October 29th: A lovely little comment from the owners of marbles.co.uk about the enormous cock-up by the Marbles credit card company, which didn't think to check the availability of that domain before it started using it. Dear oh dear.
SimCity for Palm - has been on my wishlist for ages. This is the best reason I've yet seen to upgrade to a Palm IIIx.
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October 27th: Roy Hattersley meets Billy Bragg on a train, and listens to his ideas for a House of Lords replacement.
Is it just me, or is Marc Andreessen looking very old and a wee bit chubby these days?
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October 26th: Amazon UK finally doing music.
CharlotteStreet is live at last - while it's a considerably better than the dreadful handbag.com, I'm flabbergasted that they've gone for the "let's do the whole thing in Flash" approach. I always thought Associated New Media had the right idea about web design, considering the more straightforward offerings of This is Money, etc. CharlotteStreet is fine on my T1 connection, but what's it gonna look like to a newbie at home on a modem?
I do like this tour of the solar system, especially the page about Io. Although I don't agree that it's OK to pronounce it "EE-oh", which makes it sound like a Teletubby.
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October 25th: Government e-communications bill: "The presumption of innocence is reversed .... the right to remain silent is likely to be breached ... there are inadequate safeguards against abuse..." And that's what independent lawyers think.
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October 22nd: Moon not dead shock.
A Christmas blessing. Aaaah.
I'm extremely impressed with the design and function of the Nike London site. The football directory is an inspired idea, and it works very well.
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October 21st: Holiswaps - for swapping holiday homes.
Calm your millennium hysteria by stocking up with rice and orange juice, and donate to charidee at the same time. Ber-lood-y hell.
Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see what Jeff Hawkins says about the slot-in-the-back design of the Visor: "I got the idea from the GameBoy". Yusss.
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October 20th: The new Independent site. I have been waiting for them to do something about the crappy old one for so long - but this is a real disappointment. It reminds me of the design chaos the newspaper went through under Andrew Marr. The current newspaper design is excellent - I don't think they should have copied it for the web, but that they should have come up with an equally excellent web design. It's hard to even start listing the things I don't like about it.
Just to be clear: today is NOT the Internet's 30th birthday. I asked Len Kleinrock, who was there at the time, and he assured me it was September 2nd.
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October 19th: Working well together - a practical demonstration.
The story behind the first-ever e-mail message. Apparently it was "qwertyuiop".
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October 18th: There's a new official Harry Harrison site, including the full text of his original Stainless Steel Rat story. There's a telling quote from him on how he came to write it, and the subsequent series of amusing sci-fi novels: "I was practising narrative hooks and wrote one - the first three paragraphs of the book - that hooked me so much that I had to keep going to find out what happened next."
Charitycards has had a revamp at last, ditched the horrible Flash intro and is now more like the kind of web shop I like to use. Yay.
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October 15th: The face of the designer of Stonehenge? Or just a sticky-out bit?
This chap's got it all worked out.
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October 14th: Music 365: Gallagher admits to "shit" tracks on new Oasis album. So no change from the norm there, then.
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October 13th: Nice animation at Wired.
Should be a good Grand Prix this weekend - new track, Schmacher back, etc.
Sega: cheeky buggers.
Care4free got a lot of publicity for its new charidee ISP service, but the home page is shockingly awful.
Look out for new Early Learning Centre online shop going live Thurs or Fri - great for those (like me) who have Very Young relatives or god-children, who will be expecting Chrissie pressies soon. My usual presents-for-other-people ploy ("Sod it, I'll get him a CD") won't work this time.
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October 12th: The Mirror's story of how it upset the chairman of Railtrack made for a great read - if only because they printed the entire, unedited, interview, rather than a story which has been spun to fit their own agenda. If more interviews were re-produced in newspapers in this form, there would be less concern about things said on or off the record. Shame this online version of the interview loses all its formatting about half way through, but you get the idea. Update Oct 13th: this link is knackered because the Mirror doesn't archive its stories. Sigh.
Newsunlimited is running a poll on who readers would vote for as London's mayor. When I looked, Ken Livingstone was ahead with 61%. Update Oct 13th: This link is also knackered cos the Guardian removed the poll. Not a good day today.
Word arrives of a possible coup in Pakistan - so I dug around and found this local NewsNow-style news collator, AsiaNews. Nice presentation of lots of links.
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October 11th: Seen the new "improved" bun.com? Yuck.
More rubbish from handbag.com. Every other free ISP gives you free web space and help using it. Handbag's advice? "Err, go and use Tripod."
What Arthur C Clark expects will happen in the 21st century. It starts out fine (human clones, mission to Mars, etc), then suddenly goes mad circa 2010 with the invention of the Quantum Generator. Hello?
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October 6th: Maps of museums and monuments in Paris.
The new iMacs will be on sale here in the UK by end of October, at quite reasonable prices I think. Very disappointed, though, that they do not include MacOS9 - for which people will have to cough up another £70 quid or so.
Handbag.com - what a joke. Their "Tech news section" carries a promo for a non-existant quiz. The lead news story has an incomplete URL in the second paragraph. And the "more" link takes you to a full story which is a press release copied and pasted straight into a page template - complete with notes for editors like "For assistance with screengrabs contact ..." Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish.
At last, someone has re-designed www.open.gov.uk, and it looks much better for it. Also it's now much faster.
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October 5th: Google merchandise - includes umbrellas and exercise balls.
xmlhack - a very gorjuss new xml news digest made by Edd.
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October 4th: ASCII-art applet thingy.
Hard to believe how many things Bloomberg have got wrong in this report about the Psion Revo vs the Palm VII. I got my review Revo at the press conference this morning; they had Stephen Fry there to liven things up, which worked well. But I don't think much of the Revo itself. Too small, too fiddly.
Amazon's Palm VII interface. Looks kinda nice.
There's more volcanic activity going on than you might think.
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October 1st: Ta to Jamie for this one: http://i.am/faulty
The Visor FAQ page gets round to answering some important ones - like will they ship to the UK? Umm, no, not yet.
