Alan Bradburne

• Neat fonts – Discover Free fonts from all over the web
  (tags: fonts free typography design art font webdesign gallery)

The awesome Jeff Minter sums up the wonders of tea with regard to the British software industry rather nicely:

(Without tea there would be no Llamasoft, no coding and, indeed, no British software business at all. The lines of code flow out upon a river of tea; this marvellous substance lubricates and stimulates the synapses and helps them to fire in a manner conducive to the generation of practical and robust code. Tea begins and punctuates the day; whenever a moment's pause for thought is needed it is to the kettle that we turn, that humble appliance, ubiquitous in every British home, without which the wheels of industry would cease to turn. Many a cool idea or neat game embellishment began life in a head which had just recently taken a refreshing gulp of piping-hot PG).

Technorati Tags: Llamasoft, tea

• How to plan & book a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway
  Fun way to get to or from Japan.
  (tags: train travel russia japan china trans-siberia)

• Transparent Message
  interesting form message lib
  (tags: javascript ajax rails programming rubyonrails webdesign prototype webdev webapp design forms)

This is sad if it’s true. Lik-Sang, the finest importer of Asian gaming hardware and software have been forced to close due to Sony legal action. Sony’s reasons are total crap – they claim that it’s a safety problem – that the imported goods don’t meet EU safety standards. So this means that are happily selling unsafe goods to Asia? LOL.

Anyway, Sony, you’ve let me down big time with the PSP – I wanted to love it so much. The hardware is beautiful but the few games that are released are dull and overpriced. Well, except for Loco Roco, which rocks. I have still never managed to actually play an online game with PSP due to the total non-existence of good (well, any?!) multiplayer games, whereas online MarioKart DS and Tetris DS are awesome.

I should pick up a PS3 while I’m in Japan at the New Year and flog it on ebay. I was looking forward to Heavenly Sword, but I’ll just buy more Wii games instead.

Technorati Tags: liksang, ps3, PSP, sony

• DoubleCommand
  (tags: mac osx software keyboard apple macosx tools utilities)

• Full text search in Ruby on Rails 3 – ferret
  another full-text search for rails
  (tags: rails ruby rubyonrails search ferret webdev plugins plugin mysql)

Man, I'm psyched about reading the first installment of The Glass Books. Arrived this morning. It's great to see a book turned into an event, especially when they take care over the design like this. It looks good and feels good, just as books are meant to be. Review coming soon - chapter 2 is due next week so I'd better get reading!

Technorati Tags: book, dreameaters, glassbooks

Interesting read over at The Guardian about Omega-3 and it's (possible) effect on violent behavior. After reading Freakonomics, I'm always trying to think about the other possible reasons and effects and what is really going on here. But very interesting stuff all the same.

However, at the end of the article, they list a young offender's daily diet:

• Lunchtime: 4 or 5 cups of coffee with milk and 2½ heaped teaspoons of sugar
• Mid afternoon: 3 or 4 cups of coffee with milk and 2½ heaped sugars
• Tea: chips, egg, ketchup, 2 slices of white bread, 5 cups of tea or coffee with milk and sugar
• evening: 5 cups of tea or coffee with milk and sugar, 20 cigarettes, £2 worth of sweets, cakes and if money available 3 or 4 pints of beer.

Woah! If I drank almost 20 cups of coffee in a day (with 10 teaspoons of sugar) I'd be a fracking maniac. Forget about the implications of not-enough omega-3 fatty acids! My brain starts to get shaky and irritable and after 3 cups. 20?! Maybe they should just switch to decaf and see the effects of that :)

• err.the_blog.find_by_title(‘Parse XML with Hpricot’)
  (tags: rails ruby xml parser html plugin hpricot)
• Captchator – Captcha service for PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, ...
  (tags: authentication generator programming rails ruby service webdev captcha)
• Simply Recipes: Apple Chicken Quesadilla Recipe
  sounds tasty and really simple!
  (tags: cooking food recipe recipes chicken mexican quesadilla)
• Plugins – acts_as_google_account – Agile Web Development
  could be useful
  (tags: api authentication google plugin rails rubyonrails webdevelopment)

I know it’s totally unhealthy but I have a serious craving for a big fat IHOP breakfast. Damn, don’t know where that’s come from since I haven’t been there for what, 4 or 5 years?

However, I think opening IHOP in the UK would be the beginning of the end. Like the nation isn’t obese enough already…

Technorati Tags: food, pancakes

• JonDesign’s Smooth SlideShow Library v2.0
  very nice js slideshow
  (tags: javascript slideshow design gallery tools tool webdev webdesign moo code)
• BackupGem Manual
  neat ruby backup util
  (tags: ruby backup sysadmin rubygems tools administration admin tool utilities utility)

• auto-admin plugin – Trac
  (tags: rubyonrails ruby rails plugin admin)
• ActsAsVersioned in Ruby on Rails
  (tags: ruby rails rubyonrails plugin versioning plugins)
• Homo-Adminus Blog » Using Lighttpd, Mplayer/Mencoder and Flvtool2 to Implement Flash Video Streaming
  Free Flash Video Streaming
  (tags: linux lighttpd flash video streaming howto videos mplayer FLV)

• misprinted type 3.0_ art, design and type (1998-2005) Eduardo Recife
  grungefonts
  (tags: fonts design free typography font art type)

I love horror movies. Can't get enough of them. The gorier the better :)

DVX User, a film-makers forum is holding a short-film festival for sub 6-minute horror films, all made especially for the fest. Find 'em here:

http://www.edgenmusic.com/dvxuserhorrorfest/

The standard of these shorts is incredibly high. Really impressive. Quick plug for 'Halfway' by my buddy, Karl Holt. Bloody creepy.

We're reaching (have reached?) the point where the cost of making a great film is almost down to purely the cost of people's time. Consumer and semi-pro equipment is stupidly cheap and the possibilities offered by open source or cheap post-processing sound and visual editing software are amazing. We could only dream of this stuff a few years ago. Distribution via the net costs next to nothing and opens up the field for anyone to get their stuff out there.

I know I sound all Hugh McLeod, but these are exciting times. We just need to get the word out to the man of the street. It's a bit depressing when your worries are confirmed by articles like the Beeb's report on 'geekspeak' :

35% of online Brits had heard the term podcasting but didn't know what it meant and a quarter had never heard of it.

We live in a little tech bubble. YouTube has obviously got some people watching online video, but there's a long way to go 'till it becomes a serious alternative to broadcast for the majority of people. Hopefully Apple's upcoming ITV will bring the joys of online distribution to the masses.

Anyway, enjoy the horror movies. In the dark. With the sound turned up high.

Technorati Tags: film, films, horror, movie, movies, shortfilm

The BBC have spoken, Web 2.0 = user generated ccontent phase of internet. "ccontent"? Yes, I know it's childish to laugh at typos...

• Make Your Own Adventure
  I’ve been playing with this idea in my head for ages – and someone’s finally built it for me :) Think it would work great on mobile.
  (tags: socialsoftware web games social writing adventure)
• Welcome to Solr
  Open Source search engine
  (tags: search server software webdev apache java lucene opensource tool tools Solr)
• acts_as_solr Plugin for Rails
  and a plugin for Solr searching for Rails
  (tags: rails ruby rubyonrails search Solr plugin plugins)

• Dan Theurer – Web services, technology and random thoughts! » Launching the Un-Launch-Able
  notes on bbauth. hopefully the start of good things in the SSO world.
  (tags: yahoo api authentication auth ydn webdev programming services service)