boakes.org

Imagine a scene in the not-too distant future… after a frenzied period of leaks, rumours, claims and counter-claims, interspersed with no-comments, denials, and increasingly reliable and suggestive evidence emerging from component and sub-assembly manufacturers, Apple Inc announce the imminent release of The Perfect Gadget.

The mainstream press attend press conferences and briefings where Apple proclaim that their Perfect Gadget does everything up to, and maybe even including, ordering sliced bread from the online grocer at the precise thickness that it knows you will prefer (a fact derived from a semantic analyses of how you use said gadget).

Socially driven news sites will go utterly berserk.

So how long must we wait until Apple actually makes this announcement? Perhaps we’re only five or ten years away from The Perfect Gadget 1.0. More…

In the UK, the BBC has a radio channel that is predisposed to airing important current affairs featuring argumentative interviews with politicians insistent on not answering any questions and instead peddling their own distorted interpretation of reality - it’s called “Radio 4″. More…

I succumbed to peer pressure today and bought a Wii. It’s still in it’s box and it smells very new. The release of both Mariokart and Wii Fit was what tipped the scale. Wii numbers and mingling will no doubt follow.

The new BBC News website is a bit too tall. The Beeb have introduced an additional banner at the top of the page which is of very little use (other than cementing the BBC Brand across its sites) so I wrote a little greasemonkey script to remove both the banner and a few other bits of the site I find irrelevant. More…

One of our favourite TV Chefs (and surrogate conscience for Tesco) Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has just announced a Summer Food Fair at River Cottage HQ, this summer, naturally.

Now, normally the idea of a fair, replete with wicker cutlery and forced vegetables is not my idea of heaven, but factor in the fact that there will also be a multiple spit roast featuring goat, lamb and pig and you may begin to see the attraction. This is not just food: this is organic, free range, spit roasted meat, cooked by one of the countries best chefs, on a summers day, washed down with local scrumpy, and probably some local strawbs for dessert. What could be better?

River Cottage gigs often sell out fast, so this is well worth an early look! [Update: SOLD OUT!]

Something’s broken on the database that runs this site, specifically there’s b0rkage in the comment table, and the ssh daemon is not reachable. Perhaps it’s to do with the larger than normal amount of spam that’s been arriving today (for “larger than normal” read: one metric truckload). More info later after I’ve had a poke around. Film at 11. More…

I’m in the process of rewriting the Worst Offenders plugin for the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5. Before I make a tested and polished version of the code globally available, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’d like to alpha test it.

As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose is identifying and deleting the comments that are 100% definitely spam (sent by the very worst offenders) so that any “false positives” (sent by real genuine humans) can be rescued from the spam bin! More…

For the last few weeks I’ve been testing out some geo-tagging software on my camera. The concept is fairly simple, whenever I take a photo, the built-in GPS works out where I am and records this metadata within the photo. More…

I couldn’t help but marvel at the efficiency of our local station café recently, as I watched the staff pipeline their customer orders. The busy morning rush was so great that they’d streamlined the operations; one person greeted customers, took orders from several of us at once, and processed the payments. This freed the second member of staff to focus on juggling the coffee and tea machines: getting the maximum throughput from the two staff, and the machines. More…