Status-Q

Due to a slight linguistic error, Scottish fire services are encouraging people to escape from burning buildings on a donkey.

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Tired of discovering little bits of lead shot in your roast partridge? You need Season Shot:

Season Shot is made of tightly packed seasoning bound by a fully biodegradable food product. The seasoning is actually injected into the bird on impact seasoning the meat from the inside out. When the bird is cooked the seasoning pellets melt into the meat spreading the flavor to the entire bird.

I’m wondering what would have sufficient density to work as shot and yet still be edible…

As of about now, my old company, Newnham Research, has a new name. Welcome, DisplayLink!

Newnham is the part of Cambridge where the company started, but it’s one of those names which I only really intended to be temporary. That was three and a half years ago! Unfortunately, though, it proved somewhat non-intuitive for anybody outside the UK to pronounce or spell, so the change has been planned for some time.

DisplayLink is a much better name for what they’re doing now, and it sounds like an industry standard, which is what they’re going to become. I like it.

The London Tube map, created by Harry Beck in 1933, is considered a design classic and, for us Brits at least, is so iconic that maps representing reality look weird and distorted, and so are strangely fascinating.

More maps on this Wikipedia page, and there’s even an interactive animation on the Transport for London site.

Thanks to Tom Coates for the initial links for both this and the previous post.

There’s some fun lapsed-time stuff on YouTube:

What do user-interface designers do to indicate function when everything becomes a button? I saw this on a train recently:

I like the little icon. But for how many more generations will it be meaningful? And what will the little picture show after that? The mind boggles…

For a few years now, the majority of computers sold have been laptops. It’s not surprising; I’m not sure what I’d do without mine.

But one downside is that laptop-sized hard disks are much less robust than their desktop equivalents. The manufacturers often quote an expected life of just a small number of years. And as more and more people are storing very valuable data – like the family photos – on these little devices, the potential for heartbreak is getting ever larger.

This is why I always have at least two complete recent backups on external hard disks, and why I make sure that they’re full-size desktop drives. I don’t carry them around with me, either, which probably increases their lifespan dramatically! If you’re a Mac user, treat yourself to a copy of the excellent SuperDuper software and £100-worth of external firewire hard disk, and you won’t regret it.

But if all else fails and you have a failing laptop disk and you really need to get your data off it, you might be able to help it along with a little reorientation…

I’ve mentioned Pater Callesen’s work before. But his site is well worth revisiting from time to time. If you find yourself feeding A4 paper into your printer or copier or fax today, just think about what else you could be doing with it…