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Timeout magazine lists London’s best charity shops, by area:

Central | North | South | East | West

Black Yellow
Originally uploaded by Grant Hamilton

gallery on flickr and at sxseventy.com.
Via information aesthetics

“… the Web 2.0 generation, with its YouTube and Twitter mania, has gotten a particularly bad rap for self-obsession and indulgence.”

Article: “Responsibility is in their sites. / Web entrepreneurs have an eye on social need” - San Francisco Chronicle. A step in the right direction, at least.

The article mentions Jarkko Laine’s DoTheRightThing.com.

I missed this London Bridge bluetooth gadget tracking exhibit which was active in February. Kind of like a cool big HUD for muggers. We’ll hear a report on this project and others at the next dorkbot london.

In Warana region, India, a test extension of the “Warana wired village project” has farmers using mobile phones to access their data via SMS, where previously they used shared PCs in the villages.

O’Reilly radar article.

Of interest is the comment on the importance of ease-of-implementation of backends for such projects. Being able to serve data from excel, with no internet connection, for example, lowers barriers to entry significantly.

There’s an article on the original project here.

Romily Cocking wrote this “getinline” DSL for file processing. Get it from sourceforge. Here’s an example of it in use:

 new Source().
 fromFile("docs/sample-data/flights3.txt").
 upToTheEnd().
 counting(allRecords).
 withoutBlankLines().
 counting(nonBlankRecords).
 allowing(Processing.rule().
  accepting(1).
  including(terminalRecordPattern).
  populatingList(
  terminals,
  terminalFactory,
  regexParser),
   Processing.rule().
  including(detailRecordPattern).
  populatingList(
   flights,
   flightFactory,
   commaDelimitedParser))
  .read();

The Art and Craft of Toy Design - a blog for two classes at the Parsons New School for Design, “Making Wireless Plush Toys” and “Toy Concept Development and Design”.

Talks from TED (Technology Entertainment Design).

From TED’s website: “Each year, TED hosts some of the world’s most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider audience. So now, for the first time, we’re sharing them with the world at large… Each week, we’ll release a new talk to inspire, intrigue and awaken the imagination.”

plain graph paper generators. Web-based PDF generators for plain graph paper, grid, hexagonal, isometric, music staffs, guitar chord boxes, storyboards.

via make, while I was searching for… um… darn…

Jack O’Lanterns on flickr
Originally uploaded by theorem.

Chinese classics and translations | MetaFilter “Every Chinese character is also a link to a chinese dictionary, allowing you to translate on the fly.”

“I hear they don’t provide source code for their books. The use some proprietary language called “Italian.”"

“Italian is an OO version of Latin and you can overload most methods in Italian by waving your hands about wildly.”

Funny slashdot comments on Evolution of a 100% Free Software-Based Publisher. Can’t recommend the original article.

Some great artificial renderings of the world, much clearer than would be possible with atmosphere in the pics. As an example, check out this big image of Western Cape Region of South Africa. Here’s the context of that image. Or Kimberley Plateau, NW Australia (in context). Or Mt Kilimanjaro (in context)

Some technical info on how it’s done (with povray)., and another page of credits listing programs and data sources.

Ask Tog! Panic! How it Works and What To Do About It

Shaking up tech publishing (Loud Thinking). Tim O’Reilly has a detailed response in the comments.

Well, that’s horrible… Police station intimidation via BoingBoing.

Yahoo! Mindset That slider need only be a checkbox, an opt-in for crazy people to say “actually, i’d like to shop, please”. The default being “i’m doing research, only”.

Kill Harry @ Crazykimchi.com. Yes, that Kill and that Harry.

“Strong” quake last night here in Mozambique (GMT: 22nd Feb 2006, 22:20, but 23rd Feb, 00:20 local time).
(em português - yahoo, noticias (maputo)).

In Maputo we’re fine. The epicentre was 330 miles north east. The only injuries here in the capital were caused by people panicking while leaving their buildings in a rush. Can’t blame them - earthquakes are rare here. Last night’s 7.5 was the strongest quake in Africa in 100 years, according to the BBC article. Historical seismicity charts for Mozambique (USGS).

This “did you feel it?” map shows very few reports anywhere near the epicentre in part because there’s no one with internet there. Manica province only has around 18 people per square km (source).

I thought it was re-ocurrence of a balance problem I’ve been having, and was relieved when I realised it was just a quake.

• Map, event technical details and map (U.S. Geological Survey). - Be sure to click the tabs - they have the interesting stuff
• BBC Article - “We’ll expect aftershocks from an earthquake this large.”
• list of recent earthquakes in S.E. Africa. Bigger aftershocks would be listed here.
• List of recent earthquakes (global)
• USGS: U.S. Geological Survey
• prettier? seismon

“The new computerised MOT test means you can now search a car’s MOT history online with the number plate and the reference number from the V5C document.”

via dan9.

Useful if, as in Dan’s case, the person trying to sell you a car is pretending the car hasn’t been MOT’d in a while.