The Truck Driver’s Gear Change Hall Of Shame. An entire website devoted to that pop monstrosity, the cheesy, obvious, and painful upwards key-change. If you don’t know what I’m talking about: think Westlife. Isn’t the internet wonderful?

Things to scare the children with #94: the fine young lads from Arab Strap at Loch Leven, in kilts.

HTTPanties. Words fail me.

Sometimes, the world is just too beautiful.

The artwork of Matthew Borrett; inverted cityscapes, hollowed out of paper. Beautiful, mesmeric.

All good things, it seems, must come to an end. My iChat AV beta ran out of time today – its number was up, and it reverted (with a reboot) to crappy old iChat, which I’m not best pleased about. So now: do I put up, buy it for

Shiny OSX mini-application of the week: xPad, a multi-document text editor. More of a notebook, it’s almost entirely replaced my abundant overuse of Stickies, and is a lovely little piece of software. Cheap, too.

“Glamourised Slave Labour”, as Digo put it: RipDigital. You UPS them your CDs, they rip them, and send them back to you with a DVD or hard disk with the mp3s on. Starting at $129 for 100 CDs… (Obviously, quite a useful service for libraries and the like, but hell for copyright – all that data passing through their servers…)

Oh, and I apologise for the cutz0rness of the New Year post. I was just happy, you know… a return to terse form will now ensue.

Ken and Barbie as Aragorn and Arwen. The word you are looking for, friend, is wrong.