• Jour­ney­man Leather Belts
  Nice belts, hand­made in Shetland.
• BNP Mem­bers List Leaked - Com­plete details of all British National Party Mem­bers here!
  One member, a man from Pinner, that the press haven't picked up on, whose notes are just a tri­fecta of fail: "Former police­man. Lec­turer in human rights/data protection."
• RPX: Instant OpenID and Data Porta­bil­ity
  Lets you farm out authen­ti­ca­tion, so users can use their exist­ing accounts on other ser­vices (Google, Yahoo!, Face­book, OpenID, etc.) to log in to your site.
• Iran­ian Blog­ger Could Face Death Sen­tence
  It's Hoder, who I know through MetaFilter.
• Radio Wallah
  "Click on the links below to see some fab­u­lous tran­sis­tor radios from the fifties."
• GREY GAR­DENS ONLINE INFOR­MA­TION DATA­BASE
• Mens Under­wear and Male Under­wear from Sun­spel
  Nice T-shirts. As worn by Char­lie Watts!
• groupr
  "groupr is a small web appli­ca­tion that groups photos in Flickr groups that you belong to into a series of web pages, so that you can easily look at them and see what's been added."
• Offi­cial Google Blog: Feed me! Google Alerts not just for email any­more
• Fix for Flick­er­ing Fullscreen Appli­ca­tion with Compiz | Tombuntu
• Type­Pad - Why Blog - Jour­nal­ist Bailout Pro­gram
  Send a link to your last pub­lished piece to SixA­part, and they'll give you a free Type­Pad account, and enrol you in their adver­tis­ing programme.
• A Tuto­r­ial on Hyper­fo­cus Tech­nique
  Thanks for the link Dad!
• Hyper­fo­cal Focus­ing Pho­tog­ra­phy Tips - Dig­i­tal Camera Tech­niques

This is likely to be of lim­ited inter­est to most read­ers, but the denim heads¹ will drool. Iron Heart have just released a new pair of jeans in a lim­ited edi­tion of one hun­dred: the Triple Works Hidden Rivet TWHR01.

A belt-​loop stitched to a waist­band, for extra strength.

Like the mighty Iron Heart IH-634S, they’re based on the 1955 Levi’s cut, though prob­a­bly not too closely, as Levi’s sued Iron Heart and other Japan­ese repro brands last year for trade­mark infringe­ment. Unlike the IH-634S, which is made of incred­i­bly hefty 21oz selvedge denim, the TWHR01 comes in a rel­a­tively light­weight 13oz selvedge, though it’s woven on the same 30” Riki-​Shokki—that’s Japan­ese for “power loom”—and from the same long-​fibre cotton.

Some more nerdy details:

• Goatskin leather patch
• Hidden rivets
• Donut buttons
• Button fly
• Selvedge detail­ing inside the watch pocket and the fly con­struc­tion of the jeans
• Two colour stitch­ing throughout
• Extra-​heavy twill pocket bags
• Half-​lined rear pockets
• Belt loops stitched into waist­band for extra strength

And if you order now, you can get an optional crotch rivet free of charge. Yes, you read that right, an optional crotch rivet!

1. Hello Roger! Hello Mike!↩

• BBC NEWS | Pol­i­tics | Shops may take ID card bio­met­rics
  ‘Supermarkets could be asked to take people’s fin­ger­prints as part of the government’s iden­tity card scheme.’ What. The. Fuck?
• Barack Obama: How He Did It
  Fas­ci­nat­ing, some­times gos­sipy behind-​the-​scenes look at the Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. The fact that the reporters ‘were granted year-​long access on the con­di­tion that none of their find­ings appear until after Elec­tion Day’ is pretty dubi­ous, though.
• Pod­cast Down­load­ing Con­firmed in iPhone Firmware 2.2 | TheAp­ple­Blog
  Cool. (For some reason I’ve got really into lis­ten­ing to pod­casts on my iPhone, though I never did on my iPod.)
• PdaNet — Use your iPhone as a Wire­less Router for your PC/Mac
  If there’s no offi­cial way of teth­er­ing in the next month, I’m going to have to jail­break my ‘phone for this.
• AT&T-sanctioned 3G teth­er­ing on the way for iPhone
  Fin­gers crossed O2 follows.

