Behold, I've found Jesus!

...and appropriately enough he's a sandman; well his preaching always used to put me to sleep. See how I casually threw that folkloric reference in there to demonstrate how culturally aware and quick-witted I am? Golly-gosh-darn-it, I even astound myself sometimes. All the while you've been looking...

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Hmmm-vee

A particularly captivating episode of Brian Dunnings' Skeptoid podcast entitled 'SUV Phobia' (transcript available on the linked page) kick-started my rusty neural cogs. The crux of his argument is that it's fallacious and naive to scapegoat SUVs for their supposed poor fuel efficiency and excessive output of carbon emissions because many of them "are mechanically identical to conventional cars";...

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Cushty Canaries?

Despite all Gran Canaria has to offer, the impression I've returned to Britain with is predominantly one of aesthetically pleasing - though crumbling - shopping plazas full of dodgy Arabs hawking fake electronics at too-good-to-be-true prices. For reasons which escape me, electronics boutiques make...

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Poles apart

Since the expansion of the EU in 2004 Britain has witnessed an influx of an estimated one million Polish immigrants. If you dare to point out the repercussions of this open-gate policy you're branded a Daily Mail reader and reminded of the enormous positive contribution these forward-thinking economic migrants make to the country. Well I've been unfortunate enough to find myself living with a Polish...

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Sunglasses; the cause of and solution to all of life's problems

When it comes to protecting your health what you need is clear, practical advice from medical professionals. With this in mind isn't it wonderful that scientists have taken all the guess work out of avoiding skin cancer? Ophthalmologists recommend wearing sunglasses when outdoors because they help...

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EyeTV MP3 playback

I may be stating the obvious here, but as it's not mentioned anywhere in Elgato's FAQs I thought this might be worthy of a tech tip entry. EyeTV (at least version 2 anyway), as well as playing back externally created video files is capable of opening MP3s. So what? you may be wondering. Well this means that if music and podcasts can be opened with EyeTV, they can be paused, fast-forwarded, rewound...

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Geek criminals should be made to work harder to earn their jail cells say Finnish courts

Mikko Rauhala, the owner of a web site where instructions for circumventing CSS DVD copyright protection were posted will not be prosecuted. The decision made by the Helsinki District Court resulted from the adherence to a 2001 amendment to European copyright laws that state it is only illegal to defeat "effective technological measures". Knowledge pertaining to outwitting DVD copyright protection...

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Uninventing the search engine

Don't you hate it when stuff just works? It's predictable and boring, and if you ask me, anything falling into this category should be sabotaged immediately to spice things up a little. Many web coders clearly share my view because this is precisely what they've been doing with their previously accurate, efficient and dependable search engines. Take Googles' Image Search for example. Imagine your...

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"Where Have All The Vampires Gone?"

University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has employed elementary mathematics to lampoon cliche vampire folklore as portrayed in popular literature and Hollywood. According to the prof, if - starting in the year 1600 - the first vampire sunk its fangs into one human per month, and that human subsequently metamorphosed into a vampire and went on to feast on another human, the...

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Coloureds still getting a raw deal

Is this happening where you live? Have Mr Green, and his inseparable buddy, Mr Red, been unceremoniously punted from their pedestal? There were riots in the 50s when the blacks were treated as second class citizens, but today, apparently it's OK to discriminate against reds and greens. The ones in my locale used to perch proudly atop a tall post at either side of the road separated by a zebra crossing....

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Oooh those naughty banks are right rotters!

Money Saving Expert of TV and radio fame, Martin Lewis, has been harping on about reclaiming exploitative bank charges recently. Barclays, for example, charge you £35 each time you fail to pay back your credit card balance on time. Financial analysts with letters after their names have established that it only costs the banks £4-ish in administration charges to process these deficits so the rest is...

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Mmmphumpph

Have you ever watched a film and found it almost impossible to fathom what the heck is going on because the cast all sound like they're trying to enunciate their lines around a giant gob-stopper? Could it be that they've all been held captive in the Marlon Brando school of method acting for the past decade? A bizarre trend for delivering rapid-fire, hushed dialogue through clenched teeth seems...

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If Johnny told you to jump over a cliff...

GPS systems often direct motorists down blind alleys or across otherwise unsuitable terrain because, after all, they are only mindless machines. They lack the intricacies of local knowledge and that all important human trait, common sense. Not the end of the world you might think since no car is going to force you to go where you don't want to. You see they all come fully equipped with a clever...

