Jan 10
I’ve just seen this image on the the UK Government’s Consumer Direct Trading Standards website, here.
May 10
Sometimes, you discover things that realy make you blood boil – especially if apparently motivated by thoughtlessness rather than by design…
Take, for example, the Nintendo DS: an excellent handheld games console (and web browser 
). At first glance, it has an excellent pair of screens, it has lots of innovative an interesting games, and it really has hearts and minds behind it. In addition, the battery life is just incredible. The coup de grâce is that the console is not region-locked, so imported games (which are invariably released months sooner than UK games) can be played without problems… or so it seemed.
May 01
We “upgraded” our Vodafone PCMCIA data cards for USB versions when we bought new laptops with ExpressCard rather than PCMCIA sockets, only to find that the rebranded Huawei E220 was not recognised by Vista at all 
Apr 17
Several people had complained in the past that this site is a little slow… well, what did you expect from a passively-cool 300MHz MIPS processor?!
But, I implemented some of the great tips from this blog – notably installing the wp-cache plugin for WordPress, enabling caching in MySQL, and disabling some additional PHP options (although I doubt this last thing has any significant impact).
I dunno – perhaps it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes, but it feels faster to me!
Sep 08
As I mentioned before, I recently started playing with a Slim Devices Squeezebox and the SlimServer software that goes with it.
This I’m hugely impressed with – not only because it’s written in platform-neutral perl (and thus, just worked out of the box with my IRIX64 Octane. The IRIX O2 that I’m running it from now took a little hacking – but that’s perl’s fault rather than Slim Devices).
Aug 15
Ah, the genius of combining two of the best uses of the ‘net in one place [video.google.com]
If you’ve not already been to see it, Avenue Q is truly excellent 
(And bridging a neat gap between this post and the previous, apparently “Nobody knows how to spell “bestiality”“! [slate.com])
Jun 15
There’s a Japanese guy whose site has some of the coolest and strangest Flash games on the web – Grow RPG is genius.
Brand new is Chronon [eyezmaze.com] – there’s a little yellow guy trapped in a cage inside a large grey monster’s house. Your job is to help the little guy out by manipulating the objects in the room around him – but the crucial tool is that you can skip forwards and backwards in time at will to set things up for later.
It reminds me of a game called Time Machine [worldofspectrum.org] on the ZX Spectrum [wikipedia.org] which had a similar concept of earlier actions altering the later state of the world.
In the case of Chronon, though, it’s characteristicly totally nuts (in a very Japanese way… this is the country which came up with Katamari Damacy) – but worth persevering with, if only to see what crazy thing happens next
Highly recommended!