• Welsh IT - www.welshit.co.uk
• Speed of Art - www.speedofart.com
• Morrison & Foerster - mofo.com (sounds like a good law firm to work in, more of a selling point to me!)
• Therapist Finder - www.therapistfinder.com (is this therapy?)
• Auctions Hit - www.auctionshit.com (Ebay competitor, lack of confidence there)

Only problem on my system is that the iPlayer does not like staying fullscreened on one monitor if I need to use the other screen (same issue with all other flash viewers it seems). Next best alternative is to view the video in the pop-out window; unfortunately, the window is rather small. Rather than try to fix the fullscreen issue, I found that adjusting the flash object dimensions manually did the trick. This does get rather tedious, but luckily, I have Greasemonkey installed.

Writing this was quite straightforward: this is a simple script which resizes the pop-out window to a nice size (HD-ready view of 1280×720), and allows you to resize the player by resizing the window (big criticism of the default behaviour).The bulk of the code is along these lines:


player.width = 1280;
player.height = 834;    // 720 + 114px of iPlayer chrome
resizeToPlayer(player);    //window.resizeTo(1286,916)
window.addEventListener('resize', function() { resizeToWindow(player); }, true);


Install Greasemonkey if not already (Firefox only), and install this script from the userscripts.org page.

Sticky notes: http://vimeo.com/1700732

New homes in England are smaller than those in Europe (I’d like them to compare these to housing in Hong Kong / Japan though!)

If you’ve not seen this yet - animal battle at Kruger between some lions, buffalo and crocodiles!

Lactose Intolerance by groups - the text after the chart is particularly interesting regarding children’s tolerances. Whilst as babies they can consume milk happily, apparently 85% of Chinese & Japanese children will have lactose intolerance by the age of 10, though most could consume 200ml of milk with no issues. Also for more in-depth reading - The Norm amongst the world’s people.

Rickroll’ed! Antispore (if you’re angry after reading that site, you might want to find out what rickrolling is!)

Now, experience points that to some large dodgy query or two (or a lot of them) causing issues. Anyway, to cut to the chase, I find out one particular site’s database has 15 locked tables, with the process list showing queries into phpbb_ tables… hmm

I wish I took a screenshot of the forum before I nuked the directory and the related database tables, which incidently was a rather old PHPBB board, heavily spammed with thousands of pages of topics with all your usual penis enl4rg3ment sexy girl cam wording. The mysql process list query reveals many search indexing queries (thanks to the spambots) - the tables responsible for searches alone are at least a gigabyte in size! No wonder why the server decided to jam up and play dead, whilst spam bots play ping pong guitar with this mouldy growth of a rotten board…

Moral of this story? Prune your garden, or expect large weeds to appear!

(incidently, I’ve seen what looked like a mini-garden forest on someone’s plate of what looks like months-old of baked beans. Such fuzzy greenness. In a student house.)

• Gridlock economy - how too much use (or individual control) over a resource stifles progression (in the sense of innovation, money and mutually beneficial rewards). The speaker, Michael Heller, calls this the ‘tragedy of the anti-commons‘. This reminds me of an issue a friend’s extended family is having with a land deed in his village in Hong Kong: a patch of land is to be subdivided between the surviving descendants; however one of the families involved is disputing the process, and as the law requires all parties involved to agree, no one benefits from any land at all. I will probably buy the book.
• The dramatic effect of a firm nudge (FT.com) - why subtle encouragement is a win-win approach to social issues, rather than resorting to harsh slaps and bans.
• Red One: Ultra Hi-Def camcorder (via wired). Check out the video in that article. Look at the other videos in the play list. Marvel at the details that you would normally get from a 12 megapixel DSLR camera, but played back at 24fps. Beautiful.
• Segway inventor Dean Kamen with his water-purifying machine on the Colbert Report (via wired). A machine that can filter water out of any dodgy water source! That will be pretty useful if London’s desalination plant doesn’t hold up…
• Finally, the new Jquery website design. And wow, the rock star image didn’t last long did it? I thought it was a very bold step, but too bold for some it seems!

No idea on how much the x27 will cost, but I’d be pretty interested in it if it can come with a second ethernet port!

(More info from Smartplanet)

Even you, the lactose-intolerant individuals.

Delicious organic probiotic yogurt

It is a wonderfood, low-fat, and has a nice supply of calcium for those bones. Ignore the common shelf super-sweetened yogurt packs - you’d be surprised at how much sugar is added. Use honey - the good stuff - to further combine wholesome nature smooth goodness which your body will thank you for.

Ok, says the lactose-intolerant individual, how does yogurt help me - it has lactose! Funnily enough, the same bacteria which make yogurt yogurt actually help digest lactose; some of them produce the required enzyme lacking for lactose digestion. As a further bonus in just about most people, they aid digestion. Some manufacturers go further and add even more cultures in, though beware of the duff labels which claim to offer such greatness (the food agencies will have spanked some of them for misleading advertisement by now).

It’s interesting to note that several decades ago, any kind of bacteria is bbad m’kay? however, as with what’s happened with the perception of FAT and many other aspects of nutrition, it has been shown that a number of types are beneficial for you, if not essential. They help your digestive system run smoothly, help fend off gut  diseases, and there are even claims of reducing the chance of cancer! Not withstanding the lack of full scientific backup of this claim right now, anything that reduces the incident of cancer must be good right?

Anyway, my point is, go get some now! and get some honey to go with it if you prefer it sweet! To get you started, here’s what I eat at breakfast for a good low-GI start in the day:

• portion of Muesli
• Probiotic yogurt (enough to more than cover the muesli)
• teaspoon of Honey

Stir the lot together in a bowl, eat it.

(BTW if Martin is reading this - you should eat yogurt. It really helps, I promise! Mix it with your hemp protein stuff)