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Cape weather, 22 Feb

Today: 17-23 °C, 60% rain.

Thu		17-24 °C
	Sunny
Fri		17-26 °C
	Sunny
Sat		17-27 °C
	Sunny
Sun		18-26 °C
	Sunny
Mon		18-28 °C
	Sunny
Tue		17-24 °C, 20% rain
	Partly cloudy
Wed		16-22 °C
	Sunny
Thu		16-26 °C
	Sunny
Fri		17-27 °C
	Sunny

Jun
13 Laser is produced by a living cell. The technique starts by engineering a cell that can produce a light-emitting protein that was first obtained from glowing jellyfish. »

May
29 Cleaning Up Radioactive Mess with Blue Goo. A clever technology is helping crews in Japan contain and clean up the contamination caused by the ongoing nuclear disaster there: a blue liquid that hardens into a gel that peels off of surfaces, taking microscopic particles like radiation and other contaminants with it. »

May
27 The Art of the Animated GIF. Animated GIFs are like the jazz of the internet: they could only exist, and be created and appreciated, online. Photographer Jamie Beck and motion graphics artist Kevin Burg may have finally found a way to elevate the animated GIF to a level approaching fine art, with their "cinemagraphs" - elegant, subtly animated creations that are "something more than a photo but less than a video." »

May
27 Proof That Einstein Got It Right. Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that massive, spinning objects like Earth should warp space and time around them, as well as drag space and time along as they rotate - as a dipper twirling in a honeypot would spin honey. Francis Everitt talks about how NASA's Gravity Probe-B experiment has just confirmed both predictions. »

May
27 USB-stick PC could sell for £15. A miniaturised computer could sell for as little as £15 when it is launched next year by veteran computer games developer David Braben. The device, produced by a new group called Raspberry Pi, is approximately the size of a USB memory stick. »

Apr
30 Ultrafast fibre optics set new speed record. Two separate research groups have just set a world record by sending more than 100 terabits of information per second through a single optical fibre. That's enough to deliver three solid months of HD video- or the contents of 250 double-sided Blu-ray discs. »

Apr
23 Dutch To Build Solar Panels Into Their Roads. The Dutch are well known for their ubiquitous bike lanes, to the point where Amsterdam is neck and neck with Copenhagen for the title of most bike-loving capital in Europe. Now, Denmark will have to come up with something big to match the latest plan from the Netherlands - the installation of solar panels in roads, starting with bike lanes. »

Apr
23 Rumor that "God Particle" Has Been Detected. A rumor is floating around the physics community that the world's largest atom smasher may have detected a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle." »

Apr
23 Lasers May Replace Spark Plugs. The spark plug's days are numbered though thanks to a new breakthrough from some scientists that have found a way to replace the spark with a laser inside the internal combustion engine. According to researchers, the move to lasers from spark plugs will allow cleaner and more efficient vehicles and with the looming increases in mandated fuel economy, the auto industry will need all the help it can get. »

Essential software

My software setup, documented once and for all, and ready to go for the next Windows reinstall. Organised eh? You may find some cool and lesser known software here, feel free to scan down the list.

System

Windows XP Pro Linux Shminux. I like my Windows desktop.

7-Zip Spartan, to say the least, but this open source compression utility handles all common formats. The 7zip format is comparable to RAR.

AVG Free Robust antivirus protection, free for personal use.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Detects and removes spyware. If you stick to this list and avoid that deplorable Microsoft browser you won't really need it :)

Atomic Clock Sync Keep your fickle PC clock under control. This is a lot more reliable than the Windows built-in time synchroniser. Update: looks like this app is no longer supported.... Another approach that works OK is to set Windows time synch to run a whole lot more regularly. Run regedit.exe from the Start menu and navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ W32Time \ TimeProviders \ NtpClient]. In there, find the value called "SpecialPollInterval", or create it if needed. Its data type is REG_DWORD (DWORD value) and it denotes the seconds between Windows time synch attempts. A decimal value of 21600 gives you 4 synch attempts a day. Double click on the time on the system tray, and choose "Internet Time" on the properties window that appears. Auto synchronisation must be turned on, and I use time.nist.gov because it's not Microsoft :).

Firefox The best browser. For mindblowing privacy improvement/spam relief, throw in the adblock plugin which you can find among the addons pages of the mozilla site. It shows you what page elements you can block, you pick the offending bits, and before you know it you are completely rid of all flash popups and ads.

By adding three filters I completely cleaned up allmusic.com - bloated javascript, adverts and that infernal flash banner all gone. The best part is that the site is functionally identical - and obviously much faster.

Thunderbird The best email client. Really. I have Outlook at work and it sucks in comparison. The only annoying thing, and this is where Microsoft has a firm grasp on our collective 'nads, is meeting requests. I say a mantra every night in the hope that Thunderbird will support meeting requests.

Development

Java SDK Write once, run anywhere. Mind you, C runs anywhere and you get to learn obscure terms like "dangling pointers".

Tomcat Check your web pages against the reference implementation.

JAD Recover lost Java code from compiled bytecode.

Artistic Style C, C++ and Java reformatter.

UltraEdit Best editor, and it replaces notepad too.

Paint Shop Pro For tweaking those web images like a pro.

Firebird Lovely li'l database for all purposes.

IB Expert Indispensible for Firebird admin - free for personal use.

pgAdmin III PostgreSQL admin tool.

CVS Horrible but very pervasive source control standard.

VNC Drive the slaves from your desktop.

MS Visual Studio Love it, loathe it, you wanna write Windows software you use this puppy. Why oh why did they kill my Visual Basic? R.I.P.

General Use

GnuPG At some stage or other one needs real encryption, this is it.

PuTTY Telnet client.

WinSCP FTP Client.

Miranda One IM client that does MSN, ICQ, Jabber and a whole lot more. Small, uses little memory. The uninspiring default icons can be spruced up with the amicons icon set. One weakness of the current version is its poor way of handling new messages; you can squint to see the system tray blinking or have a new chat window pounce on you - stealing your typing from whatever app you were using. After some frustrating to-and-froing with status plugins, I found PopUp Plus combined with NewGenerationEventNotify and Contacts Status Notification to be a good solution for me.

Foxit PDF Reader Stop press! Here is a completely free Acrobat Reader replacement. It's much smaller, much faster and it consists of an all-inclusive .exe file that is about 1/20 the size of the "real" reader. Put it anywhere, like an old school utility, and run. A cute but slightly bizarre feature is the option to show the same crappy upgrade nag button as the real Acrobat Reader in the menu bar.

Forte Agent On the few occasions I do use the now almost defunct usenet, this dated looking reader still works better for me than anything else I've tried. Check out yProxy for transparent yEnc decoding.

Microsoft Office Grudging choice, the one way to read Word documents. Open Office just does not do it.

Music

EAC/LAME (from UberNet) The only way to archive audio CDs. Follow the link to UberStandard for the latest links.

Burrrn Make CDs from archived audio.

foobar2000 Advanced audio player for the tech savvy. Use the special installer and add continuator and scheduler plugins for extra flava.

Tag&Rename Correct tags in audio to enhance the display and functionality of your player.