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Month: March 2008

The 101 most useful websites

Posted on March 31, 2008 By admin

As compiled by the Telegraph:

TECHNOLOGY

1 Google
www.google.com

2 Anonymouse
www.anonymouse.org

Surf the web without disclosing who or where you are.

3 iLounge
www.ilounge.com

Hints, tips and troubleshooting for your iPod and associated software.

4 Only2Clicks
www.only2clicks.com

If you use just a few websites, this lets you create a home page that has links to them all. Simple, free and practical.

5 Zoho
www.zoho.com

A suite of free business programs. From word processing and presentation software to tools for taking notes in meetings, planning projects and creating databases.

6 Backpack
www.backpackit.com

To-do lists, notes, ideas and calendar. Excellent for juggling projects and much more versatile than a ring folder.

7 GetNetWise
www.getnetwise.org

All you need to know about keeping the net safe – protecting children, preventing spam, avoiding viruses and stopping others accessing your personal details.

8 DaFont
www.dafont.com

More than 7,500 free fonts (for Mac and PC), so you can at last stop using Copperplate for your party invitations.

9 Pando
www.pando.com

The superfast way to send large files over the web. Don't attach that family video to an email, Pando it instead.

10 FlipClips
www.flipclips.com

Turn your home videos into animated flip books. Much more appealing than another DVD.

ENTERTAINMENT

11 Digital Spy
www.digitalspy.co.uk

Entertainment, media and showbiz news. Plus, a surprisingly good forum for technology-related problems – a great place to sort out your broadband.

12 BBC iPlayer
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer

On-demand television and radio programmes from the BBC.

13 Whatsonwhen
www.whatsonwhen.com

Events, attractions, openings and exhibitions from around the world. Enter a location and dates and the site will show listings.

14 London Theatre Guide
www.londontheatre.co.uk

What's coming on and what's making an exit in London's theatre world. Especially good for seating plans, so you can see where the box office staff are putting you.

15 The Internet Movie Database
www.imdb.com

The world's biggest (and still growing) reference for actors, directors, locations, plots…

16 Rotten Tomatoes
www.rottentomatoes.com

A round-up of what the critics thought of films on general release.

17 Screenonline
www.screenonline.org.uk

The British Film Institute's definitive guide to the British film industry. Plots, features, statistics and news from the film world.

18 Good Reads
www.goodreads.com

Expand your reading. Catalogue your books online and others make recommendations based on what you seem to enjoy.

19 TV Guide
www.tvguide.co.uk

News, features and listings for Britain's terrestrial and cable television. Customisable interface so your favourite channels are always at the top.

20 Football365
www.football365.com

The authentic (and often tangential) voice of the Britain's 'real' football supporters.

21 CricInfo
www.cricinfo.com

Everything you want to know about the world of cricket.

22 Beijing Olympics
en.beijing2008.cn

The official Olympics site, with news, scheduling, features and a countdown to the games themselves.

23 Radio Locator
www.radio-locator.com

From shock jocks to orchestral baroque, thousands of internet radio stations to listen to on your computer.

24 Live Plasma
www.liveplasma.com

Expand your music and movie tastes. Enter the name of a song, band, movie, actor or director you like and Live Plasma will return some pretty intelligent recommendations for further investigation.

25 Blinkx
www.blinkx.com

A clever way of searching for video clips on the internet – from uploaded episodes of your favourite soap to comedy home-video moments.

26 Lulu
www.lulu.com

Self-publishing made smart again. Write, design and then print your own books – though you'll still have to persuade others to buy them.

27 VideoJug
www.videojug.com

28 Wonder How To
www.wonderhowto.com

Two great sites full of short videos showing you how to do almost anything, from the incredibly useful (exercises for diabetes sufferers, tying a Windsor knot) to the revelatory ('learn different kinds of kisses'), via the wonderfully obscure ('make a moving jaw for your werewolf mask').

29 Instructables
www.instructables.com

DIY projects from zombie make-up to LED balloons. Excellent selection of rainy-day projects for bored children (and adults) at home.

