Here are the entries for the International Nanohazard Symbol Competition. Sadly, the competition is closed, but my entry, given below, would certainly have won:
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Blog
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wordpress dates
I’m a bit peeved that even in WordPress 2.1, they haven’t fixed a very long-standing bug: all templates (especially the default one) should respect the user’s date format. It seems that moderators on the forums see this as a non-issue, and zealously close (or ignore, if such a passive thing can be done zealously) any discussion on the topic, as has happened here. I don’t need or want to edit PHP to make this work; it’s supposed to work.
Today’s date is 28 Jan 02007. I want you to see it that way. WordPress doesn’t.
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spring (!) cleaning
I’m upgrading Gallery right now, so many of my pictures will be unavailable for a bit. I suspect (but I hope not) that my old deep links into Gallery from the blog will be broken by the upgrade.
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excel: pasting only visible cells
Ever tried to paste a range of cells in Excel that included hidden cells, but you didn’t want the hidden stuff? This works: Now Who Told Excel To Paste That Data?
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snarky van graffiti
“if the sale of spray paint to minors was banned, I’d be dealing drugs and killing your kids. Now I’m an artist …”
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’tis a pity they’re major label…
Currently grooving to: The Aliens. Funky Betas plus Lone Pigeon outthereness equals happy ears. Songs in the key of Fife, indeed!
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now with super cow powers
Fink has ’em …
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ladies and gentlemen, I give you … the hula hoop sandwich!
You will need one bag of plain KP Hula Hoops, some plain bread (aka a square loaf), and some kind of butter-like substance. I used olive spread, as I’m watching my cholesterol (in this case, watching it shoot through the roof).
Arrange the Hula Hoops on the bread carefully.
Apply the top slice.
This is the important bit: squodge it down so the potato snacks can’t escape.
Eat, and enjoy.
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Kevin’s Bad Year
Listening to Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer? (which I very much think you should), it’s pretty clear that Kevin Barnes hasn’t been in a happy place recently.
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fauxlomo
Portpatrick, taken with a Fujifilm MX-1200 pretending to be a lomoFor probably no better reason beyond babbittry, I’ve always half-wanted a lomo. Half-wanted, that is, because of my previous experience with “Russian” photo gear (I’ve had a Lomo TLR, a Fed rangefinder, and a Pentacon six) and its legendary quality control. I’m also so done with film.
A while back, Donncha wrote about a GIMP Lomo Plugin. While it looked handy, the link to the code is now dead. You can find what I think is the same one here: http://flelay.free.fr/pool/lomo2.scm (or a local copy here if that link dies: lomo2.scm). Just pop it in your .gimp-2.2/scripts/ directory, and it’ll appear as a filter. The original author‘s comment on Donncha’s blog contains good settings: Vignetting softness=1, Contrast=30, Saturation=30, Double Vignetting=TRUE.I knew there was a reason I retrieved my old 1.3 megapixel Fujifilm MX-1200 from my parents’ house. And that reason is fauxlomo!
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prescient Upton
One of the baddies in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is a political henchman called Bush Harper. No further comment is required.
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this is me with my excited face on. Oh wait, no it’s not.
Tories announce $1.5-billion renewable energy plan. Which would have been nice if it hadn’t just been the old Liberal WPPI program (which the Tories cancelled) renamed, and claimed as a whole new thing. And there was highly qualified rejoicing.
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Unfair stood the wind for England
Given that the UK had some horrible wind storms this week, I wonder how the wind farms stood up?
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What Is The Wind Power – and why are they using my pictures?
What are my pictures doing here: http://www.thewindpower.net/103-windfarms-canada.php?
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failing to sail away
I just can’t get the B-part of Sail Away Ladies down, so the ladies will have to stay on land for now.
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All the printers I’ve ever owned …
- An ancient (even in 1985) Centronics serial dot-matrix printer that we never got working with the CPC464. The print head was driven along a rack, and when it hit the right margin, an idler gear was wedged in place, forcing the carriage to return. Crude, noisy but effective.
- Amstrad DMP-2000. Plasticky but remarkably good 9-pin printer. Had an open-loop ribbon that we used to re-ink with thick oily endorsing ink until the ribbons wore through.
- NEC Pinwriter P20. A potentially lovely 24-pin printer ruined by a design flaw. Print head pins would get caught in the ribbon, and snap off. It didn’t help that the dealer that sold it to me wouldn’t refund my money, and required gentle persuasion from a lawyer to do so.
- Kodak-Diconix 300 inkjet printer. I got this to review for Amiga Computing, and the dealer never wanted it back. It used HP ThinkJet print gear which used tiny cartridges that sucked ink like no tomorrow; you could hear the droplets hit the page.
- HP DeskJet 500. I got this for my MSc thesis. Approximately the shape of Torness nuclear power station (and only slightly smaller), last I heard it was still running.
- Canon BJ 200. A little mono inkjet printer that ran to 360dpi, or 720 if you had all the time in the world and an unlimited ink budget.
- Epson Stylus Colour. My first colour printer. It definitely couldn’t print photos very well.
- HP LaserJet II. Big, heavy, slow, and crackling with ozone, this was retired from Glasgow University. Made the lights dim when it started to print. Came with a clone PostScript cartridge that turned it into the world’s second-slowest PS printer. We did all our Canadian visa paperwork on it.
- Epson Stylus C80. This one could print photos tolerably well, but the cartridges dried out quickly, runing the quality and making it expensive to run.
- Okidata OL-410e PS. The world’s slowest PostScript printer. Sold by someone on tortech who should’ve known better (and bought by someone who also should’ve known better), this printer jams on every sheet fed into it due to a damaged paper path. Unusually, it uses an LED imaging system instead of laser xerography, and has a weird open-hopper toner system that makes transporting a part-used print cartridge a hazard.
- HP LaserJet 4M Plus. With its duplexer and extra paper tray it’s huge and heavy, but it still produces crisp pages after nearly 1,000,000 page impressions. I actually have two of these; one was bought for $99 refurbished, and the other (which doesn’t print nearly so well) was got on eBay for $45, including duplexer and 500-sheet tray. Combining the two (and judiciously adding a bunch of RAM) has given me a monster network printer which lets you know it’s running by dimming the lights from here to Etobicoke.
- IBM Wheelwriter typewriter/ daisywheel printer. I’ve only ever produced a couple of pages on this, but this is the ultimate letter-quality printer. It also sounds like someone slowly machine-gunning the neighbourhood, so mostly lives under wraps.
- HP PhotoSmart C5180. It’s a network photo printer/scanner that I bought yesterday. Really does print indistinguishably from photos, and prints direct from memory cards. When first installed, makes an amusing array of howls, boinks, squeals, beeps and sproings as it primes the print heads.
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close, but …
I walked past a store that had replaced its hot table lights with compact fluorescents. It’d certainly save energy, but I have my doubts about its effectiveness.
