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The ultimate guide to xkcd, part 1

Published
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blogmywiki
on April 18, 2010
in Uncategorized
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Life is short, xkcd is long - over 700 strips and counting. What to do?

Fear not - I’ve picked the best ones for you, starting with numbers 1 to 301… the ones that made me laugh out loud and the ones that made me cry. Actually they pretty much all made me laugh out loud, aside from the barrel ones.

The Barrel Strips - remind me of Peter Blegvad’s Leviathan.
xkcd.com/1/
xkcd.com/11/
xkcd.com/22/
xkcd.com/25/
xkcd.com/31/

The Other Strips
xkcd.com/23/ - t-shirts
xkcd.com/33/ - self-reference
xkcd.com/42/ - car insurance
xkcd.com/44/ - love
xkcd.com/45/ - shrodinger’s comic
xkcd.com/46/ - secrets
xkcd.com/56/ - the cure
xkcd.com/57/ - wait for me
xkcd.com/58/ - why do you love me?
xkcd.com/59/ - graduation
xkcd.com/66/ - abusive astronomy
xkcd.com/74/ - su doku
xkcd.com/75/ - curse levels
xkcd.com/77/ - bored with the internet
xkcd.com/79/ - iambic pentameter
xkcd.com/90/ - jacket
xkcd.com/92/ - sunrise
xkcd.com/93/ - jeremy irons
xkcd.com/107/ - snakes on a plane 2
xkcd.com/109/ - spoiler alert!
xkcd.com/114/ - computational linguistics
xkcd.com/120/ - dating service
xkcd.com/122/ - quirky girls
xkcd.com/128/ - dPain over dT
xkcd.com/149/ - Linux sandwich
xkcd.com/150/ - grownups - where it all started when I spotted this strip stuck to a fridge in someone’s Flickr photostream
xkcd.com/175/ - automatic doors
xkcd.com/193/ - perfect sound
xkcd.com/197/ - ninja turtles
xkcd.com/219/ - blanket fort
xkcd.com/231/ - cat proximity
xkcd.com/251/ - cd tray fight
xkcd.com/262/ - cat captions
xkcd.com/270/ - t h white’s merlin
xkcd.com/273/ - the electromagnetic spectrum
xkcd.com/275/ - meet the parents
xkcd.com/283/ - movie pet peeve
xkcd.com/300/ - mildly sleazy uses of Facebook pt14

Good day

Published
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blogmywiki
on April 15, 2010
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Three good things happened today.

  • I discovered an awesome web site, thanks to Sky News and the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland: RadarVirtuel. Sadly it is so awesome, and word of it clearly spread so far, that their servers went into melt-down and it’s been offline most of the day. It allows you to track planes in real time. Click on them and it tells you where they came from and where they are going and shows you their flight paths. It’s as if David Cameron’s invitation to the people to run the government now extends to Air Traffic Control. “Who wants big government telling planes where they can and cannot fly?”. I am expecting a USB headset in the post following a Tory landslide. I need never leave the house again.
  • Another fricking awesome web site. The cartoons at xkcd.com - they are almost all wonderful but here are three random ones I spotted this evening:
    http://www.xkcd.com/79/
    http://www.xkcd.com/75/
    http://www.xkcd.com/90/
  • Toby Ziegler from The West Wing walked past my office door today. He SMILED at me.

Today we also speculated about what Air Traffic Controllers did with their unexpected day off:
Me: They played Pong.
Neil: They did their laundry.

xkcd cartoons

Published
by
blogmywiki
on April 15, 2010
in Uncategorized
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Check this out:
http://xkcd.com/727/

Suppertime! on your mobile

Published
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blogmywiki
on April 7, 2010
in food and iPhone
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Suppertime! is now iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry and Android-friendly… so you can browse recipes on your phone in the kitchen, on the train or where ever you may find yourself.

http://www.suppertime.co.uk/pages/

It’s all done with the WPTouch Wordpress plugin.

Hayloft

Published
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blogmywiki
on April 6, 2010
in Uncategorized
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Love this… even if it is too wide for the page.

The Eleventh Doctor

Published
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blogmywiki
on April 4, 2010
in BBC, Doctor Who and TV
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Well, of course I loved it. Matt Smith is great, he clearly ‘gets’ it - maybe playing it a little too much like David Tennant, but I’m not complaining. The Avengersesque rural England (ok, Wales pretending to be England) was a treat. Steven Moffat didn’t let us down, cheeky thing that he is. Amy Pond as a kissogram was a really, really sneaky ruse. But I think he got away with it. Just. (I was enjoying it in Freeview HD, but that’s another story. Really the detail is quite extraordinary… every fibre…)

Steven Moffat is a cheeky monkey

Ahem.

