“Groovy Motherfucker”

MovableType plugin to reconfigure the “fields” for your blog entries. Might install this, just so that I can stop storing the “via” links for Groovy Links in the “Excerpt” field.

Upload a photo of you (or someone or something else) and Time might flash it up on their “Person of the Year” billboard in Times Square. I uploaded a shot of Bacon, naturally.

An interesting new Unix shell. Look at the screenshots for examples of it’s cool tab-completion fu.

Wow. For Christmas, I want a powerbook and a big fuck-off laser!

Compression/packaging format to rip *everything* from a DVD — Menus, special features, commentaries, etc. Also allows you to unpack and burn back to a DVD! Windows-only at the moment, sadly.

Real-world bounce-the-laser-off-mirrors boardgame. Looks like a lot of fun — I think I’ll head to the “World Championships” at MIT this weekend.

Ooh. This is just supersmart! A Firefox plugin which works out when you’re on a site with multiple pages to a story (or search results), and lets you flip through them with keyboard shortcuts. This makes TWoP much easier to read. Hurrah!

New minimalistic Python web framework from Aaron Swartz.

My “sound signature” according to the iTunes Signature Maker. Slightly busted in that it refused to deal with most of the tracks in my collection, but fun nonetheless.

This brilliant little applet analyses your iTunes library and based on your listening behaviour, patches together a short “signature” of your music taste. I’ll upload mine in a moment.

The marginally tongue-in-cheek Christmas trolley tour round Somerville’s insanely lit-up homes is Saturday 17th. I think we may have to get us some tickets.

Amazon have clearly realised that there’s money in the banana stand.

Cool little app to re-color black and white photos. Lots of fun!

Some interesting notes on Google’s culture. “Nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies.” Snerk.

Politicians’ claims that police need to hold terror suspects for 90 days because of the time taken to decrypt files. Ross Anderson refutes it, saying “You find the key lying around, or you give up.” Tsk, those pesky experts ruining Tony Blair’s day.

As a Rhapsody subscriber, I’m able to listen to only nine out of fourteen tracks from the Beck album ‘Midnite Vultures’ without forking out another $10. What idiot in charge of licensing decided that ‘Mixed Bizness” was fine for free download, but that the excellent “Debra” is blocked? Record companies: You’re morons, and this is why no-one uses your crappy “legal” alternatives to file-sharing.

Real take their Windows-only all-you-can-eat music streaming app, dump the drmcrypto into a cross-platform Firefox plugin, and expose the catalog as a webapp.

A rather splendid fund-raising site from Oxfam. Pick out how you want your donation spent from a sizable catalogue. My family’s been “buying” loads of these “for” my grandmother.