For the time being, head here for the bloggy goodness. This site will have its posts archived and then will fall into line with TwinDX.co.uk, and the two domains will be married up.

Comments are now disabled on this site - most of them of late have been spam so no big issue there!

Get the hell out of here. A Korean wunderkind has gone and ported MAME to Flash. You can see the results of this most unholy of marriages here. My keyboard's going to get pummelled from Hyper Sports!

As one of the commenters pointed out, it was only a matter of time. Adobe showed off what their C++ compiler for Flash could do when they unveiled Quake playing on it, and it would seem pretty much anything open source could be up for compiling to a Flash virtual machine with pretty good performance!

In other news, this will probably be my last post to the blog in this format. I've been playing with Google Apps and Swurl and think I'm going to go to a site knitted out of other people's online tools so I don't have to worry about security so much… Wish me luck! (Good luck! – A Reader)

Radiohead's "Nude" being played by a Spectrum, dot matrix printer, flat bed scanner and a collection of hard drives acting as the tinniest speakers in existence.

Everybody give up, the internet has been won.

Yeah, I could do this, provided I was Lara Croft.

Frankly that's nuts. Walking it in the first place is bananas, but then to waste one hand by holding onto a camera instead of dear life is nuts on top.

Noswaith dda, Eddie Murphy dw i. Dw i'n hoffi transsexual prostitutes, ond dw i ddim yn hoffi child support payments.

(Three of us non-Welsh speakers in the office are getting lessons, the first of which was today. We have to practice. Hurrah!)

As threatened in my previous post, I've now got a virtual Windows XP machine for my Eee. I've created a virtual disk image on the SDHC card I was trying to install XP onto natively, and it runs from within innotek's (now Sun's) utterly excellent VirtualBox.

Because I've got two big fat monitors on my work PC, I actually set up the disk image on that rather than squint at the little Eee screen. XP installed in a virtual machine on XP - bananas. Anyway, the upside of this is that I can now use Windows Live Writer on the Eee, and I am now happy. If only there was something comparable that Ubuntu could run without me having to dedicate a chunk of SDHC space and system resources to emulation of a whole 'nother OS... hey ho.

UPDATE! This is how it looks when I use it. I'm running it like this right now, and it's bloody impressive...

As you can see, the Windows window forms an integral part of the Linux desktop. It's good!

(Casual readers - I make no apologies to the geeky nature of this post. I'm too chuffed that it all works after the problems before!)

For the past couple of weeks I've been battling to install Windows XP to an 8Gb SDHC card on my Eee. I've just given up - I've rebooted so many times and dabbled with so many dark arts in the process and it still doesn't work, so... fsck it.

I only wanted it for two things; Windows Live Writer, the king of all blog editors (seriously, this is something Linux lacks - there just isn't anything that can hold a light to WLW), and Grand Theft Auto 3 (which looks great on the dinky screen). I had a spare license I could use to install it and be legal and, seeing as I was planning on installing Ubuntu on it soon and that XP hoses the contents of the hard drive, I could do the XP thing before getting a proper operating system.

I'm hardly a novice, so things like this should be easy, I thought. Wrong at the first count - XP isn't designed to install onto SDHC cards, so there's a whole load of hacking that has to be done from the outset. Once it's on your Eee, there's some more hacking to be done to make the SDHC card look like a regular hard drive, and then you have to somehow persuade it to leap from the internal drive to the card, and then convince it to boot from it, and it's these last two parts that really push your patience - not least because you have to do all this with the fault-intolerant FAT32 file system (for non-techies, this is the equivalent of a 1960s Yale latch compared to modern door locks) and the whole process is laden with spanner-in-the-works opportunities.

The latest spanner (a carbon-fibre adjustable wrench, fact-fans) in the latest works (taking an image of the internal drive and dumping it onto the SDHC card) is the final straw. I've had enough. Microsoft can extend their XP support for ultra-mobiles for as long as they like, it ain't happening until it works the way I want it. (Speaking of the XP support, they've added so many caveats that it looks like they're insisting on killing the golden goose so that its younger, uglier and less popular sibling gets a whisper of a hint of a chance. Fools.)

So, it's over. My plan to have an XP card are dashed; life is just too damned short. Now to try and install Ubuntu via USB flash drive...

So, I've been neglecting this blog again. It's what I do - a flurry of activity followed by weeks of indifference. But spurred on by a comment from Pip, I've got something I should show off.