30 Flash games
www.k2xl.com

Addictive series of Flash games including the hypnotically soothing Boomshine.

31 GameSpot
www.gamespot.com

News, reviews, hints and tips for virtually every console game on the market. Essential if you are still up at 2am trying to find a way into the castle on Zelda.

32 Anagrammer
www.anagrammer.com

Online anagram machine for Scrabble players and crossword enthusiasts. Also solves Sudoku.

ADVICE AND INFORMATION

33 Newsmap
marumushi.com/apps/newsmap

A wonderfully graphical – and customisable – display of news stories from around the world. Click on an item to see the full story.

34 The Eggcorn Database
eggcorns.lascribe.net

Continually updated guide to modern-day Malapropisms, misunderstandings and other manglings of language. From 'high dungeon' to 'wreckless driving', Eggcorn names the culprits and nudges them in the right direction.

35 Arts and Letters Daily
www.aldaily.com

World-class articles from intellectual and influential journals around the world. Browse the day's selections. Like The Week for eggheads.

36 Ask Philosophers
www.askphilosophers.org

The academy comes to cyberspace. A panel of mainly American and British philosophy scholars answers questions sent in by the public. Search the database, from Abortion to War, or send in a question of your own.

37 When Is
www.when-is.com

Shows you the dates of Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu and American holidays from now to 2010.

38 Rhyme Zone
www.rhymezone.com

For when the muse has gone, a rhyme and synonym generator to help you towards the perfect mot. You can also search for Shakespeare quotations, biblical references and other literary inspirations.

39 Nationmaster
www.nationmaster.com

Giant but easily searchable database of statistics, maps and profiles for every country in the world.

40 Digg
www.digg.com

The people's approach to news and features, Digg brings together items from across the net, ranked according to how many people have felt them worth recommending. Sometimes a little techie-heavy, but excellent for discovering what the cyberworld is getting worked up about.

41 They Work For You
www.theyworkforyou.com

A powerful way of keeping tabs on MPs and peers: attendance records, voting patterns, recent statements and more.

42 Time Bank
www.timebank.org.uk

Volunteering opportunities for young people, sorted by region, interest, skills and need.

43 Wikipedia
www.wikipedia.org

Controversial, democractic and sometimes error-strewn encyclopaedia that has brought Darwinism to the world of knowledge. Make it your first port of call for looking something up. Just be sure to check somewhere else that what you find makes sense.

44 Wiktionary
www.wiktionary.org

Wikipedia's online multilingual dictionary. Immensely powerful and far less controversial than its encyclopaedic forebear.

45 Motley Fool
www.fool.co.uk

The original – and still the best – personal finance site on the web (the American version is at www.fool.com). For savers, borrowers, stock spotters and day traders, sound, independent advice that cuts through the jargon.

46 Martindale's 'The Reference Desk'
www.martindalecenter.com

From the arts, business, science and technology, a dry but authoritative conglomeration of data from around the world.

47 PubMed

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed

Free and authoritative database of more than 17 million medical research papers. Not always easy to understand if you are not a medic, but a far better place to look for information than the random sites that come up on Google.

48 About.com
www.about.com

The internet's version of that clever uncle who always seems to know the answer to your questions. There are few subjects the site doesn't tackle, though the coverage can be superficial. A good starting point for idle research.

49 NHS Direct
www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk

Online information and advice about health and illness, run by Britain's National Health Service. The site includes a useful self-diagnosis tool that can reassure you that your hangover is not in fact meningitis.

50 Legal Services Shop
www.freelawyer.co.uk

General legal advice relating to housing, family law, employment, motoring, consumer issues and personal injury, plus wills, conveyancing and divorce. Good starting point to see where you stand. Will also, for a fixed fee, answer questions and put you in touch with a solicitor.

51 How Stuff Works
www.howstuffworks.com

Engaging encyclopaedia of the modern (and not so modern) world, with good illustrations and clear text. Can suffer sometimes from an 'it's amazing!' tone of voice..

