• Sellthingslocally - the local way to buy and sell things in a 'save the planet type of way'
  Buying and selling items locally in the Richmond area of London, UK
  (tags: buying selling local community)

• The Warning Signs, A Pop Quiz on Quality
  A lengthy but practical discourse on quality - or more commonly the lack thereof.
  (tags: quality software engineering qa)

• TheBrain.com - home of PersonalBrain
  Like mind mapping but not constrained to be hierarchical. Ideas can be entered and freely linked to others with a very slick interface. All written in Java so works nicely on all platforms.
  (tags: java mindmapping visualization tool productivity brain)

• Second Life keyboard shortcuts
  (tags: SecondLife keyboard shortcuts)

• 100 wonderful photo effects
  Photoshop tutorials - the sort of reference for inept photo editors like me :-)
  (tags: design photography photoshop tutorial)

• Quotes from Sherlock Holmes - THE WHOLE ART OF DETECTION
  (tags: sherlock holmes detection crime analysis quotes)

• reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books
  CAPTCHA with a twist. Books that have been scanned have many words that cannot be read. reCAPTCHA presents those words for humans to decode. Very neat.
  (tags: captcha spam tools ocr)

• The Autumn of the Multitaskers
  Fascinating article around issues with multi-tasking. The comments on "Adaptive Executive Control" were particularly ironic given that there were far more important things for me to be doing than reading the article.
  (tags: cognition multitasking productivity psychology lifehacks)

I knew there was a good reason for ordering a Brompton with a rack ... Just nipped down to our local Pizza Express for a Sunday afternoon treat for the family. Guess what, pizza boxes work better when kept flat. Ordered by phone, cycled down the road, rolled the bike in - no locks required - loaded up and home!

Pizzas were good too

The mystery of the recent spate of RCD trips and strange scratching sounds from the loft appears to be solved if not resolved. I unscrewed a panel and found a nest made out of roofing and loft materials. I also found a severely nibbled cable - whatever it is has sharp teeth.

The obvious cause is mice or squirrels, I'm not sure which. I toyed with the idea of disabling the RCD but decided that was a little reckless

Having discounted electrocuting them and borrowing a passing cat to post down the eaves we're trying what is politely called rodenticide. If anyone has any other tips I'd welcome them.

More pictures here:

I'm indebted to Alec Muffett as a commment on his "How Ethical Are You ?" blog entry lead me to a fascinating article in the New York Times entitled "The Moral Instinct".

Steven Pinker examines the basis of our moral instincts at some length and with great insight. Well worth a read.

Talking of ethics with Alec I briefly mentioned Lost in the Cosmos which, while being a parody of self-help books, asks searching questions. I read it many years ago now but am often reminded of it when pondering moral issues.

One of the ideas presented by Steven Pinker is that of "Reasoning" versus "Rationalizing" - the former leads us to a conclusion, the latter starts at the conclusion and works the other way. He also writes about the moral equivalent of optical illusions - questions that subvert our apparently rational moral senses.

Essential reading.

The excellent TED talks by Hans Rosling I mentioned previously had some dynamic and fascinating graphing of data related to world poverty and development. There's now a beta version of the tool on-line here:

• http://www.gapminder.org/world/

As a reminder, the original TED talks are here:

• Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world
• Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen

As much as an aide-memoir for me as anyone else ... as a licensed Kepner Tregoe Program(me) Leader I'm interested in what other problem solving methodologies there are out there. The classic open question being "what else?".

So far I've found two:

• TRIZ, see also Glenn Mazur's discussion on TRIZ
• Eight Disciplines, also known as 8D, 8-D Problem Solving, G8D or Global 8D

This doesn't include more quality orientated concepts like Six Sigma and the 'Five Whys'. All fascinating stuff.

The footnote to this is the controversial Wikipedia Kepner Tregoe article which I really ought to contribute to at some point.

Having watched Alec Muffett's talk on "IT Futurology and the Terabyte iPod" I had some random thoughts wandering about my mind awaiting some annealing process. Until that occurs, here they are in raw form ...

BBC Radio 4's "The Material World" had a feature which implied massive and permanent data:

• Yorick Wilks talked about the Companions project
• Nigel Shadbolt talked about the Memories for Life project

I was also struck by the iPod 'cloud' idea and how important it would be to have established standards to access the cloud. Also, would it be just one cloud? Bittorrent? Or GEROS? Or Web 3.0?

Currently much of my non-home directory objects are scattered about the Internet. I have blog entries in blogs.sun.com, photos in Photobox and Flickr, personal data in Facebook, etc etc. These all suffer to a greater or less extent to that 'what if' scenario of wanting your data back. If there were multiple clouds, could I migrate those objects from one cloud to another?

A long wished for dream-organiser for is me is something that allowed arbitrary links. Everything is an object and you can arbitrarily link them. That would be perfect with the cloud backend as my RSS blog object would simply list blog entry objects that themselves include other objects such as photos.

What use a home directory? Mostly preferences these days - could be another set of objects in the cloud of course.

Finally, two of the TED talks are about gapminder.org which writes software to mine the public databases for statistics related to world poverty, health and so on and then provide meaningful data. It set me wondering about the intersection (if any) between the iPod cloud or personal objects and large databases.

Check:

• Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world
• Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen

Can I resist mentioning the network is the computer? Apparently not

The Intel Metro is old news now but it struck me today just how much I want a Sun Ray version of this.

Jim Grisanzio's recent blog on Sun Ray laptops in Japan shows that Sun Ray laptops do exist, check Accutech for an actual product.

Just think of the potential battery life (no disk, no fans), the simplicity of flipping the lid open to immediately resume access the same session you can access from any Sun Ray on the network - all wrapped up in a sleek, low-profile, lightweight piece of design elegance.

Please, please, please.