This here is my new network appliance. It's a Linksys NSLU2 (aka a Linksys Slug) with a pair of hard drives in an old DVD Recorder case. The Slug, bottom right, is a tiny Linux box that is used to put USB devices on a network, and being Linux-based it's absurdly hackable. I've got it hooked up to two hard drives via generic USB-to-IDE adaptors, picked up off eBay for about £8 each. These are the sort of thing that every self-respecting geek should have knocking about the place because they're incredibly useful for hooking up drives to PCs for data recovery and things like that - and they're so cheap you can afford to have one in a drawer, just in case.

On the bottom left side are the two power supplies that came with the USB-to-IDE adaptors. They take 240V from a kettle-lead and output 5V and 12V on a Molex connector, and plug straight into hard drives or optical drives. Originally I'd planned on using the original PSU from the DVD recorder to run everything but I realised that the peak power consumption could be a little higher than what it was rated for, so I had to get creative to get everything running from a single mains lead. In the end I made a little distribution box from terminal blocks and ran mains cables to the drive PSUs and to the crazy adaptor visible at the top right - to run 240V into the Slug's "wall wart" adaptor I hacked open an old three-way adaptor and reworked it to become a low-profile UK mains socket.

Incredibly, it all works! It runs a little hot at the moment though, because I've not managed to get the drives to spin down when not in use - I need to do a little hacking to get that fixed. I've kept the original fan in the case so that I can get some extra airflow in there as well - I'll just tap 12V from one of the drive PSUs.

Here it is, running quietly in the corner of the living room in its small, recycled case. It looks like a DVD Player - amazing!

What next? Expansion. I've got a 4-port USB hub in there as well, so I can run three more USB sockets to the back of the case, and getting the drives to sleep is top of the agenda.

So there you go, Pip!

Last Friday, the BBC quietly rolled out a version of their much-criticised (and rightly too!) iPlayer to support Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. What they didn't want people to know is that, because the Apple devices brilliantly lack Adobe Flash support, their hand was forced into delivering an MPEG4 stream. More than that, because they haven't licensed Apple's DRM (after all, they've spent a fortune on that Microsoft tat), they're delivering streams to small Apple devices with no DRM restrictions.

As soon as I heard about the iPhone support, I knew it had to be handled in a manner different to the streaming Flash. The Flash streams are handled by a proprietary Adobe protocol called RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol, although I like the idea of it being Read The Motherflippin' Pamphlet) which is a headache to try and get data from in anything other than Flash. It's possible, as Pip found out, but not with free software (at least as far as our experiments concluded). So other means were being used. I set Firefox up to pretend to be an iPhone and headed to the BBC iPlayer site.

After wading through various scripts, I discovered something quite splendid - MPEG4 files were being distributed over HTTP, and after snagging one, it was truly DRM free. I did what anybody in my position would do - I put a screenshot up on Flickr, and showed Pip my handiwork.

Then the news spread and the traffic started, helped mostly by legendary copyfighter Cory Doctorow making a big deal about it over at BoingBoing. My investigative ham-fisted hackings inspired a bunch of other people to write scripts to pull the MPEG4 files from the servers, whilst other people found the same thing at roughly the same time and started making the most of it.

All in all, 7th March 2008 should be remembered as the day the BBC accidentally opened the flood gates and gave the world DRM-free downloads. If only it were down to something other than poor-design, decisions and ineptitude by the department running the project - the department that pissed millions up the wall and spent many months making a dire Windows-only DRMed offering that has been largely ignored since the leaner streaming Flash afterthought was added to attempt to appease the techie populous.

Anyway, a quick review of the MPEG4 files - they're pretty good. Not high def by any stretch of the imagination, but then the target platform is a handheld device. I've found the picture quality to be a bit better than the Flash stream (but with the advantage of being able to save them without black arts being involved), and better than some of the Windows downloads I saw when iPlayer was launched. Perfectly watchable, and brilliantly watchable on anything that can handle MPEG4 - so all the platforms that the BBC had been ignoring, hoping the grumbling would go away. I recoded Ashes to Ashes to fit my iPod because, being DRM-free and based on a published standard, it's possible to do this...

What will the BBC do next? Who can say. They have a few options, though. They could discontinue support for the iPhone and have expensive egg on their face. They could license FairPlay from Apple, giving the streams DRM, and face questions from the board of governors and the government about why they're wasting licence-fee money on two different forms of DRM. They could carry on as it is, and hope that a tiny minority of people use it, or they can embrace the future and offer it up to all. I imagine the third option will be what they choose, but we can hope for the fourth.