52 XE
www.xe.com

Currency converter covering every world currency. Azerbaijan new manats to Cayman Island dollars? Just a click away.

53 Advice Guide
www.adviceguide.org.uk

Find where you stand legally with the Citizens Advice Bureau's online information resource.

54 Need2Know
www.need2know.co.uk

Advice and information for young people, including health and fitness, drugs, problems with bullying, how to study and applying for jobs.

55 Royal Horticultural Society
www.rhs.org.uk

Advice and suggestions from the world's leading gardening organisation. A good 'how-to' section and seasonal tips for the time of year.

56 Babelfish
babelfish.altavista.com

Automatic translation to and from most European languages and Chinese. The results are sometimes a little strange, but you will usually get your message across.

57 eHow
www.ehow.com

How to do just about everything, from getting stains off curtains to buying a second-hand car.

58 Eat the Seasons
www.eattheseasons.co.uk

Updated weekly, information, tips and recipe ideas on British seasonal food.

59 Age Concern
www.ageconcern.org.uk

Website of Britain's leading charity for the elderly, packed with advice about maintaining an active life.

60 Weather.com
www.weather.com

The queen of weather sites, with more information than you would possibly imagine you might need, from pollen counts to surf forecasts.

61 Uncyclopedia
uncyclopedia.org

Spoof Wikipedia-style encyclopaedia where nothing is true, but a good deal is very funny indeed. Idle away an afternoon or, even better, hone your comedy skills by making a contribution yourself.

62 Kiva
www.kiva.org

An easy way to lend small sums (from $25) to business projects in the developing world. Kiva keeps track of your investment, updates you on progress and repays your loan as the business grows.

63 Embarrassing problems
www.embarrassingproblems.co.uk

From bad breath and piles to cold sores and beyond, Dr Margaret Stearn dispenses invaluable advice.

HOUSE AND HOME

64 Noise Mapping England
www.noisemapping.org

Click on an area of the map to find out how noisy a street, or even a section of the street, is – handy for light sleepers planning a move. At the moment only London is mapped, but the rest of England will follow.

65 Prime Location
www.primelocation.com

One of the best sites for finding property. It is UK-based but has a good international presence.

66 Rated People
www.ratedpeople.com

User reviews on local tradesmen. You describe the job you need done and how quickly and suppliers contact you with quotes – with previous customers rating them.

67 Zoopla
www.zoopla.co.uk

Possibly the most dangerous site on this list, Zoopla gives sale prices of recently sold homes and – the tricky bit – estimates the value of the rest. We dare you not to look.

68 Money Saving Expert
www.moneysavingexpert.com

Subtitled 'Consumer Revenge', this is where you find the discounts, tricks and tips to save money. The weekly email is essential reading for canny consumers. It caters only for Britain, but every country should have one.

69 MetaEfficient
www.metaefficient.com

Practical guide to making your home more environmentally friendly, from low-flow showerheads to 12V lighting. US-based, but many of the products are available elsewhere.

70 Design My Room
www.DesignMyRoom.com

For budding Laurence Llewellyn-Bowens everywhere, it provides the ability to redecorate your home in cyberspace. Choose colours, furniture, accessories and finishes and then publish the results online.

71 Up My Street
www.upmystreet.com

Neighbourhood information based on postcode: schools, shopping and, juciest of all, how much the house down the road sold for recently.

72 Home For Exchange
www.homeforexchange.com

One of many sites where you can swap homes with someone else for a period. This is less cluttered than some of the others and has a good geographical spread.

73 SimplySwitch
www.simplyswitch.com

The fast way to compare utility suppliers and other services, from broadband to home insurance. Enter your postcode and the site comes back with the best deals.

74 101 Cookbooks

www.101cookbooks.com

Enchanting recipe and foodie blog from a Californian cook who believes in good food. Subscribe to the email alert service and transform your cooking repertoire.

