YAUT*: Fog Creek Copilot

Developer tools company Fog Creek have produced a rather useful tool for those of us who have to occasionally fix other people's computers. A web-initiated secure VNC session, routed through Fog Creek's servers, Copilot allows you to work with someone's computer simply by making a request at a website. Windows only at the moment, but the GPLed code is available if you want to port it to other platforms!

Yes, there is a fee, but at $9.95 it's less than the cost of your time when trying to debug VNC or RDP connections through someone's firewall...

^*Yet Another Useful Tool - and this was an intern project too!

Neologism of the day

Arphid: a word that formed from the acronym RFID, and refers to anything to do with RFID tagging. Expect to hear it in electronic civil libertarian discussions and see it in Charlie Stross novellas...

An arphid is "ten cents' worth of antenna, a diode, a chip, and a capacitor"

(word found via Bruce Sterling's excellent Beyond the Beyond blog).

Armadillo Skies

Views of the sky over the SECC during Interaction, the 2005 SF Worldcon.


From a Flickr photoset.

Community pimpage to the max...

lav_reviews has been linked to by those nice folk at BoingBoing...

If you're not reading lav_reviews, why not? It's full of lovely pictures of lavatories and urinals from around the world...

End of an era

I have just unloaded the last of my now worthless shares in my dot-com era employer, the one-time eBusiness consultancy Scient.