Anyway, my favourite implementation of laying hands on MPEG4 files come courtesy of Matthew Somerville. It's awesome goodness. So awesome that I hacked together this Bookmarklet! Drag the following link up to your bookmarks, and then click it whenever you're on an iPlayer page and you'll be whisked off to Matthew's site where you can see what you can actually get hold of.

iPlayer Downloader

And that, my friends, is what I did with my weekend.

Jack's speech is getting better and better. Here we are, doing the alphabet together, whilst finishing off changing a pooey nappy...

... of note is that Jack knows the 'Q' comes after 'P'. Seriously, he's just turned two and he knows his alphabet better than some people who've been given filing to do.

(Starting with 'W' was just because I love the way he says it!)

I'm not normally one for a long title in a blog post, but this needs as much clarity as possible. From BBC News:

People in the UK who go online and illegally download music and films may have their internet access cut under plans the government is considering.

A draft consultation suggests internet service providers would be required to take action over users who access pirated material via their accounts.

[...]

The Times suggested that broadband firms which failed to enforce the rules could be prosecuted, and the details of customers suspected of making illegal downloads made available to the courts.

According to the Times, the draft paper states: "We will move to legislate to require internet service providers to take action on illegal file sharing."

This is nuts. How, exactly, are ISPs supposed to do this? Are they to sniff every data packet sent, and somehow compare the contents to a list of every copyrighted work on the planet? What if it's encrypted, or in an unusual format, or being transferred via a private protocol? What about the inevitable false-positives?

And who's going to pay for this over-seeing campaign? ISPs typically make modest margins reselling services from BT - so they'd have to push up prices to pay for technology that doesn't exist (or is critically flawed) so that their customers can be spied on for the good of whom, exactly? Well, it's the international media conglomerates, isn't it. It's not for the good of the nation, it's for the good of Warner Bros, Sony and the likes.

What happens when you're accused of something you haven't done because of the flawed, non-existent detection system? Or will they assume you're guilty until proven innocent if there's a load of traffic from your computer that they can't read for some reason? What about appeals arbitration? The proposals suggest a three-strikes-and-you're-out affair - out of what? That ISP? The entire internet? What about rehabilitation - if as a 19 year old someone is booted for a third strike, but ten years later he's a vicar, is he still internetless? And is it a household or an individual? What about when people move, or change their name in some way?

Yep, the whole thing has been thought up by people who don't know anything about the reality of technology, and are naive to the fact that the glittering solution being sold to them by the entertainment cartels is, in fact, a white elephant that has been designed for people who don't know anything about technology.

Nice soundbites from the BPI in the BBC article as well:

The BPI, the trade body that represents the UK record industry, said internet providers had "done little or nothing to address illegal downloading via their networks".

"This is the number one issue for the creative industries in the digital age, and the government's willingness to tackle it should be applauded," said BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor.

"Now is not the time for ISPs to hide behind bogus privacy arguments, or claim the problem is too complicated or difficult to tackle."

Number one issue for the creative industries. Not for the citizens of the UK, who're probably more interested in clean hospitals and being able to afford to buy food and heat their homes. The government are too busy fannying about with multi-billion pound industries boo-hooing about how the proletariats aren't buying as much of their "content" because of the big bogeyman, restricting the amount of cocaine they can trumpet out of their arseholes, to actually look after the people who elected them (or not, in the case of our mighty leader).

Claiming the problem is too complicated or difficult? Try impossible. It's absolutely impossible to filter the whole of the internet in the way the BPI would like. I think now is not the time for the BPI to say they can't give me a time machine disguised as a peanut because - boo-hoo - it's too compwicated.

If the government, god bless their cluelessness, decide to shove this into law, I call for them to make the playing field equal, and force any carrier of any form of data to be responsible for any form of copyright infringement policing in the same way. And then I'd use a VoIP telephony system to phone someone and sing Happy Birthday to them without the permission of rights holders Warner Bros (despite the fact it really ought to be public domain by now, wacky US laws mean that you have to pay two long-dead women royalties when you perform it - and Warner Bros own their souls). Who should prevent me doing it - my ISP, providing a conduit, the VoIP platform, providing a conduit, or the telephone company at the other end, providing a conduit? Then I'd make a flick book of stills from a Hollywood blockbuster, printed on an Epson printer on Staples paper, put it in a Niceday envelope, use the Royal Mail website via my ISP to buy postage before getting a friend to post it in the postbox inside Tesco, where it will get picked up and put into a van made by LDV before being loaded onto a plane and flown through the air. Who in this chain of events would the BPI - sorry, the government - have stand in my way and tell me not to do it two more times?