SOCIAL

75 Facebook
www.facebook.com

The most grown-up (just) of the social-networking sites that are fast taking over the world. Excellent for staying in touch with far-flung friends, though pretty good too for re-establishing contact with those you hoped you had lost.

76 WordPress
www.wordpress.com

The quickest and easiest way to create a blog of your own.

77 Ringsurf
www.ringsurf.com

Like an online Mothers' Union meeting (though sometimes a little more risquRingsurf is a chatroom where people exchange ideas about anything from politics to relationships. The quality is not always high, but users have been known to discover new (real-life) friends with interests they thought no one would share. A tribute to the information-sharing capability of the net.

78 bubbl.us
www.bubbl.us

Organise your thoughts by creating mindmaps online and sharing them with others.

79 Technorati
www.technorati.com

An intelligent, intuitive and inspiring way to read entries from some of the millions of blogs that dot the internet. You can browse by subject or area of interest, read the postings that are catching the world's attention and bookmark blogs that catch your attention. And if you want to join in…

80 Flickr
www.flickr.com

The website you graduate to once you've discovered how to put your holiday snaps on the net. Here, everyone's photos are linked by using tags, such as 'Spain', 'beach' or 'happy', which sets you off on an exploration of others' uploads.

81 BabyCentre
www.babycentre.co.uk

There are plenty of great parenting forums out there – Netmums, Mumsnet – but this is still the best source of considered, authoritative, often soothing advice on everything from colic to tax credits.

82 Friction TV
www.friction.tv

YouTube for debaters. Upload a short video about an issue close to your heart and others reply in kind or by text.

SHOPPING

83 GiftGen
www.giftgen.co.uk

Gift ideas for when you can't think what to buy someone. You enter their age, sex and interests and how much you want to pay and it scours the net for ideas.

84 eBay
www.ebay.co.uk

Online shopping for (nearly) everything you might want to buy. The original auction formula is still going strong, but plenty more features have been added since it began. Take a look at non-UK sites, such as ebay.fr and ebay.de, too, for bargains others may have missed. The layout is the same even if you don't speak the language.

85 Who What Wear Daily
www.whowhatweardaily.com

Fashion tips, advice and suggestions. Includes Ask a Stylist for those tricky co-ordination problems and a What Was She Wearing? inquiry service to help you track down your favourite celebrity's fashion choice.

86 Gumtree
www.gumtree.com

Unabashedly straightforward classified ads site, for everything from new homes to online romance.

87 AbeBooks
www.abebooks.co.uk

The Amazon of the second-hand book world. More than 13,500 booksellers selling 110 million books. If it's not here, it's not worth looking for.

88 Kelkoo
www.kelkoo.co.uk

There are plenty of price-comparison sites on the web, but this one seems to get it right more often than most. Type in what you want to buy and Kelkoo will come back with the cheapest prices it can find.

89 Endgadget
www.engadget.com

A (digital) finger on the pulse of the technology world. All the newest developments, discoveries, gadgets and toys – before they hit the shops.

90 Cork'd
www.corkd.com

Discover more about wine by reviewing what you've enjoyed and receiving tips and suggestions from others.

91 I Love Jeans
www.ilovejeans.com

Find the right jeans for your fit before you even leave home. A cheeky but revealing 'body type' guide takes you straight to the brand you should be trying. Search by style, body type or brand. Women only.

TRAVEL

92 Sky Scanner
www.skyscanner.net

Monitors prices and destinations for all the low-cost airlines so you just type in where you want to go and when to find the best deal.

93 The Man in Seat 61
www.seat61.com

Routes, tickets, tips and advice – the only guide you need to travelling by train from Britain to Europe and the rest of the world.

94 Walk It
www.walkit.com

Online pedestrian routefinder for London, Birmingham, Newcastle and Edinburgh that shows you the best route to walk from A to B. Includes calorie counter, CO2 savings and points of interest on the way. Other cities coming soon.

95 Transport for London Journey Planner
journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk

Indispensable and almost always spot-on guide to negotiating the capital's public transport system. You enter your starting point and destination and it gives you the best bus, tube, cycle and even boat routes to get you across town.

