Ruth gets chocolate from an international sweet shop in Birmingham. This Japanese pack seems to contain mock mushrooms with chocolate caps and biscuit stalks. I love the typography on the back of the package…

Some of the details appear to be telling a story (aimed at children?)

And the teacher figure appears in red on the back – I wonder if this is some kind of food labelling thing?

I rather like the teacher-cat, so I used the levels tool in GIMP to remove the colours and exported him (her?) as a GIF cartoon. I might add this as a logo to some of my worksheets to keep the atmosphere light. I can always use the Inkscape trace tool to tidy the edges up.

...that have solidified his believe that the PC industry needs to move away from just selling hardware and towards a service-based model that could be used to establish an educational infrastructure. “It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships,” he told me, something that mobile phone companies have been practicing for years.

Alan Kay on the Apple Tablet and its alleged included phone plan. I suppose a move from rent a pipe to pay per megabyte is inevitable. Via daringfireball.

Electricity costs less than 10p per kilowatt hour. You can charge quite a few laptop batteries for that, so I assume the notice was to do with health and safety, or encouraging people to move after their latte.

I see a lot of small odds and ends of space like this around the cities I visit. How do we use them to increase (positive) interactions, break down barriers, and increase social cohesion (or confront and resolve the differences)?

#! /bin/sh
curl  --basic --user "username:password"
        --data-ascii "status=`echo $@|tr ' ' '+'`"
          "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml" > /dev/null

Update of something I found from 2007, when twitter was using a different API by the look of it.

The curl command line should all be on one line, no line breaks. I’ve had to add line breaks here so the line does not disappear into the sidebar. The redirect to /dev/null simply suppresses the 20 lines of xml that are returned by twitter when the twit is received.

If I used the short version of the—user option to curl, and if I put up with the xml output, I could have a script that posts to twitter that I could tweet.

Click for a 1280 by 1024 desktop wallpaper image with a January 2010 calendar on it.

Can you guess where the postcard photo was taken from? I’ve been printing calendars. Back to work Monday, kicking off with the data handling module.

Jupiter is following the Moon at present, and this sight prompted me to dig up some of my old astronomical Web pages and spreadsheets. Below are some highlights. The Web site is available on this server in the kepler directory.

My Solstice spreadsheet based on Jean Meeus’ routines from his Astronomical Algorithms is predicting the instant of the winter solstice for 2009 within one minute of the USNO prediction. Not bad for a simple spreadsheet.

You can see how short the day is on the 21st by looking at a screen grab from my illustrative spreadsheet above. Click on the thumbnail to get the full resolution grab. You can download the spreadsheet in XLS (MS Excel) format. The Sun and Moon altitude spreadsheet will work in OpenOffice 3.1 but you can’t save in ODS format, if you do the graphic stops being hotlinked to the calculations.

I’ll try to sort that out!

             sun       c twi    n twi     a twi     moon
date        r    s   b    e    b    e    b    e     r    s
------------------------------------------------------------
20091216  0813 1554 0732 1635 0647 1720 0605 1801  0832 1535
20091217  0814 1554 0732 1635 0648 1720 0606 1802  0916 1637
20091218  0814 1554 0733 1636 0648 1720 0607 1802  0949 1746
20091219  0815 1555 0734 1636 0649 1721 0607 1802  1012 1856
20091220  0815 1555 0734 1636 0650 1721 0608 1803  1031 2007
20091221  0816 1556 0735 1637 0650 1722 0608 1803  1046 2117
20091222  0817 1556 0735 1637 0651 1722 0609 1804  1100 2226
20091223  0817 1557 0736 1638 0651 1723 0609 1804  1112 2336
20091224  0817 1557 0736 1639 0651 1723 0610 1805  1125 ----
20091225  0818 1558 0737 1639 0652 1724 0610 1806  1138 0047

You can calculate the sun rise and set times, the twilights and the times of moonrise using my javascript sunrise calculator. This javascript uses a slightly more robust algorithm than the trial and improvement system that Meeus uses, and so it will work closer to the Arctic Circle.

I still get a number of inquiries about my approximate astronomical positions web pages. They are hosted on bodmas, but there is a mirror that has slightly out of date pages on that has a higher Google rank!

“It is easy to turn the aquarium into fish soup, but it is more difficult to reverse the process”—Lech Walesa

Orvieto, Italy, November 6, 2009: In partnership with the OpenOffice.org community, WarMouse announced the release of the OpenOfficeMouse, the first multi-button application mouse designed for the world’s leading open-source office productivity suite. With a revolutionary and patented design featuring 18 buttons, an analog joystick, and support for as many as 52 key commands, the OpenOfficeMouse is intended to provide a faster and more efficient user interface for OpenOffice.org applications such as Writer and Calc than the conventional icons, pull-down menus, and hotkeys presently permit.

I have a 109 button mouse. Link via Daringfireball. Scroll down for scientific poster stuff.

The Gallery on the Green is a postcard gallery in a telephone box in Settle. The Upper Settle green is a small patch of grass in an older and quiet part of Settle, away from the market place.

When we visited, there was a range of small images on view, and a comments book. I can remember actually using the phone box when it had a working pay phone in the days when mobile phones needed separate battery packs. The red box looks reassuringly familiar. The crows seem to have decamped from the large plane tree, judging by the quiet and absence of ‘crow marks’ on the seat under the tree.