First step to save the world’s rarest bird taken successfully! - Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) A collaborative team of specialists were hampered by electrical storms, gruelling journeys and illness in their bid to secure a precious batch of eggs laid by the Critically Endangered Madagascar pochard (Aythya innotata) in early October. (Via BBC World Service Science in Action podcast.)
What if Earth had rings like Saturn? Roy Prol’s animation shows what it might look like from different places on the surface. (Via Reddit.)
Awesome stuff. I’m really enjoying the performance race between the bird and the pie. These things are really pushing the pony forward.
– Comment on Lazy Pythonista, ‘Another Pair of Unladen Swallow Optimizations’
League Gothic: A revival of Alternate Gothic No.1. It was originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders Company (ATF) in 1903. (The League of Moveable Type)
Public Gothic type family: The beta version of the boldface is available for use in your own projects, but not for redistribution (so NOT available as a weebfont). (ANTREPO4.COM OUTPUT REPORT)
Your Tool: Crewdrill
Previous Tools: Ching, Chinter, Paner, Radisk, Mortisk
Yesterday I wandered in to town and sampled the Apple Magic Mouse. While it may not literally be magical, it does have a certain surreal aspect, being so smooth and featureless as to look more like a small sculpture than an input device. I got to play with it a bit and the imaginary scroll wheel works nicely.
I also watched a performance at the Fudge Kitchen, where they sell only fudge, and that fudge is all fudge that has been cooked, sculpted and sliced in front of the shoppers.
If a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words …
Neven and Gus both expressed interest in “NaNoDrawMo” (see previous blog post) and three people is all you need for a conspiracy, right?
Loosely defined goals are: 50 individual works/drawings produced between Nov 1 and Nov 30. Extra points if they work together to tell a story or otherwise share an overall theme (people you know, people you saw on the bus, etc).
There is no quality requirement — really the main idea is to force a certain amount of practice by setting a high quantity goal. Also, it’s not a competition (except with yourself). Any medium is OK, as long as you can get it onto Flickr somehow.
We are going to use the Flickr tag “nanodrawmo” if you want to follow us or join in. My Flickr gets reposted here, so you don’t have to do anything special to follow me if you are already subscribed to my blog.
Some terrible science fiction technologies
Robodroids
Lasergel
Metaphones
Mr ferociousj has a strange hobby: he invents names of things that don’t exist. The thing is that fifty percent of the time they are so apt I find myself wanting immediately to use them in a story or something.
Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server - Much lower power consumption than a tower server (though there do exist servers with even lower power draw), compact, stuffed with discs, and with Mac OS X Server, which is reputedly quite nice to work with. If you were setting up a small office or even an overqualified house network, then this would be a fine way to go about it.
