wwwFAIL.

Enter a URL, and it will be displayed, with FAIL written on top. Simple, and, may I say, quite brilliant. It made me laugh anyway.

I got an opportunity recently to play around with some old iMac DVs (late 1999 or early 2000 by the looks of things) that had been lying around unused for a while at college.

So now, instead of lying around with no system software loaded on them, they are being put to use. Two are running OS X 10.1 and the other one that is up and running is running OS 8.6.

It’s always good to play with older stuff, and it’s nice now that they can be put to use (which I imagine will involve reinstalling Mac OS lots of times as part of the Operating Systems unit).

I was pleasantly surprised to read that The Times Magazine for the 9th February includes a section on the latest internet meme of FAIL (page 12, left hand box if you’re interested).

I was not so pleasantly surprised to notice that half way down, you are invited to “Visit timesonline.co.uk/microtrends for an epic shipment of fail”.

Why? Well, in my opinion, FAIL is subject to special grammar requirements. It should have been “a shipment of epic fail”, not “an epic shipment of fail”.

The lack of capitalisation also concerns me, but it might be a little harsh to be critical on that point as well - and the capitalisation of the word isn’t necessarily a set-in-stone rule, either.

You can read the article that appears in print over on their site.

Yeah, they cost too much, but they are awesome. So here are my completely unrefined first impressions.

Mail is by far the best mobile email client I’ve ever used. To be fair, I haven’t really used that many, but it beats going to the Gmail web interface hands down. On a full-sized computer, Gmail webmail is pretty workable, but is sluggish on a device like the iPod.

Here, the richness of a local app improves the experience significantly, especially on slower and unreliable dodgy wi-fi connections. And I can have as many POP/IMAP accounts as I want loaded in and synced up. The best part of Mail for me is that it caches email you’ve downloaded (even on IMAP), so you can look at email again even when you don’t have a connection to remind yourself of a detail or something. I actually love Mail on the iPod Touch.

Maps is pretty cool - haven’t had much real use for it yet, considering I only got the apps this afternoon. It’s less useful than on the iPhone as you’ll have to find an open connection to use it, rather than using the cell network. Still, it’s an impressive maps experience considering the portability of the device you’re running it on.

Weather’s useful, and as far as I can tell, also caches data so you can still see something when you’re not connected.

Notes is a genuinely useful app and should in my opinion have shipped with the iPod in the first place. Shame about the lack of syncing, but it’s useful for quickly jotting something down without finding a pen and paper.

I don’t really care much for Stocks, not at the moment anyway.

The customisable home screen and web clips are a nice touch too, although I’m not sure about the wobbling icons. It sort of distracts you from what you’re doing - I think something a little more subtle might have been better to let you know that you’re in editing mode.

Overall - they’re worth getting, but I am still quite annoyed at the fact that it isn’t a free update. Roll on the SDK.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to know exactly how hot the Geforce 6600 GT in my desktop PC here was. Turns out, it idles about 52 Celsius (125 F).

Then, again, out of curiosity, I put it under some load, by running glxgears at full screen - 1600×1200. Turns out the GPU positively roasts at such a temperature.

83 C ~= 181 F.

Pretty hot.

So I’m officially ready for Leopard.

The entire Macintosh HD volume has been backed up (60 GB of sparseimage!) and frozen (I’m not touching it in terms of saving anything important) and I’m ready for my shiny Leopard disc to arrive to do an erase & install and then copy selectively the good stuff back.

Now we just hope UPS decide to deliver it tomorrow morning not evening (or worse, later than tomorrow!). Go on UPS, make me happy.

[via]

Google Reader finally has a search box, but more importantly, actually tells you how many items are left to read if there are more than 100.

Previously, you’d just get the extremely descriptive 100+ which didn’t really give you a realistic estimate of how much reading there was to do.

It is about time!

I am officially back from the Lake District. Well, actually, I was back on Saturday, but as always I’ve jumped straight back into all sorts of stuff and haven’t got round to updating this blog yet. Had a good time up there - did lots of walking, seeing things and just generally spending time with the family and getting away from things. Wasn’t completely unplugged, got some (expensive) wifi while I was there for a couple of hours over the week.

Actually I had re-enabled my Zooomr photos in the sidebar of my site (on all pages except blog pages). It now works as the feeds from Zooomr which got lost during the transition to the new Mark III version of the site have reappeared.

Unfortunately, I’ve decided to take them off again. Even with Magpie caching (I have a neato Magpie RSS-based parsing solution for the feed to make the photos appear on the sidebar), it slowed down the site loading times to an absolute crawl, so I’ve disabled it.

If I get time, I might redo it and do the Magpie execution via cron, store the results in a static file and just read that at runtime. But that is a big if. For now, no photos!

FOSSwire is doing amazingly well. We’re on track to hitting a very significant visitor number milestone (not telling you exactly what just yet!) by the end of this month, so right now we’re doing a massive push to get as much content in the next few days as possible.

College starts again soon - which means even less time for all this stuff, unfortunately. I have to go in on Thursday and do the whole re-enrol and all the admin tasks associated with that and then on Monday it’s back to the daily grind.

In the meantime, I’ll try and keep this blog a little more frequently updated - but no promises!

If you’re like me and open Terminal.app quickly under Mac OS X to do something, but then want to open your working directory in the Finder (perhaps to drag something to another location or just see the current directory graphically), I found a really neat trick.

The simple command:

open .

Will open the current directory in the Finder. Very useful for me anyway.