96 ViaMichelin
www.viamichelin.com

A hi-tech hark-back to the days of leisurely motoring. ViaMichelin gives you maps, routes and directions throughout Britain and continental Europe with added panache. The maps have a pleasant printed quality about them and, naturally enough, your route is accompanied by gastronomic highlights to be found along the way. There's also information about destinations.

97 Carbon Neutral
www.carbonneutral.com

Information on your carbon footprint and how to cut it down. Includes an online calculator to measure your effect on the world.

98 Expedia

www.expedia.com

Excellent all-round travel site. Use it for good prices on flights and holidays, but click on 'Destinations' for some well-researched and up-to-date travel guides.

99 SeatGuru
www.seatguru.com

Aircraft seating plans, showing you the prime seats, possible annoyances and seats you should avoid.

100 Airline Meals
www.airlinemeals.net

A consumer guide to what you can expect to eat on board. There are news and features from the airline catering world, but the best part is a gallery of photos of on-board meals sent in by passengers and listed by airline.

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How to make certain that your children hate you…

Posted on March 31, 2008 By admin 10 Comments on How to make certain that your children hate you…

More parents using txt language to make their child's name gr8

The mobile phone age: More parents are using text language in their children's names. It might not be every parent's idea of a “gr8” way to name a baby. But our growing habit of using text messages to communicate appears to be having an impact on what we call our children.

Abbreviated versions of traditional Christian names are appearing on birth certificates along with “original” ways of spelling which even include punctuation marks.Anne has been changed to An, Connor to Conna and Laura to Lora. There were reportedly six boys who were named Cam'ron instead of Cameron, and according to the online parenting club Bounty, one girl born last month was born Flicity.

And basic changes to spelling have led to numerous Samiuls (Samuel) and reports of 23 different versions of Isabelle or Isabella, ranging from Izzabella to Yzabel.

Some experts have warned that odd spellings bestow no favours on the child [Editor's note: well f'n duh!!]. Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at the University of California who has researched the impact of irregular names, found in that “less attractive characteristics were attributed to individuals with less conventionally spelled names”.

Professor Mehrabian said: “Unconventional spelling connoted less masculinity for men and less femininity for women [and] more anxiety and neuroticism were attributed to those with less common names.”

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that it was possible that new mothers and fathers had lost the ability to spell forenames. He added: “Some of it is genuine misspelling; some is parents looking for a unique way to spell a name and some is just carelessness.

“It makes life very difficult for teachers taking the register and completing forms.”

The new names continue the trend by parents who seek to be original over the naming of their children – although not always successfully. Last year a couple were told they would not be allowed to register their son's name as 4Real. [Editor's note: these people should be shot.]

Officials in New Zealand ruled that the use of a number made it inappropriate, and Pat and Sheena Wheaton had to opt for their second choice instead – Superman. [Editor's note – really, really shot. Many times.]

In this country, other bizarre choices officially registered have included Ikea for a girl as well as Moet for boy whose parents might have a soft spot for the champagne label. [Editor's note: Horsewhipped, then shot.]

The trend is thought to be inspired by the “original” names given by celebrity mothers such as Gwyneth Paltrow, who named her daughter Apple, and Jamie Oliver's wife Jools, who has daughters Daisy Boo and Poppy Honey. [Editor's note: Quartered, whipped, then shot.]

However a spokesman for Bounty said parents were putting a lot of thought into new names as a way of increasing their childrens' individuality. Pauline Kent said: “Some of these new and different names are a way for parents to give their children a unique identity.

“It is similar to the thinking that goes in to naming a new brand of product for example – something to make them stand out from the crowd.”

Others in recent registers have followed the example of the Beckhams who famously named their eldest son after the place where he was conceived. But while David and Victoria chose Brooklyn, children in Britain have been named after places such as Finchley in North London and the cathedral city of Ely in Cambridgeshire.

