Links for 2006-01-23

Posted January 23, 2006 12:17 AM.

• The Slanket is the best blanket ever - very large, very warm and with sleeves so you can change TV channels! If they hadn't sold out of these, I'd have already ordered one. They look toasty.
• How to trace an e-mail, and report its sender for abuse The process of scouting around for trolls on messageboards is pretty similar, but e-mail makes it way way easier to find the information than web submission forms.
• "Katie Holmes Turns 27 Amongst Other Imprisoned Playthings" For her birthday, she apparently got given a DVD boxed set of all Tom Cruise's movies. The picture on this article alone is astonishing. You know you shouldn't find this interesting, but it just is.
• Lucas Blog talks about cowardice at the Golden Globes Despite the success of Brokeback Mountain and Transamerica, most of the established talent prefer to talk generically about the "difficult circumstances" of their characters rather than even mention that they could be gay.
• Ferrofluid Sculptures by Sachiko Kodama Ferrofluid can be manipulated and turn solid in response to magnetic fields. Skip past the writing on the page to the link just above the comments - there's a video that will demonstrate this extraordinary material in action.
• The BBC reports that British teenagers think science is interesting and important, but not for 'normal people' 'Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".'
• There's a job going in the Social Software team at Apple And it looks incredibly depressing! Apparently social software can be conflated with RSS frameworks. It's no wonder that Apple aren't exploiting this area if this is how they view it...
• Darren Shrubsole - relentless Link Machine - reveals the doom-and-gloom agenda of London's Evening Standard headline writers He's produced a Flickr photoset of some of the best (read most alarmist) Evening Standard Headline's of 2005
• Know Your Type - Starting points for Typographic Inspiration Very interesting primer in Typography that I don't entirely agree with, but has given me a different perspective on what I've been doing on plasticbag. Hopefully at some point soon an iterative redesign will appear
• Broadcast Flag is back, this time it covers iPods and PSPs, too "Under the DCPA proposal, digital media technologies would be restricted to using technologies that had been certified by the FCC as being not unduly disruptive to entertainment industry business-models."
• EgoSurf search for Tom Coates EgoSurf is possibly the least useful website I've ever seen - you can use it to give yourself a score about how nominally important you are online, with no positive scores at all - you're either a nobody, ordinary or stuck-up
• Firefox to include a new 'ping' attribute I'm quite interested in this one. It seems to have generated a fair amount of dissent on privacy grounds, but I've got two thoughts - what distributed services could you make with this, and how easy is it going to be to spam the trackers?