“groovy mother...”

Bizarre tale of a plagiarised nature article appearing as dialogue in a trashy paperback romance.

Classic bit of early Hugh Laurie musical brilliance. (Also worth seeking out on YouTube: his version of Hey Jude)

You can now log into your AIM or ICQ account using Jabber. They’re not yet doing server-to-server, but it’s surely just a matter of time.

Ashes to Ashes (the 80’s Life on Mars follow-up) is starting the first week of February, and everything about it sounds bloody AMAZING.

“What’s been your favourite scene to film?” “That would have to be when we were on a speed boat going under Tower Bridge carrying machine guns. Say no more.”

If you bought any diamond jewellery between January 1994 and April 2006, you can become part of the class action and apply for a share of De Beers’s settlement. Depending on what you bought (and the number of people who apply for their share), you could get around 30% of the purchase price back!

Yahoo embraces OpenID, acting as a identity provider for now, and promising consumption to come. Unfortunately, it uses the new OpenID 2.0 spec, so I don’t know of a single site where you can use it yet, but hey! It’s a start.

Avoid being Rickroll’d with this anti-rickrolling firefox plugin. A great example of Firefox’s extensions making the internet a safer place to be.

Graph of storage per dollar, based upon hard drive prices scraped hourly from NewEgg. 500Gb drives are the sweet spot currently, at $0.18/GB

“Please do not use Word Art™” Should make a set of these for code reviews. “Use spaces, not tabs”

Hard to watch without remembering his interview scenes in Magnolia. “When you’re a Scientologist, and you drive by an accident, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you’re the only one who can really help…”

My SimpleDB account got enabled yesterday, so I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it. This looks like a handy Python library for accessing it (and the other Amazon Web Services)

Awesome upcoming feature from my credit union: Pay in checks by scanning them on my home PC. Hooray for banking becoming less paper-driven.

US Library of Congress + Flickr == FTW! LoC uploads photos from their collection to Flickr, sharing them with the world, then Flickr users can update the metadata, improving their usefulness. Everyone’s a winner.

Cool prototype application by Tom Insam which monitors your foreground application in OS X, and tries to provide you some context by matching it to someone in your Address Book. It’s early days yet, but decidedly cool (and written in Python)

BusySync 2 will synchronize between Google Calendar and iCal in both directions. Unless Apple announce this exact feature at Macworld, I’ll be buying a copy forthwith.

Conference/celebration of internet memery, being put on at the Berkman Center in Cambridge in April. I love the fact that registering to discuss webcomics and LOLCats has resulted in my first ever charge of my credit card by Harvard University.

Been putting off joining the EFF? Now might be a bloody good time to break out your chequebook. Anyone know of a link to the original New Yorker article on which this scare-story is based?

“The Jack Principles is the first set of comprehensive guidelines for designing, writing and performing for an interactive conversation.” Great reading if you’re developing software for humans.

Dicking around at CES? Fine. Slightly amusing, even. But dressing it up as “journalistic integrity” or “civil disobedience”?! Horseshit.

Another social software village I’m a member of: Basset hound owners on Flickr. There’s a great community forming of basset owners commenting on each others’ photos, and here, celebrating the birthday of another Flickrer’s dog!

Great post by Laura “@Pistachio” Fitton. Exactly sums up why Twitter is so lovely: “For a contrived, weird and techy way to communicate, Twitter’s “passive conversation” fosters very natural, gradual relationship-building.”

Fantastic reading: HD-DVD fanboys in denial on Amazon discussion boards.

Desperation play on Toshiba’s part? They’ve dropped the price of their entry-level HD-DVD player to $130, which includes two movies, and a rebate form for five more. Even knowing the format is doomed, this is tempting me.

An interesting way to moderate IRC chat: Only allow unique new sentences to be spoken.

This could be interesting to watch — In my social network, Scrabulous is *the* killer Facebook app. If it were to disappear, would it hurt Facebook?

Thankfully, I was completely unaware that any of these games existed — I had to do a quick search to make sure they were real, and not created purely for the purposes of this article!

Jimmy Carter op-ed piece from The Onion. “You better get down on your hands and knees and kiss Jimmy Carter’s rosy-red Georgia-peach-picking ass and beg me to run your fucking country again, because there’s no way I’m ever gonna come to you fuck-knobs and politely ask you if I might please be a presidential candidate in your precious fuckin’ election.”

Interesting looking tool which is a cross between Quicksilver and Terminal.