Both are male names. Other examples of unusually named boys registered in the past 12 months include Rocky, Rivers, Tudor and Red. As well as Ikea, recent girls' names have included Paprica, Caramel, Bambi, Fire-Lily, Skylark and Tame which apparently stands for The Apple of My Eye.

[Editor's note: Branded, drawn, quartered, whipped, shot and then burned, with the ashes thrown into the Thames.]

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I hate it when this happens

Posted on March 27, 2008 By admin

Spending an hour listening to two german interns talking about their student project in heavily accented english while sitting in direct sunlight in a generally warm room is not a good thing when you've hardly slept the night before. I kept nodding off and doing the whole head-bobbing thing. Uncool.

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True, how true.

Posted on March 27, 2008 By admin

But sometimes I wonder if I'm being too cynical about the whole mess…

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Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you the Bobble Dance

Posted on March 26, 2008December 7, 2018 By admin

I've finally taken the time to get pictures and stuff off my camera and have a little fun with them. This is part of what was on my memory card:

https://www.flubu.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/Bobble-Dance-2BlETVq8Yko.mp4

Here's another bit:

This is what I have to deal with when I get to bed after being on the laptop for longer than Katy deems suitable.

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We've been very domestic recently

Posted on March 26, 2008 By admin 1 Comment on We've been very domestic recently

Been a while since I updated this thingie, but it doesn't mean that we've been idle. The Grogan elders were here over the long Easter weekend. We moved the office into the ex-guest bedroom and repainted the ex-office, which will become a nursery when needed. Katy's dad was a madman with a tin of gloss paint. He did the last of the baseboards and a few window frames here and there. It's amazing what a lick of paint can do to a room. I've given away about half of the books I had piling up in my old bookcase. Most of them I'll get in ebook format anyway. They're going to the British Heart Foundation – it's going to be our good deed for the year :)

I took the time this weekend to give the BBQ a good scrub down and get it ready for the summer. Hopefully, it'll see more action this summer than it did last year. It was weird though, running the BBQ on the only weekend it snowed so far since last year :) A very Canadian moment, hehe.

Monday saw us going to Ikea. We wanted to get two bookcases and another storage chest for the guest bedroom linen. Of course, this being us, nothing went to plan… The chest was out of stock – it was a long weekend after all – and there was no way in well we could get the bookcases into the car. We improvised a solution and got another model of bookcase, which we got setup today.

Katy and I had taken the day off today, mostly because we needed a day to recuperate after the weekend :P We spent part of the morning seting up a bookcase that had, in essence, half an inch of room to spare on either side. Why do we keep buying furniture that we need to dismantle before we move it? The office desk had to be broken down into about a half dozen pieces before it could even get out the door. The bookcase, if it needs to be moved, will require the desk to be moved. This will, of course, need to be broken down… again. Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!

I hate moving stuff – this just confirms it.

In other news, the cats have been in complete attention whore mode for the past two days. Tolstoy has been sleeping – splayed on his back – on the bed, under the bed, next to the bed or generally anywhere where there's a bit of heat while Reenie was been sleeping anywhere there's a willing lap. As I'm writing this, she's snoring on the back of the couch above my head…. A snoring cat. So cuuuuuuuuuuuute :)

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Take notes, this is how I want my funeral :)

Posted on March 18, 2008 By admin

Man hires stripper for dads funeral

A Taiwanese man hired an erotic dancer to perform at his 103-year-old fathers funeral. The stripper danced in front of Cai Jinlais coffin for more than ten minutes at the funeral in Taizhong town. Son, Cai Ruigong, paid her more than £80 to dance in memory of his late father.

Cai Ruigong says he promised his father a stripper for his funeral if he lived beyond the age of 100. Cai Jinlai passed away at the age of 103 after a three mile walk into town to vote. He was the oldest person in his village and had more than 100 descendants. His son said his father was famous locally for his interest in strip clubs: He would travel around the island with his friends to see these shows, he added.

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Sometimes, I love being a geek :)

Posted on March 15, 2008 By admin

We recently bought a new laptop. The old one was starting to show signs of age and it was time to put it out to pasture. The new shininess is a Dell Inspiron 1525. It came with Vista but since I refuse to have anything to do with that devil-spawned OS, I decided to go to the next level of geekdom and install linux.

