Bloc Party - The Prayer video

Although it was released a few months ago, I've only just noticed the video for Bloc Party's "The Prayer" on YouTube during the week. Intriguing, disturbing, and just brilliant - all at the same time. And the tune is rather good too. I have to admit that the video made me relisten to the tune , and i've had it playing on my car stereo non stop for the past few days. I'd keep an eye out for Bloc Party - they've got a powerful lead singer, and damn good music, and something about their music says to me that they'll be in it for the long term.

The song is taken from their second album A Weekend in the City

Redesigned my blog - what do you think?

You might have noticed that i've moved this blog to a three column format and redesigned the general look of the site. I've also started publishing adverts from Chitika,Auction Ads and ReviewMe. What do you think? I hope the ads are unobtrusive and not too much in your face, but let me know if they are. I'll be tweaking the layout over the weekend. I've not blogged about the new advertisers, or what they offer, so that'll definitely be coming up in the next few blogposts.

Moved to three columns

I've been busy this evening moving this blog to a three column format, which i found on Blogcrowds. So, there will be a lot of moving things around , as i tweak the layout. It's by no means final right now.

Link-love from John Chow

Yesterday, I bought the make money online prolific blogger John Chow a beer via his newly installed buy me a beer wordpress plugin.
A nice simple idea - one of those "why didnt i think of that before" moments.

Now in return I get a bit of link love from John in a thanks for the beer blogpost. It'll be very interesting to see what effect this has on my blog traffic. Google Analytics hasn't yet reported on the traffic for today, but when it does I'll do another blogpost about it.

Intel ultra thin laptop

Intel unveils the world's thinnest laptop, and it's as skinny as a Razr. Codenamed the Intel Mobile Metro Notebook, this prototype was designed by Intel along with Ziba Design, and it's a mere .7 inches thick and weighs just 2.25 pounds.

Buy Me A Beer!

After John Chow added the buy me a beer wordpress plugin to his blog, I was inspired to add a "buy me a beer" sidebar blob of my own. You can see it on the right hand side. You'll be making a payment to "Saffron Technology", which is actually just me. It's the name of the one man band company I owned for consultancy purposes a few years ago, thats now defunct. But my paypal account is still active - I use it for occasional eBay sales, for example.

So, buy me a beer! Blogging is thirsty work. Suggested amount - £2 (thats 2 pounds sterling) - so thats about $4 U.S. dollars. Of course any amount less or more than that gladly accepted.

Note: If you buy me a beer, also send me your website/blog url in either the comments below or via email (depechemode AT gmail DOT com) - and let me know what anchor text you'd like me to link on. I'll add you to a list of beer contributors on this blogpost and give you a bit of link-love in return. This applies to ALL beer donations from now on.

Note #2 The first 5 beers will have a digital photo taken after the beer is purchased in a genuine English pub in the south of England. The outside of the pub and a Google Maps link will also be posted. Photos will also be uploaded to flickr, 23hq, zooomr and elsewhere. These photos will be individually blogged about, so you will get an individual blogpost on this blog on a per beer basis about the beer that you helped me to buy. Birth of beer, drinking of beer and death of beer photos will be posted, and all stages of the beer's (brief) lifespan will be hyperlinked back to your site.

I will incorporate links back to your site using anchor text that you provide - and if you want some text as well, then i'll blog that as well. The usual caveats to what i link to - no pr0n, no gambling, no hate, no racism, no spam - apply.

Note #3 - Gotta give a bit of link love to Ankesh Kothari , who came up with the buy me a beer wordpress plugin. If you dont want to buy me a beer, buy a beer for him.

Review Me review - Mozomo dot mobi

Please note: This review was sponsored by Mozomo on ReviewMe for $5

I've just received my first ReviewMe review offer - from Mozomo.mobi- Designer Mobile Content who , according to their blurb are "the first Premium Designer Mobile content store which produces truly luxury and designer mobile content". It sounded interesting, and within the marketplace of my geeky/techie gadjet loving audience.

Hitting their website produces the first problem -theres hardly any content on there and an enormous amount of white space. The women in bikini wallpapers are located on the left. Although, to be fair there's also a Porsche wallpaper

The second problem is that in their blurb, they said:

"Following is what Mobile Monday Finland and Nokia have to say about us:

http://www.mobilemonday.net/mm/story.php?story_id=4926"

Well, if you visit that url, you just end up on the Mobile Monday home page.

Mozomo have no information on their About Us page, which really isn't a good idea and doesn't build much trust with potential customers. To make matters worse their contact us page has no contact information - just an online contact form.

So, I have no idea who these people are or where they are located. In an era of 911 scams and internet fraud, not letting your customers know who you are is a bad idea. Mozomo should be more upfront with who they are and where they are , and thus generate a level of trust between them and potential customers.

Marks out of ten : 2. Must try harder.

Supplemental hell

After reading John Chow's post about getting out of the Google supplemental index, and then reading that Shoemoney has managed to increase his traffic by a staggering 1400%, again by getting out of Google Supplemental, I had a look at the supplemental index for the site I work on for my day job. It doesnt look nice, with around 265,000 pages in supplemental.