• wp-​Hyphenate 1.0 beta • KING­desk
  ‘Hyphen­ation is finally avail­able for the web.’ I just installed it, and it works very well.
• Twit­ter / Num­bersSta­tion
• Simon Pegg on why the undead should never be allowed to run
• From Silver Lake to Sui­cide: One Family’s Secret His­tory of the Jon­estown Mas­sacre - News - LA Weekly - LA Weekly
• The Croft
  Mike D.’s new weblog (at least I’m pretty sure it is!) about the Hebrides.
• Hand-​Knitted Luxury Aran Ice­landic Jersey ‘Odin’ from Scotweb Kilt & Tartan Store
  Very nice hand-​knitted wooly jumpers. Bit pricey, mind you.
• Clark­son joke sparks com­plaints
  Looks like funny jokes on the BBC will have to be banned.
• PyRoom — dis­trac­tion free writ­ing
  Write­Room clone. I think I’ll go with this one for the Eee PC.
• tex­troom - Google Code
  Write­Room clone. Has some inter­est­ing fea­tures, includ­ing set target word count, but fiddly to install.
• The Comics Reporter
  "Garry Trudeau has confirmed… that he has sub­mit­ted Doones­bury strips for next week that are based on Sen­a­tor Barack Obama win­ning the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion to be held on Tuesday."

• Word­Press › Blog » The Visual Design of 2.7
  Look­ing good.
• Shep­ard Tones
  "The "sonic barberpole" illu­sion invented by psy­chol­o­gist Roger Shep­ard at Bell Labs. The illu­sion con­sists of a seem­ingly end­lessly rising or falling set of tones. The trick is done by simul­ta­ne­ously sweep­ing eight (or so) pure tones (i.e., sine waves) tuned exactly one octave apart. The human ear/brain has a really hard time fig­ur­ing out which pure tone is the fun­da­men­tal, so it "slips" peri­od­i­cally, just like an eye watch­ing a bar­ber­pole (or look­ing at an Escher staircase)."
• Five Things You May not Know About Net­NewsWire: News­Ga­tor Widget Blog
  The screen­shots of old ver­sions are making me all nostalgic.
• Grif­fin Tech­nol­ogy: iTalk Sync
  Free audio recorder for iPhone. (It irri­tates me no end that a sep­a­rate Mac app is needed to sync files - it'll be the third such app I've installed, when I should be able to mount the iPhone on my desk­top and drag files off it.)
• Does Obama / McCain slash fic­tion exist?
  Of course it does.
• Conky - Home
  A Linux util­ity (equiv­a­lent to Geek­tool on the Mac) that puts info on your desk­top - uptime, net­work activ­ity, email noti­fi­ca­tions and what­not. A bit fiddly to con­fig­ure, but there are squil­lions of sample config files on the web.
• Mine­field
  An exper­i­men­tal new ver­sion of Fire­fox. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now, and it’s incred­i­bly fast. Stable too, sur­pris­ingly, and all my add-​ons work fine (thanks to Nightly Tester Tools).
• hildam​agazine.net
  An art magazine.

• Betavine - Betavine
  Vodafone’s R&D lab. Lots of inter­est­ing stuff, plus dri­vers for some of the oper­at­ing sys­tems Voda­fone don’t offi­cially support.
• Hands on with the Ubuntu Net­book Remix
  It’s kind of cool, but I dis­abled the spe­cial launcher thingy and auto­matic max­imis­ing of win­dows thingy after a day.
• Lit With­out Build­ings - The Apoc­ryphal Car­togra­phies of Car­roll and Borges : Life With­out Build­ings
• Linux.com :: Desk­top search com­par­i­son: Beagle vs. Tracker
  I went with Tracker.
• Art and Sports, Meet­ing on a Level Play­ing Field - wash​ing​ton​post.com
  No men­tion of Dou­glas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane film, weirdly.
• ScribeFire - Blog Editor
  Full-​featured weblog editor in the form of a Fire­fox add-​on.
• No Labels for the Olsen Twins, Unless It’s Their Own - NYTimes.com
• Bug #286465 in Ubuntu Eee: “Lots of wrong per­mis­sions or miss­ing setuid,setgid: /dev/fuse, unix_chkpwd, passwd, mount, ping, …”
  Pretty much every­thing you try to do on Ubuntu Eee (maybe stan­dard Ubuntu too?) is stymied by fucked per­mis­sions, or weirdly restric­tive per­mis­sions. I’m bored of typing sudo all the time, and I’m nowhere near Linuxy enough to know what per­mis­sions things are sup­posed to have.
• Custom Compiz Effects in Ubuntu 8.04 | Tombuntu
  Compiz works just fine on the Eee 701 with 1GB of RAM, which really sur­prised me. You do have to install this set­tings man­ager to turn off a lot of daft stuff - what’s the point of wobbly win­dows? - but the fancy work­space switch­ing is both pretty and useful.
• Many Tricks · Witch
  I used this window switcher for yonks, then forgot about it for some reason. Reinstalled.
• Essen­tials, 2008 edi­tion [dive into mark]
  Mark's fave apps and tools on Linux. GNOME Do, a Quicksilver-​equivalent for Linux is really good.
• Like, Social­ism: Com­ment: The New Yorker
  Sarah Palin redis­trib­utes the crikey out of wealth in Alaska, but Obama is the ‘socialist’? (Alaska has no income or sales tax, but taxes oil com­pa­nies so heav­ily they can give cit­i­zens $3k a year.)

