( Go visit XKCD. No really. If you don’t know Randall’s comics, go. I’ll wait… )

This fantastic preamble comes from that Google scanning and OCR…

      This is a digital copy of a book lhal w;ls preserved for general
ions on library shelves before il was carefully scanned by Google
as pari of a project

      to make the world's books discoverable online.

      Il has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the
book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one thai
was never subject

      to copy right or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether
a book is in the public domain may vary country to country.
Public domain books

      are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history,
culture and knowledge that's often dillicull lo discover.

      Marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original
volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long
journey from the

      publisher lo a library and linally lo you.

      Usage guidelines

      Google is proud lo partner with libraries lo digili/e public
domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain
books belong to the
public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this
work is expensive, so in order lo keep providing this resource,
we have taken steps to
prevent abuse by commercial panics, including placing Icchnical
restrictions on automated querying.

It’s not looking good when your OCR can’t even process your boilerplate frontpage…

The case for the defence recently presented a Venn diagram that showed ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’ with an intersection ‘people who argue about the difference between geeks and nerds’.

The prosecution would now like to offer this Venn diagram which has been floating around the internet for about a year…

The first person to comment on the geekery or nerdishness of arguing with Venn diagrams will be sacrificed to the school bully.

QWxsIHlvdXIgYmFzZSBhcmUgYmVsb25nIHRvIHVz

What amuses me significantly more is that none of the 6 Google results currently showing this string are in the same deeply retro-nerd context that I’m using it in…

Answers (if you give a shit) on a postcard to the usual comment box…

EDIT : 7/7/10
I suppose the string should really be one of these two

QUxMIFlPVVIgQkFTRSBBUkUgQkVMT05HIFRPIFVTLg==
QUxMIFlPVVIgQkFTRSBBUkUgQkVMT05HIFRPIFVT

but I don’t like all-caps (even if they are technically correct) and there are no results at all for those two…

Maybe this isn’t the best idea after all…

• 2 * Weatherproof Solar panels @ £21
• 2 * deep cycle 12v 7A batteries @ £10
• 300W Inverter @ £26

Add some wood to make a rain shelter for it, and you’ve got a power station out in your garden for £80. Or I could buy £100 of armoured cable and pretend I’d got an electrician to install it. Even if we ignore the geekiness, I think we all know which one is more likely…

I present to you, The Periodic Table, as arranged by Thomas Andrew Lehrer…

[ a larger version (2000*1000) is available, but Flickr won't show it. Mail me and I'll see what I can do... ]

Strange… I would have gone for Comic Sans MS. Or Brush Script…

Laptop Stand

I have just two complaints so far… firstly that the rectangle drawing tool seems to go off in an random direction (which is probably because I haven’t found the right toggle) and secondly that you can’t control in which direction the textures are applied.

I’m now desperately looking for things to draw.

The first victim? Some thoughts for a collapse laptop stand…