Cool, CSS3 has a built in drop shadow feature for text! I had no idea.
Look, fanciness!
STOP!
Grammer time!
(No reason)
Cutty Sark
Silly Google Maps, historic ship is not chemists!
http://snurl.com/rg3j8
Stylus
So the stylus for my beloved Nintendo DS seems to have vanished into thin air, which is a little annoying. But even more annoying is buying a new one. Apparently if you want a new stylus, you also have to buy a case, “screen protector” (read: sticky back plastic), game cases and/or headphones (or “earbuds”, as most of the packs seem to call them. Does anyone call them that in real life?)
Eventually I managed to find one sans all the extras. Well, when I say one, I actually mean four. To quote Oscar Wilde:
To lose one DS stylus may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose 4? Seriously? What the hell is wrong with you?
Actually it’s not really four. Two are short styluses (styli?) for the DS Lite, and two are long styluses for the DSi. Of course this is even more illogical. I now have two DSi styluses which are almost useless as they don’t fit in the hole of my DS Lite.
To top it off, they come in absurdly large packaging, and it’s that damned plastic which I needed the help of my trusty swiss army knife to open.
Timelapse – Parker’s Piece, Cambridge
Yes, it’s rather rubbish, but this was my first timelapse, made impromptu while I led on the grass reading, to check if the technique worked. Made using CHDK on a Canon PowerShot A470 (a handheld) and put together using VirtualDub
Catching Twitter spam accounts
I just noticed something interesting on Twitter. One of the hot topics at the moment is “LinkedIn Reaches 45 Million Users”. But that’s getting shortened to “LinkedIn Reaches 45” in the sidebar trending topics list. Now, one of the tricks spammers seem to be using is taking text from there and adding their link. So searching for “LinkedIn Reaches 45” without “Million” should flush them out
New name, new theme
Ok, so creating a theme from scratch proved to be an awful lot harder than I expected it to be. Luckily I found Lime Radiance, which was almost exactly what I wanted except a bit too… well… lime! Anyway I changed the background and a few other things around, and I’m pretty happy with the result. What really helped was using xampp to run apache and mySQL locally on my computer, so I could install WordPress and test out themes and modifications much faster. That was a trick I probably wouldn’t have found if I hadn’t looked to design my own initially, so it was definitely worthwhile.
I might make a few minor changes yet, but this design is pretty much how I want it. :D
And the new name is the obvious pun, which I think was my original idea for the name. Then when I couldn’t get the domains I originally wanted, I ended up buying astick.net, planning to do “blog on a stick”, “wiki on a stick” etc. I guess I always preferred this name though.
Nebula
Been playing around with Photoshop recently. I made this following a great tutorial. Click for bigger.
Razorlight vs Rathergood
Too much coffee and not enough sleep caused me to make this… erm… thing. I blame Virgin Radio (as it was called back then) for playing “In The Morning” so much that it warped my brain. And of course rathergood.com for the pre-packaged insanity that is La La La Oo-hoo-hoo
Boxed Water
Whilst searching the net (for pictures of turbine blades, can you tell I’m a materials scientist? :), I came across this ridiculous piece of Greenwash. Yes, these people are seriously trying to sell their water as environmentally friendly because it comes in cartons rather than those nasty plastic bottles. Conveniently ignoring the fact that:
- The cartons come from a plant in Vancouver
- The water (tap water!) is put in at a plant in Minnesota
- The boxed water is then sold in Michigan …
- … where the cartons aren’t even recyclable! (Though plastic bottles are)
D’oh!