Project Starshine - Student Tracked Atmospheric Research Satellite, or Disco Ball in Space? Wow...Found by following a link from Heavens-Above, which is a wonderful resource for getting things like the latitude & longitude of almost anywhere, or really useful astronomical charts

To go with the recent links on securing Windows kit (assuming I remembered to put them here) The Register has a piece on tightening up Linux installations. I guess it's pretty self-evident, but...

Thanks to lukelog, I've found the lyrics to Tom Wait's Step Right Up, as well as a bunch of others...

Celestia is a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions, and it's available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. It's wonderful...

Is the Lord of the Rings an allegory of the PhD? Well, Danny Yee seems to think so. As does Lilian Edwards, who forwarded the link to the Plokta News Network.

Pissed off by phone spam? Register with the Telephone Preference Service

Oh boy, this could be fun. According to The Register, Philips have decided that copy-protected CDs aren't sufficiently close to the CD standard to be allowed to use the CD logo.
And adding injury to insult, they would appear to be working on a burner that will copy them -- it's only playback that breaches the DMCA!

I wonder how these people came up with their name: Ancient Sacred Landscape Network. It's hardly contrived at all, honest...

Another reason to bin Windows Media Player from The Register...

It's about fucking time. Finally, bullies face school ban for a single offence. Of course, it would have been far too much to have expected this in my day -- it was probably considered "character building" or something -- but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Trinity Academy's (that's Trinity Academy in Edinburgh for any websearchers out there) attitude to bullying (basically summarised as fine words and unbuttered parsnips) messed up our kids something rotten...

From Bifurcated Rivets comes this link to the WordsEye project for converting text into images...

So that's all right, then

"Never mind the needless deaths, we've only succeeded in making bin Laden a shadow of his former self", says Terry Jones in The Observer...