knowlege to individual or group production of such.
The chart comes from a 1999 talk that is available online (how’s that for no link rot!)
An astonishing photo essay showing boosters crashing in Kazakhstan. And the people collecting them.
Tixall Lodge Gatehouse is a Landmark Trust property which we’re going to in a couple of weeks. It looks fun. Some more fun things to do.
Don Norman steps out In Defense of PowerPoint. He makes the valid point: PowerPoint is a tool, not the reason for things happening. So PowerPoint didn’t destroy the shuttle - humans did that. However, I like the idea of more creatively using PowerPoint as espoused in Beyond Bullets. Images and graphical representations are harder to create, forcing you to think about what you’re saying. That’s a good think, IMHO.
Lovely shot of part of the Himalayan range from space (from the International Space Station, in fact).
More spectacular than my shots of the mid-West from a plane.
You wouldn’t have thought that a game that uses only the left mouse button could be a) difficult and b) reasonably compelling. Here’s a version of SFCave
that meets the bill.
Lovely continuation of the Orange “pitch” ads with Darth Vader being seen off.
Flexfind is a (new to me) find tool for Excel that gets over the 1024 character limit, and also searches within charts, etc.
A written question about e-government related in Hansard. One of the few mentions that e-gov gets.
William Heath has done the digging around to find the evidence that biometrics won’t work for a UK ID card (drawn from research submitted as part of the bill being resubmitted this week). This has been known for a long time, but maybe someone will shout about it this time.
New Scientist has 11 steps to a better brain that appears to involve chewing gum.
Charles Arthur is absolutely right: you’ve heard a song and like it and think “shall I buy the album”. If the song is the first one on the album, the album is rubbish. If the song is somewhere else, the album is likely to be OK. Think Muse:Absolution, where Sing for Absolution is the fourth tuen for example. Think U2:How to Dismantle… where Vertigo is the first song and there is only one other good one on the album.
Egads! Some signs of truly joined up government around spatial references. Why is it important? Because postcodes don’t uniquely identify anything, and aren’t necessarily useful even when they do.
