Deirdre › Comments

Mowing obstructions! Ugh, they're hell! I mow a few lawns/paddocks around the place, and low-branching trees are sent by the devil to taunt we mowing humans, I know it.) + Thanks for following my FF account. I'm just leaving it now, but waving toodle-oo on the way out. I'll keep reading your blogs on feed, so please don't fret about having one less reader ;) - Deirdre

"The worst crimes of academic publishing are to not methodically address all known sources of information and documented accounts on a subject, and to ignore information that conflicts with the premise of the author's research. Of the countless historians and researchers who have pored over the official documents and accounts of the founding and early years of South Australia, only two before Don Langmead – Grenfell Price (1924) and Professor Michael Williams (1974) – had either published doubt over the authorship of the 'parkland town plan' or surmised on its true origins." Great story about warring historians and the things which might influence their work. Includes this strangeness: "When Langmead went to the State Library of South Australia in the course of his research, he discovered that Dutton had put an embargo on access to the Light Papers he had researched for the 1984 revision of Founder of a City." Huh? (via forested, Delicious) - Deirdre

Sea creatures being joyous, and a song from 1979. (12 MB) - Deirdre

"[Last year] people flipped rocks on four continents on sites ranging from mountaintops to urban centers to the floors of shallow seas. Rock-flippers found frogs, snakes, and invertebrates of every description, as well as fossils and other cool stuff. [...] Be sure to replace all rocks as soon as possible after documenting whatever lies beneath them. Any and all forms of documentation are welcome: still photos, video, sketches, prose, or poetry. We encourage those of a scientific bent to try and identify everything they find, but we’re also open to purely lyrical or impressionistic responses." - Deirdre

"...allows you to search, browse or find information about individual Australian birds." Includes MP3 files of bird calls on some pages. - Deirdre

"The idea of photocopying all the relevant documents was [an] impossibility, because of cost, time and travel constraints. [...] An off-hand remark to one of the staff at the Riksarkivet revealed that they not only allowed non-flash photography of their collections, but they even had a camera stand setup for the occasional photographing of maps and images that could not be photocopied. Gennari set about photographing 2,500 documents, producing some 25,000 images in total, which would have been the equivalent of $15,000 worth of photocopying. If he had used a film camera, almost 700 rolls of film (about $4,000) would have been required with the attendant costs of converting those to photo CDs adding $30,000 to the total costs). However, with the images safely stored on a handful of recordable DVDs Gennari was able to import the whole collection into Google's free Picasa image library software for cataloguing and study on his return to the US." (via Uncertain Times) - Deirdre

"The internet is atwitter with Google Chrome's innovative new features, but there was no clear winner in our speed test comparing Firefox and Chrome—which means your choice of browser may depend solely on features. Apart from a few specific issues (namely process management), many of Chrome's best features are already available in Firefox 3, proving yet again the power of extensibility. From incognito browsing and the streamlined download manager to URL highlighting and improved search, let's take a look at how you can bring some of Google Chrome's best features to Firefox." - Deirdre

"Google's Matt Cutts dropped by our previous coverage to say that "no, we don't want rights to everything you send through Chrome." Can Google be trusted though? Below we review just the most recent history of privacy concerns raised about Google. It's a mixed bag, but we argue that given this context, no individual case should be taken lightly." - Deirdre

"The iPhone 3G’s ability to geotag photos out of the box was a major draw card for me. Unfortunately, there’s something awry with the way geotagged photos are being handled in OS X. At the moment whether you import photos through iPhoto, Preview or using Image Capture, at some point the GPS reference may get set to North/West. This is a problem if you live outside of the North-Western hemisphere. Regardless of whether Apple fixes this, you’re still going to have to retag all of your old photos. So a few weeks ago I wrote a script to automate the process." - Deirdre

An account I've just started for saving quotations. - Deirdre

I found this site while searching for the context of a popular Russell quote - this blog was the only decent source I could find, bless it. From the first post: "My half-baked plan is to devote some time to reading a few books by Bertrand Russell over the next few years -- OK, it isn't a hugely ambitious plan. This blog has been founded as a place to record some notes on that reading, should it come to pass." - Deirdre

testing - Deirdre

Ernie - holding a rubber duck in one hand - is learning to play the saxophone, but can't work out why it's only making a squeaking noise. His adviser (apparently an owl, but I'm not sure): "Ernie, keep your cool, I'll teach you how to blow the sax / I think I dig your problem: it's rubber and it quacks!" Groovy song. Features cameos by humans, including actor Jeremy Irons, who does a little dance. (10.9 MB) - Deirdre