See the problem? It's impossible and stupid, frankly. Not that things like that have stood in the way of legislation in the past...

As astute viewers of my Flickr photostream will know, I've recently got a very, very cool gadget - an Asus Eee PC. Here's a photo of it on my lap...

It's probably the tiniest little laptop you'll have seen in your life, but it's a real computer - at its heart is an Intel Celeron processor, the same as you get in 'proper' computers, and it has 512Mb of RAM and 4Gb of 'hard drive' (a bit of a fib, seeing as it's all flash memory inside, or what those in the know call Solid State Drive). Its sole moving part is a tiny fan that kicks in when it needs a bit of a breather. And, like its meatier brethren, it can run Windows XP (if you're that way inclined) or Linux, which is what it comes with. For something so small, and of such negligible power compared to big, full blown PCs, it's remarkably fast. Mine boots up to the desktop in 20 seconds - far faster than any Windows PC I use, even my Toshiba laptop which is kept in a hibernate state so as to allow faster start up. And Firefox, the web browser within, starts in less than 5 seconds - again, faster than anything else I regularly use. OpenOffice starts impressively quickly as well. The use of flash memory as its drive means you can turn it off, close the lid and sling it in your bag without worrying - there's not going to be any drive head crashes (not like the last two iPods I've fixed). The keyboard, although small, is perfectly adequate - and I found myself able to touch type on it, albeit not at my usual speed. Above the monitor is a VGA-quality webcam which can be used with the bundled Skype application for video calls, or just to take little videos and things. It copes well, even in low light, which is impressive. Also impressive is the number of ports on such a little device. There's three USB ports, and hackers have managed to find and enable two more internally. To the left there's headphone and microphone sockets, complementing the built in stereo speakers and front-mounted microphone, as well as an Ethernet network socket and an (unused) modem port. To the right you find a VGA output, to hook up to an external monitor, and an SD card slot, which can be used to pull photos straight off a digital camera, for example, or used to expand the amount of storage from 4Gb to something a little more substantial. I found that Play.com have a 4Gb SDHC card for £12.99 (which is a complete bargain), but some people have been loading up 16Gb SDHC cards to bring it up to 20Gb of storage without voiding the warranty.

Warranty voiding - and slightly bending with Asus' permission - has become a bit of a pastime for some Eee owners. These things are remarkably hackable! The simplest thing being done is increasing the memory, up to a maximum of 2Gb, which Asus in their wisdom have decided won't void the warranty (despite having to break a warranty seal to get in there). More extreme is the hacking of the internal USB ports, which has seen internal Bluetooth dongles, flash drives, GPS dongle and much more being squeezed into the diminutive case. At £220, these things are an absolute bargain - a cheap, capable computer that can cope with pretty much anything you throw at it. It comes with a fantastic user base as well - the first site to bookmark for users is EeeUser.com, where everybody is chipping in with help and advice (myself included) on its forums and wiki. With a guide for an older version I managed to compile and install the Fuse Spectrum Emulator, and am working on updating the guide to cover all the gotchas I found along the way.

These aren't aimed at hackers though, they're aimed at anyone - anyone at all. Research Machines sell them into schools and sold several thousand in a single week, which is an astonishing amount. Their everyman feel is exemplified by the fact that Asus (and Xandros who put together the custom Linux operating system for them) have made all the windows look as much like Windows XP windows as possible, to put people at ease with a little familiarity. In my opinion, Asus have found their iPod. It's already the most successful product the company has ever made (and they're quite big in the Far East, making mobile phones and all sorts), and the imagination has been captured. I'd happily replace my Eee with another, later model in a few years, and a lot of other people would too. It's a remarkable feat - a tiny computer with a tiny price - when you consider that until very recently you had to pay a significant premium for ultra-mobile laptops, like the tiny Sony Vaios. In case you can't tell, I'm quite smitten.

Let's all hope that 2008 is great. Given I enter it with bandages and wrist supports, it can only get better!

(And yes, I'm sat at home, on my sofa, in my pyjamas, on New Year's Eve. At least I've got a bottle of Champagne - rock and/or roll!)

Yep, Christmas is being rubbish.

