{ 2002.08.31 } Users of Alcatel USD ADSL modems and Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar): I recommend Antonio Strijdom's Getting onto BT Openworld with Mac OS X which covers the tricky process of updating the drivers, and even makes the new files available for download. Also simpler to follow than other instructions online. (You may have come here because I fixed Tom Coates' computer, hello!)

{ 08.30 } Most wonderful true story at Upsideclone today by Giles Turnbull: The old lady and the whelk. (It's about Whelk, the Upsideclown book, for context.)

{ } The purpose of Ellen Feiss is to flip out and kill people.

{ } The Syd Mead Project [via blackbeltjones]. Retro futurist paintings gallery, with nostalgic faded-photo-style palette.

{ } The Spring Desktop looks interesting. Your desktop is your canvas on which live representations of real things, like people and places. Each Object carries with it its own behaviour; the example on the front page is of an application displaying a 'Download Latest Version' method, another is of dragging a file to a person to AIM is to them. But the Spring Developers page is more interesting. A Spring Object is simply a folder with its behaviour contained within. And the actions will be based on existing standards and methods. It's at an early stage, but still -- one to watch.

{ } History is a struggle over who owns the identity abstraction, the Me-Proxy, it's a tug of war between people and corporations. My identity reference can be my email address, my TV, my eyes reading a book. How close is that proxy of me to me? Can it be taken away? Replicated, exchanged, bought and sold? Created? Broadcast to? Who controls access?

{ 08.29 } "We think there are ways to interface with the complex flows of electronic data that run through our cities so that they can be experienced as an enriching contrast to other, more 'earthly' phenomenon": Altavistas [via Play with the Machine]. Layers and layers of hypertexted data underlying Heathrow, London, and a hypothesised town of the future that takes this complex as its very foundation. Beautiful. Real-life slices through the dataverse.

{ } Software Engineering Issues for Uniquitous Computing. Read about the common features in the paper: Transparent interaction; Context-awareness; Automated capture [via Nooface, which is particularly good at the moment].

{ } The large crates you see on ships, that lorries and trains are designed around, are the fundamental unit of cargo shipping, and are relatively new. "Just as the Net and deregulated telephony spelled the death of distance for telecommunications, containers spelled the death of distance for manufacturing". This 1999 Wired article on the Port of Singapore tracks what they call The 20-Ton Packet, because if you think about it the transportation network is just a collection of pipes and routes shuttling standard containers round and round [reminded of this by Anil].

(I wrote an Upsideclown a while back about a London built around this kind of routing metaphor: Gifts, contracts, and whispers.)

{ 08.28 } The headline is promising: Viewers question reality TV. Could it be that a mere television programme is teaching humanity that we all have our own reality, that there is no absolute truth? Alas, no. Viewers still "look for 'moments of truth' that reveal a person's real nature", and thus betray their continuing belief in an underlying objective, independent universe.

{ 08.27 } The original Euro symbol was a mathematical construction, all measurements and curves. However, this posed a typographic problem: "Had the Eurocrats consulted a typeface expert, they would not have failed to learn the difference between a character's graph and its ductus. In a letter - and that's what the Euro sign is intended to be - its skeletal shape (graph) and actual form (ductus) are two different things".

There are some good quotes in Jürgen Siebert's article The Euro: From Logo to Letter. Here's another one: "Width, breadth of stroke and style are not elements of the A-ness of an A".

Micro-management of the symbol made it difficult to adopt -- how to make this sign have the same feel as another type, the correct shape, size, weight, contrast, serif? The highlight of the article is about 75% of the way down, a comparison of the newly designed Euro letter in context against uppercase numerals in nine different faces. The art of typography is to become invisible, and it's impressive seeing that evolution.

{ } Question: I seem to remember an article saying Google were going to start supporting searching on Dublin Core metatags. Can you remember anything about this or do you have a url? Please mail me if you do. Much appreciated.

{ 08.26 } If you use Mac OS X, you're comfortable mucking around with really dirty scripts, and you want to change your smtp server for Mail.app every time you change location, try autosmtp what I just wrote in a fit of utter geekness. Filthy, dirty script.

(Can I just point out that I would never be able to do anything like this on Windows or Mac OS Classic. But because Mac OS X and the unix underpinnings are so tightly bolted together, I can use Perl (which is easy, and I know from making websites) to bolt together all the bits I only slightly know, and still make my day-to-day gui existence easier. This is what an OS should be like.)

{ 08.25 } The 50 sexiest cartoon babes, with commentry [via Fark]. Redheads are a common theme, although the red hair being attached to a human body isn't.

{ } Mac OS X Hints is your best source for little known hacks and features.

Yes, I'm now running Mac OS X 10.2. And in bigger news, yesterday I finally lost my installing-an-OS-in-Starbucks virginity. I'm not a proud man.