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Me 2.0

What is it with all these new 'bleeding edge' web technology upstarts churning out useless online services people neither want nor need just to get in on the Web 2.0 'revolution'? Take Tumblr for instance (I wish that was a typo, yawn). It's pitched expressly towards Webizen X who allegedly has a burning desire to post unblogworthy information, in a blog format. Stuff like disorderly scraps of half-baked...

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Subscribe to podcasts without iTunes

Lots of people don't like iTunes and would rather not use it to keep up to date with their favourite podcasts. I'm one of them. One alternative is to subscribe to RSS podcast feeds using an RSS to email service such as Rmail. You can do this by submitting the feed as you would with any ordinary blog feed. The MP3 files themselves aren't attached to the emails; what you get instead is a description...

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Energy saving ace in the hole unveiled

The business manager of Hazel Grove High in Stockport, England has shaved £16,000 off his schools' £100,000 per year energy and water bill and slashed its 530 tonne carbon payload in the process. How was this possible? You'd expect some fairly imaginative and dramatic compromises to be implicated wouldn't you. If you guessed that they've revised the dinnertime menu so as to feature nothing but salad...

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Ultimate Mac hack: turn your iPod into an MP3 player!

Pin back your ears, this is a Kookclusive! Thanks to Isaac Huang and his new application, iPodDisk, you can now access songs stored on your iPod via OS X's Finder. When plugged in, your iPod appears alongside your other drives and folders through the magic of iDisk drive emulation. The mounted drive...

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'Friendly fire' muppet is a hero!

Nearly four years after Lance Corporal Matty Hull was gunned down in a gung-ho fly-by shooting in Iraq, 'POPOV36', the trigger-happy pilot responsible, has been identified as Colonel Gus 'Skeeter' Kohntopp. Despite evidence of numerous grave errors and the conclusion of a British Army inquiry - "that procedures were not followed" - neither Kohntopp or his still unnamed wingman, 'POPOV35', have been...

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Of warm mice and screwdrivers

In winter my extremities (fingers and toes) swell up, itch and ache like hell due to poor circulation. The condition is known as Raynaud's and it's a pain in the posterior. To combat the vasospasms which cause your blood vessels to contract (vasocontriction) and reduce the blood flow, you have to induce...

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Autoasphyxiation can be fun kids

As a rule Mondays are not worth getting out of bed for, except the one just gone was marginally better because it marked the return of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe. He spent a good chunk of screen time divulging the intricacies of the BBC's programming code of conduct. Unsurprisingly they take a dim view of advocating behaviour which might induce harm to minors. As an example of a cartoon you're...

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Business applications are the devil's work

Anyone who spends a significant amount of time managing great wads of data for a living will know exactly what I mean. Business applications are clearly designed by robots who will never have to use them, for people who spend 8+ hours a day pleading with the retched things to do as they're told. Take the Oracle E-Business Suite for example. Firstly it's designed to run inside a web browser which,...

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Link checking with Firefox

OK, so checking your blog or web site for dead links is never going to be glamorous or fun. Really the best you can hope for is to make the tedious process as painless as possible. I checked several hundred links in a matter of minutes with the aptly named Firefox extension, LinkChecker, and didn't blub like a baby once so I reckon we're on the right track. Unlike most other link checkers this one...

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Subscribing to blog labels or categories

There will be times when you're only interested in receiving RSS blog updates which revolve around a particular theme. Many blogging platforms allow you to monitor individual categories via RSS even if their feeds aren't immediately apparent. Below I've compiled a list of the URL structure required for each kind of blogging software. Note that several links to further information have had to be removed...

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Gmail speed-up tips

Occasionally Gmail can trip itself up while interpreting all that behind the scenes javascript and this can lead to delays when serving up your emails. If you're as important and popular as I am you'll know 0.7 milliseconds isn't acceptable - you want your information now! Below you'll find some steps you can take to squeeze that last drop of juice out of your Google web mail:- 1. Disable the chat...

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Slimming World voodoo

At work I'm enveloped by talk of red and green days, 'Syn values', food optimising and 'free' foods. This is the language of Slimming World, one of the major British weight-loss groups. Ultimately the plan hinges upon the assignment of 'Syn values' to 'non-free' foods ('free' in this context means those you can eat by the bucket load to satiate your hunger whilst consuming relatively few calories)....

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PMP up the jam

I didn't think Portable Media Players, mobile cinemas - or whatever you want to call them - would be my thing, but when you're given one as a present you've got to at least have a tinker before leaving it in the bottom of a drawer to gather dust. I think my indifference towards them up until this point can be put down to not wanting to carry an extra bulky device around with me - even the svelte new...

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