On Thursday, whilst ice skating with my work comrades in Cardiff, I fell. Badly. I put my arm out to stop myself walloping my face on the ice, and then felt something pop in my arm. Seconds later the wave of pain came, and, as happens to me when in pain, I started fainting. Fainting in an ice rink -- not a good idea. I managed to get to the side and flopped myself over the barrier, safe in the knowledge that someone would come to my aid. Sure enough, people came to my aid, paramedics and a nice policeman (who was obsessed with finding coffee) got me to the first aid station in a wheel chair, and my day out was over.

Fortunately my arm's not broken. I've done something to the tendons by the feel and sound of things -- it hurts like hell and I've got to keep a tight bandage on my arm for a while. It make things hard, especially trying to get Jack into bed, or serving food, but at least it's not a break.

On Friday, I tried to start the car and found the battery was flat again. The connector for the stereo is all wrong and supplies 12 volts continually instead of only at ignition, which wasn't an issue with the old one, but the new one seems to be a thirsty little bugger. Somehow I managed to get thebattery out, and to the house, with only one working arm - clearly I am Superman.

And to top it all off, despite having our phone line fixed (the old junction box was corroded), our broadband is 22 times slower than it used to be. It's hard getting anything done online at 122kbps...

So, Merry Christmas y'all. Hope yours is better than mine has been!

It's not that big, actually. It's just that today is my last day proper at work this year - tomorrow is our Christmas meal, and then I won't be in the office for the rest of the year.

We're all in various states of recovery from the nasty stinking colds that hit the populous every Winterval. Here's a tired, poorly baba to illustrate:

The result of this illness is that we're completely unprepared for Christmas. Tomorrow is the last posting day and we've not got everything sorted, we've not got decorations up... the only thing we've done is get most of the presents sorted. I still have some to do for Jayney... and then it's her birthday a week later, so I need to be ready with gifts for then as well.

The other thing I'm having to deal with is our internet connection - our ADSL has gone all flaky, and most of the time we can't connect to anything outside the house. Great timing...

So, to cheer myself up, I've done the unthinkable once again, and 'bought' downloads to get into the Christmas charts. Lucky Soul's Lips Are Unhappy is gorgeous, and can be bought for 40p from their website; not only that, the luscious indie popsters are doing it all for charity. Hurrah! I'd have left it at 40p off my PayPal account until I heard Malcolm Middleton's awesome indie anti-Christmas romp, We're All Going To Die. Odds of being Christmas Number 1 have been slashed from 1000/1 to 12/1 over the past month - it still won't reach number one whilst fools buy X Factor twattery, but by jingo it feels good to bop to.

Link-me-dos:

• Lips Are Unhappy
• We're All Going To Die

Other things? There are a few other things. I wanted to get an Asus Eee PC, but I appear to not have the cash, so that's not going to happen any time soon. Our DVD recorder is playing up - again. By hassling Admiral I've managed to save £160 on car insurance next year. Nibbling a hole in the top of a Mr Kipling mince pie and squirting Courvoisier-laced Anchor squirty cream into the void is amazingly awesome. The BBC's cross-platform, Flash-based iPlayer is better after a couple of months of development than the foetid turd that they spent millions of pounds on.

That is all.

I'm on holiday this week. I'm rubbish at taking annual leave during the year and when it comes to the end of the year it's always a mad dash to use up my allowance. So, this week is a week of taking it (relatively) easy. As I type this I'm pleasingly lightly drunk which is really nice, although my typing is not quite as good as it could be.

As is typical, I've had a whole bunch of plans for the week that have, for the most part, not come to fruition. I've also barely checked my email - I've been relying on Google Mail on my phone to keep an eye on things which is great, but fiddly to use to reply to things (because it's like typing a text message - but longer). Photos I've taken have stayed on the camera or phone rather than getting downloaded as well.

The main reason for letting everything fall by the wayside is Jack. He's completely ace but completely exhausting and constantly on the look out for things to get involved with - like hitting keys on the keyboard when you're trying to use the keyboard. I don't mind, it's just hard to get things done with a toddler!

I did start this post with things in mind to witter about, so it's about time I say something that is of some vague interest to someone... and here it is! I started creating a DVD last night, compiling the Peter Serafinowicz Show on one disc, and left my laptop on overnight to do the business of transcoding and creating menus. This morning I got up and went to look at how it all turned out, and discovered that Windows had decided to install a bunch of patches and reboot - and then had the audacity to boast to me that it had done it, and wasn't it clever that it had done it all by itself. Mother flipper! Back in the day, at least it would leave a window up to tell you that it wanted to reboot - now Windows just hoses the work that you've been trying to let processes get on with...

