And on a lighter note...

With all this news of doom, gloom and economic boom we need a bit of satire.

Twitbin

I have been scathing about Twitter in the past on other blogs, wondering exactly what it was for. It's continued popularity however has led me to give it another try, however this time i am coming armed with... a Firefox plug-in. I wondered if there was a plug-in to allow me to write to my Twitter account directly from FF without having to go to the site, login and all that jazz. Of course there are several. The one i am giving a go to is Twitbin.

It works quite nicely, adding a collapsible sidebar to Firefox and easily allowing you to post to your Twitter feed and see what else is happening on your feed. It actually makes updating your Twitter account quite painless and fast so maybe i will finally use it...

I have also added a Twitter badge to my static homepage (which is basically a portal into my blogs) but the ridiculous caching on the ISP server means i can't actually see if it works (it did work offline so i assume it is OK).

Real-time ship tracker

Now this is rather cool, a real time tracker of civilian ships using Automatic Identification System (AIS). Unfortunately not all areas of the globe are covered but those that are are very interesting, especially choke points like the Strait of Gilbraltar where you can see a real traffic jam of ships.

D9 50th Anniversary running day at the Aston Manor Transport Museum

One of my favourite places to visit is the Aston Manor Transport Museum as old buses are one of my interests, well old buses from the late 1960s to late 1980s anyway. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the BMMO D9 bus as used by Midland Red they held a special running day with some D9s and also Routemasters plus some other buses. I took a trip on a Routemaster and a D9. Bus travel is always a joy in times like this, maybe its because there arn't any awful kids on board who wish you to enjoy their music collection.





The full set of pictures are here, i'm impressed all 62 photos turned out reasonably well even though the camera's battery was in the red.

Neo-Amish

An interesting article on how some of computing's high priests like Richard Stallman and Donald Knuth actively avoid being online as much as they can, which Kevin Kelly has called "Neo-Amish". I can understand their point of view, being always online seems to breed an anxiety and paranoia especially if you get no messages. And many newer methods of communication like Twitter seem to just exist for the sake of it not for any real perceived benefit.

Thats why i stopped using Twitter anyway, i could no longer see the point. Recently i have also changed how i blog a bit, in the past i used to try and post to all of my blogs at least once a day but no longer. However i do get anxious if a blog hasn't been added to for a few days, but now i am trying to ignore it.

I bought a new watch

After about 6 years and 4 straps i decided it was finally time to replace my venerable Casio F-91W watch... with the very different F105W (not quite the same as the illustration but close enough). Really to me this is the best watch of all, it does everything you want, keeps the time, lasts for years and is very cheap. Why would anyone get any other kind of watch?

Apparently analogue watches are the vogue now, i can never understand that to be honest. I need to know it is 14:22 and 24 seconds. Maybe i am quite strange? Some say cheap Casio watches like this are not very stylish or elegant but i firmly believe form should follow function and thus the F-91W is a design classic.

US Navy hires kite-assisted ship

Earlier in the year i wrote an article on alternative propulsion methods for ships including kite-assisted propulsion where wind is used to pull a ship along using a computer optimised kite. Now MV Beluga SkySails has been hired by a rather notable customer, the US Navy's Military Sealift Command. The ship will carry military equipment from Europe to the USA. Considering the USN use a lot of ships and shift a lot of freight if the SkySails concept can reduce fuel costs by 20 to 30% as they claim then it could be a considerable fuel saving.