Nice watches on ebay at Poljot Watches, and if you’re a penguin-bothering type of geek, especially this one, with 24-hour dial and penguins!
Analogue watch for the linux geek in your life…
Tracking my time
Photo by Csaba_Bajko
I’m not too bad with timetracking these days. I use Billable for invoicing and as long as I keep a vague eye on the time, and add the hours into Billable as they’re spent it’s not too much of a bind.
Recently, though, I’ve started using a solution that seems obvious, but I’ve never heard of it used (I haven’t Googled it, either, so I can very easily be proved wrong!) I’ve set up a screengrabbing utility to take a shot every 10 minutes, then if I have any doubts about what time I started on something – or more usually, until what time in the middle of the night I worked until – I can have a quick look back at the screengrabs and it’s all there.
The side benefit is that while I’m looking at the screengrabs as thumbs I can see the ratio of Google Reader to TextMate (for example) is quite obviously not balanced how it should be ;)
Hmmm… latency…
3G?
Question Box: one-key, no-screen internet
This is an interesting idea, that seems slightly mad at first, then starts to make perfect sense once you think about it. Then it seems really obvious. Then it makes me think about that fact that I already provide this service to family members! Cool.
IE8 wants to be free
Fairly surprisingly (no, really bloody amazingly) the IE team has decided to make IE8 “interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can“.
This is a welcome change (although we’re still having to make things work for IE6, of course!) What’s interesting about it is the willingness to put themselves on the side of standards.
Flickr geotagging
I’m loving the Flickr geotagging, but obviously the problem comes with the fact that it was Yahoo! and not Google that bought Flickr… To be honest, for absolutely anywhere I’ve taken a photo, it’s almost impossible to pinpoint it on the Yahoo! “maps”. You’ve got half a chance with the satellite imagery, but it’s all very poor as compared with Google Maps. I’ll have to stick with loc.alize for now and import later.
Image blocking on RSS feeds.
It seems a little daft to me that you’d set up your RSS feed to include images, then block image download by referer, when by definition, the referer isn’t going to be the feed’s home site.
Barcelona humour.
Black humour, really. And I like black humour, but this is not that funny. I was having a quick peek at to see the lay of the land in the web/tech sector in Barcelona and it’s not a pretty sight:
- companies looking for experienced analyst/programmers and expecting to pay 900€ a month – that’s NET of tax, though!
- offers for PHP/MySQL jobs that then ask you to know Java, ASP a bit of C++ and why not? Photoshop and Flash as well! WTF does a self-respecting PHP coder want to know bleeding ASP for?
When I came to Barcelona in 1999 I noted the difference between here and the UK, but suggested it would improve. It hasn’t, still. Of course, I go through this process every year so maybe I should just let it go?
I want one!
Dope on wax! (er, clay…)
This is quite a mad one – and yet obvious when you think about it. Pottery from thousands of years ago carries an ambient recording superimposed into the work of the artesan. A Belgian team have managed to extract the recording from a 6,500 year-old South American vase and some 1,000 year-old Latin from another from ancient Pompeii (if my French understanding is to be believed…) Follow the link, check the video.