Ernie - holding a rubber duck in one hand - is learning to play the saxophone, but can't work out why it's only making a squeaking noise. His adviser (apparently an owl, but I'm not sure): "Ernie, keep your cool / I'll teach you how to blow the sax / I think I dig your problem / It's rubber and it quacks!" Groovy song. Features cameos by humans, including actor Jeremy Irons, who does a little dance. (10.9 MB) - Deirdre

Animation. It's cute. Tap your feet and count to 12. (2.3 MB) - Deirdre

Unusually-shaped gears in motion; quite mesmerising to watch. (2.5 MB; via Uncertain Times: < http://un-certaintimes.blogspot.com/2008... >) - Deirdre

A panorama showing the 360 degree view from the top of Mount Everest. I find it strangely unbeautiful, but it's interesting nonetheless. For the location of mountains, click the link "above image" or go to < http://www.pbs.org/wgbh... > Roughly, the photo starts on the left looking southeast, and then pans around through south and west to finish on the right, looking towards the Tibetan Plateau. - Deirdre

This is great! Allows you to see 200 Flickr photos as thumbnails, all on the same page - especially good for anyone on a limited-download Internet account or using a slow connection. Mousing over a thumbnail will show you the photographer's name and photo title; clicking the photo will take you to the original Flickr page. You can either type in the Flickr details in yourself, or, if you use the Firefox browser, install the Greasemonkey add-on ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US... ) and a userscript ( http://userscripts.org/scripts... ), which adds a link to each Flickr page which will launch the Leech site with appropriate details already added. - Deirdre

Kermit tries to sing the alphabet and the little girl who has the cutest laugh in the universe tries to disrupt him. Really sweet. (2.3 MB) - Deirdre

Cookie Monster: "Now, what starts with the letter C? 'Cookie' starts with C! Let's think of other things that start with C... Ah... Oh, who cares about the other things! C is for 'cookie'! That's good enough for me!" Priceless and happy-making. (3.9 MB) - Deirdre

(see my previous bookmark for Flickr Leech) Once installed, the link ("Flickrleech") appears near the top of each Flickr page, under the page title and next to "Join this group" in Groups, or "Profile" on individual pages. But - at least for me - it doesn't appear until the page has fully loaded. If you're trying to minimise downloads, it would be better to add the details yourself by going directly to the site on the Web (not via Flickr): http://www.flickrleech.net/ - Deirdre

A page of quick descriptions with links to YouTube videos. Probably the best list of anything, anywhere, ever. - Deirdre

For anyone sick of Web2.0's frantic networking: "Our patented isolatr technology: Helping you find where other people aren't." See the FAQ if you get confused. - Deirdre

Bravo! "...we've added a new captioning feature which allows you to give viewers a deeper understanding of your video. Captions can help people who would not otherwise understand the audio track to follow along, especially those who speak other languages or who are deaf and hard of hearing." - Deirdre

Song from 1974, the first of their 35,000 hit singles which followed soon after. (6.5 MB) - Deirdre

Song from 1980. (11.3 MB) - Deirdre

A video: subtitles over a scene from the film, "Downfall". As the blog post says, "This is horribly inappropriate", so don't watch it if you'd be upset about using Hitler in a comedy setup, or offended by some coarse language and a sexual reference. Also, if the dialogue from the original film remains unchanged (I can't tell, it's in German), you'll need to mute the sound. - Deirdre

"...shows the current position of the Sun and indicates which parts of the Earth are in day and which are in night." - Deirdre

This seems like a great idea: a collaborative blog for videos about cities: "Urban life is the main subject of the blog, the idea is to show the life of the city where you live, or where you travel; but always with a curiosity for seeing farther than the usual stuff. Either showing a normal day in the city, or the weirdest." Videos can be up to 2 minutes 15 seconds in length. (via robertogreco, FriendFeed) - Deirdre

Crows remembered a mask worn by the researchers who trapped and banded them, and scolded walkers who wore it later. But I think the more interesting point is that the group of banded crows apparently taught other crows to recognise the mask too: "Wearing the dangerous mask on one recent walk through campus, Dr. Marzluff said, he was scolded by 47 of the 53 crows he encountered, many more than had experienced or witnessed the initial trapping. The researchers hypothesize that crows learn to recognize threatening humans from both parents and others in their flock." (via robertogreco, FriendFeed) - Deirdre