Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

We seem to be watching a friend's mother's wedding on the other side of the country via web cam in the Register Office...

(It's live-ish, with a 12 second refresh on the still images)

It looks like we are living in the future after all!

The BT Tower is 40 this weekend.

We know how much it weighs, 13,000 tons, as well as the degree to which it is designed to sway, about 8 inches, in winds of up to 100mph. In winter the Tower contracts; in summer it expands by as much as nine inches.

Click here for a QuickTime VR panorama I made from photographs I took from the tower a few years ago. Be prepared for a wait - it's a 5MB file made from 40 or so photographs taken from each window on the observation deck while it was stationary. As it was made from a set of 4 Mpixel images there's quite a bit of zoom available too...


One of the photographs I used to make the 360° panorama.

See today's Two Lumps for additional details.

It is to laugh, it is...

Paging fluffcthulhu. Ïa Ïa Cthulhu Ftagn'

Google has just launched its beta RSS reader. An online tool like Bloglines, it imports OPML lists of your RSS feeds from your existing readers and seems to display full text feeds in an AJAX browser. There's filtering and search as well (which is what you'd expect from the folk at Google).

You will need a Google account to use it. Not surprising, as it stores subscription information.

I'll be playing with it over the next few days - once I've persuaded it to import my blogroll...

Update: This is looking very interesting, with keyboard controls and a "lens" UI for the reader.

...if you're offering an exclusive, make sure it's an exclusive. Fake exclusives go straight to the bottom of the "answer never pile". Even if they do sound interesting.

IT journalists notice when you send the same email message as a round robin to several addresses, and we don't like people who try to manipulate us into replying to messages.

Here's a helpful hint: we may have more than one mailbox or we may be married to other journalists. And we sometimes pass ideas around, too...