The upside of this? There isn't a real upside, but Nero 8 is really quite nice, and Nero Vision now lets you make DVDs without insisting on a bunch of predefined menu layouts for the button styles. (You have to be someone who makes DVDs to appreciate this!)

What else? Well, Toys R Us are stocking the Asus Eee PC I discovered today. Brilliantly they didn't have the display model switched on, but I had a go on the keyboard and was amazed by how usable the teeny tiny keys were! The only problem seems to be the positioning of the cursor keys - the 'up' key is right next to a reduced-size 'shift' key on the right-hand sidek, so trying to type an exclamation mark resulted in going up a line (or would have done if the box was switched on). It was clearly something I could get used to though, which is good seeing as this is a device I've been lusting after for a while now!

Christ, it's late and my beer intake has been greater than a normal school night. And you don't want to know how many times I've retyped some of these sentences as my fingers skate around... so a slightly drunken Hwyl a Nos Da - I'm going to crash out and leave this post sans formatting and hyperlinks. Google anything that doesn't make sense =)

This blog is running on Drupal, which is a wonderful content management system which does everything. And I use approximately 4% of its power. Meanwhile I'm having to keep up to date with security alerts and things for the mass of plugins I installed "just in case" so that nobody can hack my site, as happened a few years back with an old, forgotten install of PHP Nuke.

A while ago I stumbled across Picnik. I forget how, but I think it was in a post on Flickr. Having played with it on and off for a while, I recently decided that it was one of the best Web 2.0 (I hate that moniker) applications I've ever used.

It's like that cut-down version of Photoshop (is it called Photoshop Elements? Something like that) that gets bundled with some digital cameras and things - it has a whole bunch of fairly simple tweaks (like adjusting colour and things) to photos, and a whole bunch of slightly more complicated ones, without ever going over the top. But it trumps it by existing as a Flash application in your browser, and by blurring the line between online and offline quite well. Where it excels, though, is where there's any popular online repository of photos with an accessible API. I can use the excellent Picasa to upload a whole load of photos to the PicasaWeb online albums, then hit Picnik, grab them from there, tweak them in any way I need (like maybe scrubbing out serial numbers in screenshots) and then save them back in the web album, or save them directly to Flickr, or Facebook, or Photobucket, or email them around, or (amazingly) even back to the hard drive on my computer.

Being Flash-based it's as cross platform as the Flash player is, and I've run it (slowly) on my (slow) Linux box. It's Flash 9, so the chances of open-source Flash player Gnash making it run are slim-to-none, but there's no way you could get the speed and flexibility with an earlier version of Flash. What's really refreshing is that, despite being a Flash app it all works with the Back button as well, by some clever manipulation of the browser history. (In non-geek words - it just works really nicely.)

Other notable things - one of the ways you can get photos into Picnik is by doing a Flickr or Yahoo image search. This is neat. You can even type a URL straight into Picnik and it will list all the images there, for you to choose from. There are Firefox and (ick) IE extensions to make the acquisition easier still, and this is brilliant for another reason - you can grab the whole webpage as an image this way, which is brilliant for screenshots and things. The screenshot in this post was grabbed like that, unremarkably (seeing as I just mentioned it).

I've been using it as a handy gateway to get pictures from (Google's) Picasa to (Yahoo's) Flickr. Picasa is just about the best photo management program available for Windows, and the Linux version is pretty good to boot (although very obviously not a native app) - but it's unlikely to ever talk to Flickr natively. Although there's no batch way of moving stuff from PicasaWeb to Flickr, for five or six photos at a time it's fine, and gives you a chance to get your tags and comments in order!

It's a fabulous application - they've introduced a paid-for version which has a bunch of extra effects, but the free version has all the abilities I've mentioned (and more - I've just not used them!). It ties into Flickr and Picasa through legal use of APIs, so you're not giving passwords to unknown third parties to achieve the interoperability. It oozes professionalism from the offset. It is, in short, really really nice. Nice enough for me to love it; and not in secret, but to profess my love of it.

Jack loves his Daleks.

He even has his own Dalek voice.

When Daleks Invasion Earth: 2150AD was on last week, Jack sat next to Jayne and did his little Dalek voice every time he saw one... which was quite a lot!

I chuckled. Sadly the still image you see below doesn't do it justice by any stretch of the imagination.