I was going to upload the said pictures tonight but after staying up until 1.30am — and amazingly avoiding a hangover this morning — I’m just too wiped out; vegging out in front of a repeat of Top Gear is about all I can be bothered with. That 6am run tomorrow morning is looking mightily uninviting right now. And so to bed…

On the BitTorrent front, I’m very interested to find out about Mininova from Tim. I’ve been using The Pirate Bay so far but the lack of dodgy adverts at Mininova is appealing. Since iPlayer came out at the top of the year we’ve started using it frequently. Having become accustomed to watching programmes on our laptop, I want to be able to access all TV programmes this way. Downloading them with BitTorrent works very well, especially because we get free overnight bandwidth from the nice folks at PlusNet. But that endorsement can wait for another post.

One tip I’d pass on to Mac and Linux (and *nix) users would be to use Transmission. It takes all the insanity out of BitTorrent downloads and just works.

I don’t get much spam and thanks to Thunderbird’s junk filtering I barely have to spend any time even thinking about it. Recently, though, I’ve been paying it more attention because I realised that I can do my part in making the web a safer place: In Firefox you can report scam sites, or “web forgeries” as they call them. This information is then passed on to all other Firefox users and they are warned if they ever visit that scam site. Cool, huh? So that’s what I’m doing now, to try and give a little bit back. Want to help?

I’m on the fence about Facebook “friending” of folks I went to junior school with. Of course I’m interested to see what they’re up to now, that’s only natural, but I don’t think I need to keep tabs on them that much. I mean, I’ve wasted more than enough time on that site already and I’ve specifically stayed away from all the Pirates and Zombies and Vampires malarkey. Call me miserable if you like, I’m just trying to use my time wisely; I’m not very good at that as it stands.

And what’s with all this “wall” business? That’s got to be the most ass-backwards form of communication yet invented. Clearly I’m just too old to “get” it. Oh well, I am a dad after all, I suppose I can’t feel too bad about it, it’s my role in life.

And at home? Well, the hard drive finally broke so I had to rebuild the PC, which was actually quite painless — thanks Ubuntu! Then the kids managed to break our bed this week by jumping on it too enthusiastically, meaning the mattress is on the floor until the replacement arrives next Tuesday, when, of course, I’m in the US and unable to put it together for Louise.

So, I may be losing the war at the moment but there’s one battle I can win: With some help from the Google Reader Widget for WordPress I’ve added the contents of my news feed to the right-hand side of the blog. Sweet. Hope you find the links interesting.

Also making an attempt for the most categories for a single post here.

Time passes.

There, done. Will upload a picture and blurb a bit later.

The real coolness starts when you create an account — everything you listen to is recorded in your profile. You can skip over or even permanently ban tracks you don’t like. In this way the system learns what you like. Over time it starts coming up with recommendations for you and finds other “neighbour” users on the site who share your tastes. Then you can tune in and listen to what they’re listening to. What a great way to discover new music!

I’m really only scratching the surface here, too. You can download plug-ins for your “normal” music player (e.g. iTunes, WinAmp, Songbird or even your iPod) so that what you listen to “normally” is recorded in your last.fm profile. You can create groups. You can see when your favourite artists are playing nearby. You can add your recently played tracks to your blog. You can make recommendations to your friends. You can clear out your profile and “start again”. You can even listen to my very own radio station.

Google Reader has a few nice features. Firstly, it can order posts such that more “important” posts, i.e. those from less frequently updated sites, are shown before those from more prolific sites. You can also share posts, creating your own news stream, which other people can subscribe to and so on ad infinitum.

So, there you go Tim, let’s see what you’ve got! Louise and I will be joining you as soon as I’ve upgraded our PC to the latest version of Ubuntu.

One of the nice features of Firefox is that you get search suggestions from Google when you use the integrated search box on the toolbar. Cool!

Where am I going with this? Well, if you type “1+2+3″ into the search box with Google selected you get “= 6″ as the first suggestion, before you even press Enter. Super cool!