Portent

These are just humourous, clever or very subtle. My favourite is probably the woman with the handbag. 

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"Do you know the way to San Jose?"… These photos are the same streets taken 30 years apart. 1975 and 2005. No prizes for guessing which are which, though the faded tones make the 1975 photos look about 1945.

A fascinating glimpse at the changes that time has wrought. Don't forget that in this period, the population of the USA increased from nearly 200 million to 300 million. (See this story on Portent).

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Tim Roberts has put together a site for amateur mathematicians and cryptographers. It is to encourage thought and discussion of some of the outstanding problems in number theory, logic and
cryptography.

The picture is a cipher written by Sir Edward Elgar to a young companion that remains unsolved over 110 years after it was written. Not the best looking site (well excellent looking for 1998!) but the contents are fascinating. If you are into problem solving get dug in…

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Jordan Matter is a successful New York photographer. One of his projects was persuading women to pose bare breasted in normal surroundings in New York and act as normal as if they were fully clothed.

There are 72 photos and they are fascinating, and each comes with a little bit of background about the person. Don't expect models- these are real people and some of the women are old but it' still great photography.

Of course if the sight of naked breasts offends you, move along quickly!

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Which organisation was founded 61 years ago, has the endorsement of over 67 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, economics, medicine and physics, includes a massive directory of US and non US military systems, takes views on weapons in space, and even has a gallery of images showing houses made of plastic foam that can survive earthquakes?

Well of course, who else could it be but the Federation of American Scientist? Joking apart, this is a fascinating site for both its breadth and depth of coverage. For example, should you need to work out the Kilo or Mega tonnage weight of a nuke to destroy Chicago or other US cities, you can do so here. If delivered n a car- what a suicide bomb that would be, you need 4 Megatons but by air delivery , just half of that.

The image is of a plastic foam constructed house for suggested construction in Afghanistan. The hole in the cornmr worries me. Is that for aiming a Stinger missile at US helicopters?

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This looks like a game but is more of a puzzle. It's educational in a logic type of way. For each level you have a number of fuses. You just have to fit the fuses to power up the robot. The logic part comes with what the fuses power- these are logic games- AND, OR and various combinations. With an AND gate it only works if fuses are fitted to both inputs. With an OR gate, either input will do.

A great set of graphics and sounds plus some amusing cut scenes, especially if you mess up a level.

The only complaint is the size of this- its nearly 8MB which is quite large for a browser to download. You really need broadband speed internet access.

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I bought this game for my old Atari ST back in 1990. This is a fantastic implementation, particularly as it's NOT in Flash but DHTML which means JavaScript.  I'd guess that the original graphics have been used.

The game is about helping to save a number of Lemmings on each level. You get special powers to bestow on Lemmings- some dig, climb, fly and can even blow themselves up. By clever use of the apropriate power on a Lemming at the appropriate time you can rescue the required number and get on to the next level. A tremendous game. 

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The metro is not the only free newspaper available each day, there is also the First Post but you will only find it online. This is an excellent piece of work, produced to the same standards as print newspapers but presented for the web. On Sundays for instance they produce a summary of many of the best stories from the Sunday newspapers.

With sections on Features, Life, Arts as well as opinions plus the usual (letters, photos, games, beauty, reviews) there is an incredible amount of reading and it's nicely laid out- clean and crisp, this is an excellent production. A look at the list of contributors shows why the quality is so good, many write for newspapers and magazines. 

I'd sum this up in saying that it combines the immediacy of a daily newspaper with the extra interests of a weekly or monthly news magazine. But whatever it is, it is highly recommended.

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The picture shows my hotmail folders, normal on the left, faulty on the right. The left one is what you would expect, the right one is what I get about 99.9% of the time. I'm using Firefox but it happens in IE 6 as well and on different PCs. As well as the unread email count, the jump to a page and sort facility controls are absent. And this is a paid hotmail account!

My guess is that it's a reduced facility mode which for some unknown reason is triggered most of the time. I have seen the unread email count etc return after deleting 20 or 30 emails at once but it's not consistent so maybe just a coincidence. I've reported this to support on innumerable occasions without any satisfactory reply!

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I have over 300 digital photos on flickr.com. A day or two ago they introduced geotagging, allowing you to locate your photos in the world. Eventually, Ie within a week or two there will be millions of photos of nearly every spot on earth. Or at least the interesting spots.

In the first 24 hours after they added geotagging, over 1 and a quarter million photos were geotagged. Now there’s a bit of a gimmicky aspect to this, so I can’t imagine this level of geotagging will be sustainable for more than a week or two but never mind. I’ve geotagged five of my photos. The picture shows a couple located on the flickr.com map. One is in Windermere, the other of Blackpool tower. The link goes to Flickr, if you want to see my photos (you do???) search for homeparking on flickr.

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You can just imagine the comments: "Its got a new Engine- a Flat 4", "Well flat out it can do…", "We've lowered the suspension…", "Ultra Low profile tyres"…

Schadenfreude of course means getting joy at someone elses problems! 

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We are in the early stages of a transition from local computers to online working. With increased bandwidth due to ADSL and more powerful web software, we are already seing the early signs. Googles Apps are a move towards on online version of Office and this site fauxto.com is a step towards an online Photoshop.

I'm very impressed with this- despite it having just a fraction of the power Photoshop offers, it is still very neat with layers, text (with ten of the most popular fonts), text rotation/ kerning, filters and more. All done in Flash.

This isn't the only one – remember sketchr? What we are seeing and will benefit from is an arms race- to see who can have the best online drawing app and then presumably sell it to the likes of Google or Microsoft. Expect more of these web apps.

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Though mainly used for validating input forms and doing clever tricks to make sites like Google Maps possible, JavaScript can also do games (eg the Arkanoid game covered on Portent) .

On this site there are a number of visual toys, all programmed in JavaScript, including 3d cube and a simulation of birds flocking (pictured).

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I've been playing Celebdaq on and off for three or four years – I can't remember when it started. It is hosted by the BBC and is a simple game where you can buy or sell shares in celebrities. You start with £10,000 and if you ever reach a million you get a recognition of that fact and reset to £10,000.

The value of stars depends on their newspaper appearences and stories so this week for some reason Jade Goody is the highest moving star. There are several hundred stars tracked and their value moves upand down quite rapidly. Most are languishing around the £1.00 mark. Eg David Hasselhof while others Daniel Radcliffe and Alex Ferguson have stellar prices. The celebs are drawn from the worlds of pop,movies, tv, sport and fashion.

It's free to play so why not signup and have a go! There are no prizes just fun and it doesn't take up much time.

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I see a bit of a meme here- 4 letter .com websites that end in db for catalogs of things. First was the Internet Movie Database, and now here is the Internet Broadway database. If you're into musicals on Broadway then "IBDB provides records of productions from the beginnings of New York theatre until today. Details include pertinent people involved as well as interesting facts and production statistics. Get a list of every production of Hamlet on Broadway or a list of your favorite actor's credits. Find out what played at a particular theatre or what shows opened in a specified Broadway season."

Did I mention cndb.com ? Well if I tell you that C is for celebrity and N is for nude/naked, that might give you a clue. View it at your own peril!

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