Not only is it Contractor Day, it's also Monday, so you get to invoice an extra day and then spend it reading this stuff 
BTW: norrahe’s blog has a shiny new design, so why not celebrate with Chicken Liver and porcini paté
Happy invoicing!
- Exclusives and x-Heights Across the Multiverse - A blog looking at how newspapers are portrayed in film, from the Hill Valley Telegraph of Back to the Future to the Guardian’s starring role in The Bourne Identity: ”It seems as if Simon Ross has been sending off his copy to print without it passing under a sub-editor’s gaze. The Guardian’s style guide advocates using N-dashes in copy, rather than hyphens or the longer M-dash… But Simon Ross has put two hyphens next to each other as an ad-hoc N-dash. It’s not an uncommon practice in typing, but should definitely have been caught before printing.”
- Who Said… – Subtitle Search - After the other week’s The Simpsons subtitle search, here’s another example, this time for Doctor Who: ”You can search by word, phrase, stage direction-ness, subtitle colour or position, series, episode, or time within episode. Episodes in series 1 to 4 have a representative tag cloud, and search results have a line graph showing usage throughout the series. All subtitles on search results are clickable to go to that point in the full episode list of subtitles.” Matthew Somerville, who made this, is also responsible for a variety of useful tools like the train ticket splitter and the London Underground live map (
which seems to be broken at the moment, but hey, he does this stuff for free and it's cool when it's workingUPDATE: I tweeted him, and he's fixed it; "permissions problem after server upgrade").
- I bought some awful light bulbs so you don't have to - Matthew Garrett gets some cheap Internet-enabled lightbulbs: ”There was a telnet daemon running. I connected and got a login prompt. And then I typed admin as the username and admin as the password and got a root prompt. So, there's that… As long as you know the serial number of the device (which it tells you in response to a discovery packet, even if you're unauthenticated), you can use the cloud service to send arbitrary commands to the device (including the one that crashes the service). One of which involves the device then doing some kind of string parsing that doesn't appear to work that well. What could possibly go wrong?”
- Artists Covertly Scan Bust of Nefertiti and Release the Data for Free Online - "Last October, two artists entered the Neues Museum in Berlin, where they clandestinely scanned the bust of Queen Nefertiti, the state museum’s prized gem. Three months later, they released the collected 3D dataset online as a torrent, providing completely free access under public domain to the one object in the museum’s collection off-limits to photographers." If you don’t want to torrent it, there’s also a direct download at the project page: Nefertiti Hack
- Creepy Vintage Pictures of Clowns - HT to Alias for this collection of coulrophobics’ worst nightmares
- I dared two expert hackers to destroy my life. Here’s what happened. - "Several months ago, while I was typing a few e-mails at my dining room table, my laptop spoke to me. “You…look…bored,” it said in a robotic monotone, out of nowhere." Kevin Roose thought he was pretty security-conscious online until he invited these people to carry out penetration tests against him.
- The Great Moon Hoax - No, not NASA’s moon landings: ”Throughout the final week of August 1835, a long article appeared in serial form on the front page of the New York Sun… The article started by triumphantly listing a series of stunning astronomical breakthroughs the famous British astronomer, Sir John Herschel, had made "by means of a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle." Herschel, the article declared, had established a "new theory of cometary phenomena"; he had discovered planets in other solar systems; and he had "solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy." Then, almost as if it were an afterthought, the article revealed Herschel's final, stunning achievement. He had discovered life on the moon.” Needless to say, Herschel was completely unaware of this elaborate media hoax being perpetrated in his name.
- Ludger Sylbaris: The Man Who Survived The Apocalypse - "Deciding to make the most of a tropical evening, Ludger Sylbaris headed out for an evening of heavy drinking. By the next day he was the only remaining survivor after a volcano killed an estimated 40,000 people and reduced the entire town of Saint-Pierre to ash and rubble." Proof that being thrown in jail for drunkenness isn’t necessarily a bad thing
- The Forgotten Beatle- The Story of Jimmie Nicol - Did Paul McCartney die and get replaced with a lookalike? No, of course not; it’s a stupid idea. But in 1964, Ringo was hospitalised just before the Beatles started a world tour, and drummer Jimmie Nicol got the opportunity of a lifetime: ”In what must have been the most surreal day of Nicol’s life, he received a phone call to come down and audition, then upon arrival drummed through a handful of songs, after which he was immediately offered a gig with the most popular band in the world… within 24 hours of meeting with Epstein, Nicol was playing a set with the band in Copenhagen on June 4th in front of thousands of screaming fans.”
- Pets That Are Stuck But Pretending Everything Is Fine - Bless
BTW: norrahe’s blog has a shiny new design, so why not celebrate with Chicken Liver and porcini paté
Happy invoicing!
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