It's been an experience.

First challenge is that this laptop is dual-core, so I decided to install the 64 bit distribution of SuSE. I have to say that, overall, I'm impressed. Linux still has a bit of work to do though because I don't see Joe User recompiling parts of the kernel to get network card drivers to work. But I did it. And I loved it :D

The shininess is now up and running and is almost as I want it. I still need to install a few more apps on it, but once that's done, I'll be in nerd heaven.

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gmail-notifier woes on x86_64

Posted on March 15, 2008 By admin

One of the things I miss in linux was the windows Gmail notifier. There is a linux version, written in Python, but it wasn't working in a 64 bit distribution. If you tried to run it out of the box, you would get the dreaded “wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32” exception, because the distributed shared object to create a tray icon was compiled in 32 bits. If you tried to grab another version compiled in 64 bits, you now got the “undefined symbol: Py_InitModule4” error, which was caused because some file headers were redefined and renamed to avoid conflicts (sic!) in 64 bits. I was going nuts at this point, because I am most certainly not a Python programmer. But I still managed to find a fix, before everybody else on the net, woohoo!

A simple cure in 3 easy steps

1. get package python-gnome2-extras
2. change a few lines in notify.py as described below:

#comment out the pytrayicon import and import egg and egg.trayicon
#import pytrayicon
import egg
import egg.trayicon

#change the way the tray object is built
#create the tray icon object
#self.tray = pytrayicon.TrayIcon(self.lang.get_string(21));
self.tray = egg.trayicon.TrayIcon(self.lang.get_string(21));

3. enjoy!

Works like a charm :D

This makes me go squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

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Tea – Is there anything it can't do?

Posted on March 14, 2008June 16, 2017 By admin

Cup of tea could cure anthrax

A new study by an international team of researchers from Cardiff University and University of Maryland has revealed how a cup of black tea could be the next line of defence in the threat of bio-terrorism.

According to the team of scientists led by Professor Les Baillie from the Welsh School of Pharmacy at Cardiff University and Doctor Theresa Gallagher, Biodefense Institute, part of the Medical Biotechnology Centre of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute in Baltimore, the humble cup of tea could well be an antidote to Bacillus anthracis, more commonly known as anthrax, a disease potentially lethal to humans and animals

As a nation, the British currently drink 165 million cups of tea, and the healing benefits of the nation's favourite beverage have long been acknowledged. But now the team has found that the widely-available English Breakfast tea has the potential to inhibit the activity of anthrax, as long as it is black tea.

Anthrax – a potentially fatal human disease – is caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. A very serious and rapidly progressing form of the disease occurs when bacterial spores are inhaled making anthrax a potent threat when used as a biological warfare agent.

Published in the March issue of the Society for Applied Microbiology's journal Microbiologist, Professor Baillie said: “Our research sought to determine if English Breakfast tea was more effective than a commercially available American medium roast coffee at killing anthrax. We found that special components in tea such as polyphenols have the ability to inhibit the activity of anthrax quite considerably.”

The study provides further evidence of the wide range of beneficial physiological and pharmalogical effects of this common household item. The research also shows that the addition of whole milk to a standard cup of tea completely inhibited its antibacterial activity against anthrax.

Professor Baillie continued: “I would suggest that in the event that we are faced with a potential bio-terror attack, individuals may want to forgo their dash of milk at least until the situation is under control.

“What's more, given the ability of tea to bring solace and steady the mind, and to inactivate Bacillus anthracis and its toxin, perhaps the Boston Tea Party was not such a good idea after all.”

Professor Les Baillie is Professor of Microbiology at Welsh School of Pharmacy. He is also Associate Professor, Director Biodefense Initiative, Medical Biotechnology Centre, University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute in Baltimore, and Adjunct Professor in the Microbiology and Immunology Department, University of Maryland at Baltimore.

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