http://horuskol.net Personal blog - musings on the web and the world Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:39:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Over the Christmas break, I spent about 50 hours or so putting together an initial design and release of a new photo gallery - the result is Modus InOperandi. The plan is that this will be my semi-professional site - eventually including a service where prints of selected photographs can be ... http://horuskol.net/modus-inoperandi-my-new-photo-gallery-20100120 I got this as an email from a family member, it is apparently an obituary as printed in the London Times - either way,I think it makes a point: Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows ... http://horuskol.net/the-death-of-common-sense-20091115 Ben Goldacre writes an incredibly intelligent and accessible deconstruction of homeopathy, nutrionism, and big pharma, and how they all abuse science and play on people's hopes and fears with only one real goal - money. Goldacre doesn't actually cover the money angle too much, though, as that is incidental to the ... http://horuskol.net/book-review-bad-science-by-ben-goldacre-20091008 Given my previous experience in reading Victorian-era literature (Dickens, Hardy, etc), I had thought that a book of scientific discussion would be even more weighty and inaccessible. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Darwin actually has a rather light touch to his writings, and even the rather complex ... http://horuskol.net/the-origin-of-species-by-charles-darwin-20090919 National Geographic ran an article recently about the global food crisis, something that is easy to forget is happening to most people in the Western world, since we don't suffer the same shortages as parts of the world like sub-Saharan Africa. While Australia does have limited resources, the majority of ... http://horuskol.net/food-for-all-20090906 I got home tonight to find my Nintendo Wii flashing an alert at me (it gets updates over a wireless network to my broadband connection). When I checked the incoming messages, I was informed out that Nintendo have decided to release their Internet Channel for free. Channels are basically software applications which ... http://horuskol.net/nintendo-internet-channel-20090901 The latest National Geographic magazine ran a single page feature on Ecofont - a new font design that is supposed to require 20% less ink when printing, developed by a Dutch agency called SPRANQ. This obviously would provide a financial saving for printers, but also help reduce the environmental damage ... http://horuskol.net/ecofont-whats-wrong-with-draft-printing-20090827 After playing a couple of turns on Empire and then closing the game, I got the regular Steam advertising for new content. One of the games looked interesting, so I grabbed the demo and played it as far as I could and then figured that for US$8.99, the full game ... http://horuskol.net/game-review-osmos-20090825 For the last year or more, I've been trying to spend time in the evenings working on writing content and creating websites, as well as get fit, cook dinners, do housework, read books and magazines, and a whole lot more. But evenings are very limited - I typically get home ... http://horuskol.net/life-changes-and-routines-20090823 If you want to fly in this war, you must be crazy. If you're crazy, then we won't let you fly - but if you don't want to fly, then that is rational fear of death, so you can't be crazy which means you have to fly. - Catch-22 Catch-22 follows a ... http://horuskol.net/yossarian-lives-catch-22-by-joseph-heller-20090822