Why is this important?
In the words of one commenter on Shoemoney:
"Removing duplicate content and pages with little to no written content bring a lot of pages out of supplemental. The more pages your site has in supplemental the less ranking power your domain has. If you decrease your supplemental pages your domain’s pagerank and ranking power increase."

I'd better get working on this one so. Thankfully, Google has made it easier to tackle this, as Googlebot recognises wildcards in your robots.txt file

e.g.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*sort=

will stop Googlebot indexing ANY url with the string "sort=" in it.

Titan's coasts and drowned mountains

On May 12, 2007, Cassini completed its 31st flyby of Saturn's moon Titan, which the team calls T30. The radar instrument obtained this image showing the coastline and numerous island groups of a portion of a large sea, consistent with the larger sea seen by the Cassini imaging instrument
Read more here

Review of John Chow dot com

If you are curious about how to make money online then a visit to John Chow's blog wouldn't go amiss. It's currently ranked no.1 in Google for the search phrase "make money online". His blog is very easy to read, and a great place to read up on the various advertising and affiliate schemes on offer to bloggers. Also , if you review his blog, he'll create a link back to you in one of his "make money online" backlink batches.

Jodcast

The Jodcast is a twice monthly podcast on astronomy from Jodrell Bank Observatory.Now I can set the phase variances in the deflector grid.



read more | digg story

Programming languages

Spotted this in the comments on Losing big is easy - a blogpost about badly named computer languages (and its quite funny too)

Christopher said...

Cool, great names for future programming languages:

- Rockefeller
- Capone
- Patton
- Shark
- Fire
- Arrow
- Ring
- Eagle


Example:

Woah, my boss asked me is I could take over the project from Mike, and I said"sure", because Mike used Rockefeller extensively, along with the Capone toolkit (the one where all the class names start with GUN), and I could just bring in my Patton web services, link it with routines written in Shark by Ellie in Financial Services.

Of course, the web server is written in Fire 2.2, with Arrow modules, and uses Ring for dynamic configuration. (Ring of Fire) All this will be hosted on Linux with the Eagle virtual environment manager.

Panoramic drive through Berlin

Map Movin 360 is an astonishing map hack. Fabian Zastrow and Christian Müllenhagen (who are both post-graduate students from the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin) used a videocamera, combined with a single-shot panoramic camera system to film a route in Berlin which is totally panoramic. During the video, you can move the camera around to see what's on your left, your right, your back or front.

Hat Tip: Google Maps Mania

Bizarre aerial drone photographed in California?

This week I was visting my fiance's parents in Capitola. We were eating dinner on the back porch when we noticed this "object" sort of hovering in the sky.
At one point a car stopped to look as well. No one had any idea what this thing was but everyone in the car was visibly freaked out by it.

There's also some writing on this thing, which I didn't recognize (and I read both English and Hindi). You can see it in a few of the pictures.

Anyway, I created this Flickr account for the best of these pictures. I have no clue what this thing is so I'm putting it out there to see if anyone else saw it.

Full flickr photoset here

Microsoft oPhone

Review Me

I've signed up this blog to ReviewMe, which is an interesting concept - you, the blogger, gets paid for reviewing other websites, and thus those websites will gain some extra traffic. I'll only review sites that would be of interest to readers of this blog, and of course, I will be entirely transparent in my reviews - I will state that any review is a "review me" review.

Interview with Dr Michio Kaku

Fascinating interview with Dr Michio Kaku on parallel universes, the matrix and superintelligence. I particularly liked his explanation of the multiverse idea:

Now, this can be compared to sitting in a room, listening to radio. When you listen to radio, you hear many frequencies. They exist simultaneously all around you in the room. However, your radio is only tuned to one frequency. In the same way, in your living room, there is the wave function of dinosaurs. There is the wave function of aliens from outer space. There is the wave function of the Roman Empire, because it never fell, 1500 years ago.

All of this coexists inside your living room. However, just like you can only tune into one radio channel, you can only tune into one reality channel, and that is the channel that you exist in.

Dell announces models for Ubuntu

Over at Jeremy's blog is a blogpost about a Dell email, in which they announce the models on which Ubuntu will be offered:

We will be launching a Linux based OS (Ubuntu) on the E520, 1505 and XPS 410 starting next Thursday, 5/24. We expect these systems to be less than 1% of our OS mix for the entire year which is ~20,000 systems annually. Please cover the huddle deck below with your team by EOB Sunday. If any questions come up, please let me know so I can address them before launch.

The goal of launching Linux is to continue to give our customers more choices to customize their new Dell. Providing more options to our Linux Enthusiast customer group will hopefully create even more Raving Fans!!

Here are the links to the Dell models mentioned above:
Dell Dimension E520 desktop
Dell Inspiron 1505 laptop
XPS 410 desktop

Linkdump

Undiscovered bedrooms of Manhattan
Projected climate map of Europe circa 2071
The last ten seconds of every episode of season one of Star Trek:The Next Generation
Episode 47 of the Linux Action Show is out
U.S. slow broadband speeds
The Motorola Razr 2 runs Linux
Death by Lawyer - 10 cool sites that we miss

Amsterdam in 3D

3D buildings for Amsterdam have been rolled out to Google Earth.