The Linkielist

This is a great introduction to the night sky, and teaches you to find Orion, Jupiter, Polaris, Casseopia and Betelguese quickly and easily. Worth running through.

It's a great article about them, but this is something I've been looking for for ages: it describes the huge gatherings these sharks have as they migrate towards the poles: 500 large! I've seen footage of them passing over in endless ranks... this is something I need to do before I die!

If you want the ability to clone your RFID passport with photo and name changes included, go here quickly before it's taken down!

The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) staged an excercise pitting the JSF against the 4th generation russian fighters and it got it's arse handed to it in the turning game. Link goes to the movie. Memorable quotes are:

"The report says the JSF is: "'Double inferior' relative to modern Russian/Chinese fighter designs in visual range combat." And has "Inferior acceleration, inferior climb, inferior sustained turn capability."

It concludes that the JSF: "Can't turn, can't climb, can't run."

and dogfighting it is:

"like clubbing baby seals"

I've been saying it enough - JSF is a dud!

John Chiara drives around with a camera the size of a car, handles exposure on the 2x2 m prints with a pinhole camera by placing his hand over the aperture and produces some stunning results.

Online poker sites Absolute Poker and UltimateBet have had a security flaw in them, which allowed certain players to see the hole cards of all the other players. An Australian, Michael Josem, used statistical analysis to prove that certain accounts were winning around 100 times more often than other accounts. Now there's a whole suing clusterfuck, where the state is suing the owners of the sites, who are suing the makers of the sites. Employees are being fired and even the World Series of Poker winner Russ Hamilton has been implicated as being a cheater.

MouseJail is a tiny freeware that keeps your mouse on the monitor you want it to stay. Very handy with games, where sometimes the mouse wanders out into the desktop next to the gaming area.

Minitube integrates with Winamp, Itunes or KMPlayer and hunts down the music video to the song you're playing on youtube.

Spore has been getting loads of flak for publishing a game using a copy protection method that only allows you to install it on 3 user accounts. They've since raised the amount to 5, and say that you should be able to install it on more PCs if you give them a call.

Wall Mart is taking down their DRM servers. This means all music purchased legally from Wall Mart can no longer be played. Wall Mart is now reccomending people break their DRM if they want to keep their music!

This is why copy protection schemes such as Electronic Arts' Spore are unnaceptable. Servers do go down. And then suddenly you can't play your game any more at all!

Labour is a big fan of huge, vulnerable and downright dangerous centralised databases. The Tory party: less so. Especially when it's their kids being centralised for an unencrypted USB device to give all the data to someone.

After 3 failed launces, fourth time was lucky - the three stage rocket made it to low earth orbit, making it the first privately funded spacecraft to do this, trumping Spaceship One, which, allthough manned, only stays in space for very short periods of time.

Well done China, not many countries have had spacewalking astronauts!

Well, there you go. Proof that speeding camera's are basically only another way for the government to shake us around upside down and catch the money that falls out.

Rockbox replaces the UI and OS on a whole range of popular MP3 players (archos, iriver, ipod, iaudio, gigabeat, sansa). You can customise the UI, use voice control, play games, load plugins, etc etc etc. A great way to breathe life into your old MP3 player.

Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd (SPR Ltd) a small UK based company, has demonstrated a remarkable new space propulsion technology. The company has sucessfully tested both an experimental thruster and a demonstrator engine which use patented microwave technology to convert electrical energy directly into thrust. No propellant is used in the conversion process. Thrust is produced by the amplification of the radiation pressure of an electromagnetic wave propagated through a resonant waveguide assembly.




Emdrive - Home

Laptops and digital stuff wasn't enough for them - no, they can photocopy anything and everything you take into the country....

If you don't want to run an MS Exchange server, but you do want to have the groupware functions such as sharing calendars, emails, notes, contacts, etc. there are a few semi open alternatives you can try which also support phone synchronisation.

Most support webbased functionality and allow you to attach any client to it, some come with their own suite of clients.

But if you want to use your Outlook client, all of them require you to buy a connector.

OpenGroupware.org Ogo

Scalix

Kolab

Zimbra

Zafara

Citadel

Open Xchange

Most work quite a bit like Outlook, but Citadel is totally different, out of the box.

We've covered how Apple has stolen the Ipod from a broke British bloke before (here) and how they've ripped the design of the new Nano from Cupertino (here) and whilst we haven't covered that before, it turns out that the OS-X desktop launch bar (the thing on the bottom) has marked similarities to Konfabulator. Now, Apple has taken it in their head to attempts to patent a pre-existing display software idea, namely Intelliscreen's notifier for jailbroken ipones.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies today on behalf of AT&T customers to stop the illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records. The five individual plaintiffs are also suing President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, former Attorney General and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and other individuals who ordered or participated in the warrantless domestic surveillance.

EFF Sues NSA, President Bush, and Vice President Cheney to Stop Illegal Surveillance | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Whilst I wish the EFF all the luck in the world, justice in the States is not a function of right or wrong, but in these cases a function of money. And I have a slight suspicion that these guys have a whole load more money than the EFF. Good job on at any rate making it look like the US wants to hold their leadership accountable for their actions.