Just been inspired to renew etla.org for another 3 years.

I want one of these.

On autopilot?

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People have a strange and worrying tendency to admit to things they have not, in fact, done

South Korean clinic treats web addicts

Tweetage Wasteland: The Action Movie Blog Post

This post is pretty good, as in fact is the entire blog.

So at the moment I'm interested in large datasets. Trying to collect some interesting links to what's out there:

• theinfo.org: A site to discuss large data sets, although it seems quiet
• Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network
• UK govt data site
• The London Datastore
• Datawrangling: some datasets available on the web
• Ordnance Survey OpenData
• Wikipedia database dumps
• Project Gutenberg mirroring HOWTO
• Amazon Public data-sets
• data.gov
• USPS Address Information Systems products (okay, this is commercial)

There's obviously some duplication here in terms of sites linking to other sites, I'm highlighting stuff I thought was interesting. I'll probably update this post as I find new data that seems interesting.

A couple more interesting links on free public datasets:

• Free, Public Data Sets
• Hacker news discussion on previous link

Cabell de Marcellus

Is multi-tasking a myth? (BBC News article)

Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains

How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking

(Yes, I know I keep going on about this every 5 minutes to anyone who'll stand still long enough)

• xkcd have gone command line
• A&A drop that nasty legacy "IPv4" protocol
• Google launch new animal translation service
• Google Docs launch some new features
• Charlie Stross announces new literary direction
• More Charlie Stross news
• The iCade, a great new iPad accessory
• Google choose new name
• New video format from YouTube
• kernel.org move to australia
• Exciting new Starbucks offerings
• The true perspective on atheism
• New direction for PostgreSQL
• Apache Software Foundation sell to Oracle
• New use for Circle Line

More on the day as it develops.

My ISP have just started providing IPv6 Coffee. Excellent.

Modern procrastination

All must watch zefrank!

My Life Offline - interesting article, fits in well with my frequent anti-internet moods lately.

Rejecta Mathematica is a real open access online journal publishing only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences.

Someone's collection of links to online CS courses.

I don't remember exactly where I found it, I think Hacker News

I went to Brussels at the weekend!

I'm too lazy to write it up properly, but you can Look at the Photos.

In the Long Run We're All Mice

Chocolate cake in 5 minutes

The Underground History of American Education - looks like it could be interesting reading, although I don't have time to actually read it at the moment.

Stoooopid .... why the Google generation isn't as smart as it thinks

Disconnecting Distraction

Low cost laptop cheat sheet. Personally I like the look of the Asus 901, although it's a bit expensive. And not actually available yet.

(Sourced from Roger)

I found stickK in the Economist this week. It seems like an excellent idea - motivate yourself by contracting to pay out if you don't meet personal goals.

Thunderbird is leaving the mozilla project

A depressing article on the state of GCSE Physics courses

javi is a vi-clone written in pure javascript

I've created a separate running blog at A Story of Doom.

"Any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML"

Scribd - it's like youtube for text

• Novelist accidentally burns down office
• Multimedia Hipster PDA upgrade now available in more colours
• Boost AJAX performance using local storage
• Moving a 100 year old church

• retrofone - specialists in obsolete mobile phones. Tried to order a 7110 from them and my card was rejected, their contact email address bounced.
• thinkgeek retro phone handset
• Hulger retro handsets
• iwantoneofthose retro telephones
• Mayfair retro phone with buttons
• Dial Retro Telephones
• the home of vintage and rare mobile phones

Sign this petition to promote the use of Open Document Format within the UK government.

Threading is hard

How to Hire Guillaume Ports or, why the new Microsoft Open Office XML standard is impossible for anyone but Microsoft to implement.

via slashdot

I just found out about the amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. If I read it right, it's essentially rentable virtual machines, similar to the Sun Grid service.

At the moment, it's a beta, which appears to be full. If and when I get an account, I'll be trying it out, and possibly moving etla.org related stuff onto it.