Yes, anyway. My only niggle… there had to be one… was a surprising one. I’d have told the story a bit differently at the start. I understand they need a bit before the main titles, but I didn’t like the Tardis out of control flying over London, even if it was making a point that they don’t ‘do’ London any more. It could have started with the Tardis crash landing in the garden, Amy’s reaction to it, drawn out a bit more - until eventually, just before the main titles… the Doctor appears from the box.

Also, the idea of Amy growing up with this possibly-imaginary friend called the Raggedy Doctor, the psychiatrists, her friend playing games with her, is such a good one, I cannot believe Steven Moffat didn’t make more of it. It’s thrown away in a few lines of dialogue. How delicous would it have been to spend the first 15 or 20 minutes with Amy growing up, no-one believing her, maybe without us even seeing the new Doctor at all until he reappears? Maybe we will come back to this story and the superb Caitlin Blackwood who played the young Amy - and is in real life the cousin of Karen Gillan. She almost acted everyone else off the screen.

Télégramme Sam, you’re my main man

Published
by
blogmywiki
on March 29, 2010
in photography
. 1 Comment

Delicious new photography magazine… Check it out:

http://www.sarahmia.co.uk/telegramme/

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Published
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blogmywiki
on March 25, 2010
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Even when I was young I wanted the ability to delve into my mind and remove painful, or embarassing, memories. I imagined a soldering iron, cauterising the offending part of the brain.

As you get older, the capacity for being embarassed diminishes, but still there’s a desire to erase the painful… like in the wonderful film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind.

Well maybe that will happen one day… on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning they were talking about using it to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, but it’s hard to imagine it not being used for other reasons, like the removal of painful love…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8586000/8586523.stm

Steven Moffat is coming to your living room

Published
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blogmywiki
on March 24, 2010
in BBC, Doctor Who and TV
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New Doctor Who on the way and its new presiding genius - Steven Moffat - has given a nice interview to The Guardian. He’s the man behind The Empty Child and Blink, which is not the best episode of Doctor Who ever; it is the best piece of TV ever. Full stop.

Amongst gems in this interview are the line “all we writers really want to do is write a script, toss it over a wall and go out with strippers” and the revelation that in the last episode of the new series “practically everything” happens - “some of it twice”.

I can’t wait.

Useful iPhone camera apps

Published
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blogmywiki
on March 23, 2010
in photography
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There are gazillions of camera and photo apps for the iPhone - here’s a review of the ones I’ve tried on an iPhone 3GS, starting with the most useful. Thanks to Dave for pointing me in the direction of many of these in the first place.

William Norman & Chip
Hipstamatic
Hipstamatic - £1.59
An utterly beautiful, if slightly mad app. It’s possibly a bit too trendy for its own good, and is probably already responsible for even more wistful-arty-girlie photography on Flickr than ever… and hell, who’s to say that’s a bad thing?
It does not let you apply its filters to saved images, only photos you take while you’re using the app. This is slightly limiting, but it’s supposed to turn your iPhone into a lo-fi camera - and that’s what it does. You can load (and buy) different ‘films’ (borders), ‘flashes’ (which are like filters and add flares) and ‘lenses’ which can be warm or cool. All about making more money, but it’s all done with such panache and style I love it.

.

The Map Approach to Modern History The Mother of Parliaments
Camerabag - £1.59
A simple set of effects that you can apply to either saved images or use it as a camera. I use this a lot, especially the ‘Helga’ and ‘Magazine’ settings. There are some Polaroid and black and white settings too.

.

Flickr - free
The official Flickr app is ok. It geotags photos from where you upload them, rather than where you take them, which is a bit crap. And I still cannot work out how to rotate a photo on Flickr - not using this nor Safari.

.

Crop for Free - er, free
Worth having just so you can crop a photo. That’s all it does.

.

Camera - built-in, free
Yes, the iPhone’s built-in camera is very, very basic - but it seems solid and saves quickly. Worth keeping to hand.

.

Gorillacam
Gorillacam - free
Great idea: spirit level, digital zoom, time-lapse etc… but I find it buggy - I lost about a dozen photos that it just didn’t save. Still, at that price you can’t complain I guess.

.

Guess Where Lego?
Lego Photo - free
People grumble about this, but it was a huge hit keeping 10 year-olds entertained on a school trip. Take a photo or one from your camera roll and turn it into a Lego mosaic. Westy points out that you should then be able to order a physical Lego kit - like you used to be able to on their web site. They’re missing a trick here.

.

Lo-Mob Saltford School
Lo-Mob - £1.59
On paper it sounds good - lots of different vintage effects and filters… but I hardly ever like the results enough to use them. Too many Polaroid-type effects and I find the results not quite to my taste. There’s also one ‘Instant Wide’ setting that always produces a blank white vignetted image.