• Poladroid project : the eas­i­est and fun­ni­est Polaroid Image Maker
• Ekow Eshun and the ICA’s death blow to live art | Stage | guardian.​co.uk
• Read­dle — iPhone book reader and file stor­age
  ‘A.I.Disk is an ele­gant solu­tion to access files on your MobileMe iDisk, save them to the iPhone or iPod Touch, read on the go and even email to friends.’ Def­i­nitely the best way to get files onto the iPhone and then email them, but it’s still com­pli­cated (and expen­sive) com­pared to just send­ing the file over Blue­tooth, which you can do with pretty much every other ‘phone in the world.
• reQall
  Inter­est­ing app that lets you record voice notes on your iPhone which are then tran­scribed to text files which are synced to the web app or Fire­fox extension/turned into reminder emails or text mes­sages. It’s Ever­note for audio rather than images, very roughly speaking.
• Net­NewsWire to Ever­note — Single Head­line or Tab Export Apple­script

If you use the clever Radio Pop ser­vice that BBC Radio Labs launched a little while ago, and you also use the Action Streams plugin for Mov­able Type¹, this might come in handy:

Radio Pop Action Streams Pro­file [36KB .zip archive]

As you’d expect, it’s a pro­file for Action Streams that will add the radio pro­grammes you ‘pop’ to your ‘lifestream’.

To install the pro­file, down­load and unzip the archive, edit the file ‘config.yaml’, replac­ing the word ‘Username’ with your own Radio Pop user­name, and upload config.yaml and radiopop.png to the right places on your server, eg.:

/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/radiopop/config.yaml

/web/public/mt-static/plugins/radiopop/radiopop.png

Then you’ll need to acti­vate the pro­file in the usual way, by log­ging into Mov­able Type, nav­i­gat­ing to the Other Pro­files sec­tion, click­ing ‘Add Profile’ and choos­ing ‘Radio Pop’ from the drop-​down menu.

To get the little Radio Pop logo to show up in your lifestream, you’ll need to edit your Action Streams CSS file. Assum­ing you’re using the default tem­plates that ship with the plugin, adding a dec­la­ra­tion like this should do it:

    .service-radiopop {
        background-image: url(http://yourwebsite.com/mt-static/plugins/radiopop/images/radiopop.png);
        }
    

If you’d like the pro­file to track every­thing you listen to via Radio Pop, rather than just the pro­grammes you pop, change line 25 of config.yaml from

url: 'http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/Username/pops.rss'

to

url: 'http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/Username/listens.rss'

All this messy edit­ing busi­ness isn’t ideal, but I couldn’t work out how to get the pro­file to ask for your Radio Pop user­name when you acti­vate it, then con­fig­ure itself accord­ingly. If I do get around to making a clev­erer ver­sion, I’ll update this page straight away.

And, just in case anyone is won­der­ing what on earth I’ve been wit­ter­ing about, here’s what hap­pens on my home­page when I pop a programme:

1. To be honest, it’s pretty likely that I’m the only person in the whole wide world who uses both Radio Pop and Action Streams, but I thought I’d make the files avail­able on the offchance I’m not alone!↩