Five simple steps to better typography – a really interesting and well presented guide by Mark Boulton. It manages to explain concepts founded in print but with an eye to how they may work online. Useful stuff, a bookmark to come back to.

Phatduck – the blog of an American chef on a two month stage at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck – recently voted #1 restaurant in the world in the Restaurant magazine awards. It’s fabulous; really personal, really interesting, and oh the food. Do subscribe.

Blockies lets you annotate the planet even more than you have done already. You take a photo on your cameraphone, put a sticker with a unique code where you took the pic, send it to blockies.com with the code appended in a message. Now anyone passing just needs to message blockies, GET your unique code… and they get the photo. “Photo graffiti”, they call it. Now, to batch upload to both Blockies and Flickr… [via We make money not art]

Yep, it’s live: Google Maps UK. Same features as the US version but without the creepy satellite photos (yet). Pretty accurate, good route-finding (although it automatically assumes A-roads are faster than anything else, which is not the case in London), and all the business data is taken from Yell so it’s got lots of great stuff in. Like, for instance, all the Indian restaurants near me. The top link, Indigo, I can strongly recommend.

Brian Meidell is hacking his workplace coffee machine. For serious. Dumping EPROMS, burning new ones. Not sure what he’s going to do with it yet, but it looks mighty fun.

SCIgen produces randomised, automatic computer science papers. With graphs and diagrams and everything; clever Perl scripting combined with LaTeX abuse. The results are funny in themselves, but even better – the team of MIT grads who made it have been invited to give one of these talks at a conference. Bravo, young sirs.

Woo yeah, baby: OS X Tiger is here in seventeen days… and for once, I’ll be able to buy it.

PerlNomic is a game of Nomic played out entirely in Perl source code. In short, it hurts my head.

Semi-goofy photo of me from Blogs In Action (courtesy of Lee Bryant). Focused, intent… and writing notes on my Powerbook. Still, sideburns in full effect.

“Typo is a absolutely minimal weblogging engine”. There’s no admin interface; you just set it up and from that point post to it via XMLRPC. Nifty – it’s a database driven app, unlike, say, Blosxom, but all from desktop applications. Plus, it’s written in the language and framework du jour – Ruby on Rails.