Genius Product Ideas #247

This genius business idea is free to anyone who wants it: someone really needs to make a little tool for cleaning out the headphone socket on the iPhone. As I carry mine around in my pocket typically without the headphones plugged in, I find I’m constantly having to use the end of a paperclip to remove all the fluff and lint and crap that somehow finds its way into the headphone jack. Given that Apple…

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Aussiefication

So last night we headed for the Sun Theatre in Yarraville to see Mark Watson reading some passages from his new book, parts of which happen to be set in Melbourne. One of the many things he spoke about was his affection for this city and his plans one day to move over here. In answer to some further probing on the specifics of his migration plans during the audience Q&A (I think he was…

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Oh Yeah, Comment Spam. I Forgot All About That…

One of the downsides to kicking off the blog again has been the return of the dreaded comment spam. Before I moved the blog over here, I was using my own custom blog system, which meant I could implement a very simple little trick to stop comment spam. Not quite a CAPTCHA in the true sense of the word, but good enough for my little insignificant blog: I simply added a field asking people to…

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46 People Like This…

I’m all for social network integration and everything, but I can’t help thinking that there might be some occasions when that Facebook “like” button isn’t actually an appropriate thing to have on a news story: Really, NME? 46 people “like” the fact that a former member of ELO was killed in a freak road accident? That’s just great. In other news, 295 people just love the fact that Charles Haddon jumped to his death at…

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Neither Here Nor There…

I was struck by a wave of nostalgia the other day, when my mid-afternoon-lull/boredom-alleviation strategy at work saw me tuning my iPhone to BBC 6 music, only to find Damon Albarn mid-way through a performance of his The Good, The Bad, And The Queen “concept album about modern life in London”, recorded at The Roundhouse in Camden in 2006. Ah. 2006. When I used to live just down the road. Suddenly I wasn’t sitting at…

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