Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

I just noticed, on a recent Amazon packet, that it included the invitation to "Rate this packaging", at www.amazon.co.uk/packaging. Intrigued, I investigated further. It seems you can rate it from for degree of protection afforded, for appropriateness of size, and for ease of opening; and you can add freeform comments and even upload photos (of your delighted face as you rip the box open. Or possibly of the dreadful gash it made on your thumb.)
[Poll #1598289]

I was quite pleased to see that there exists such a thing as a portable jump starter, ie. a device that you plug in to the mains to charge it up, and you can then subsequently use it to jump start your car. This one at Maplin is an example.

Unfortunately, a bit of hunting around turns up reviews ranging fairly evenly from "it works, brilliant" to "it doesn't work, rubbish".

Anyone actually tried using one of these, and how does it compare with a normal trickle charger?

I love my Microsoft Trackball Optical, which I've had for about seven years now, and thought idly about getting another one for spare. They've not been made for a while, so I expected them to be fairly pricy. Even so, I was quite amazed to see the best price I can get for a new one is nearly 300 USD. Even second-hand ones on eBay start around 50 quid. Yikes! Perhaps I don't need a spare quite that much.

I see Logitech do a similar sort of thing, does anyone know if it's any good?

I need to get a new hard drive for my PC. I've not bought one for around 3 years, and that mfr (Maxtor) doesn't even exist any more... any of you bought one recently, or otherwise kept up with devpts? Who's good these days?

Internal drives mostly seem to be SATA now, which am I right in thinking isn't back-compatible with my ATA motherboard? But maybe I should be considering an external one instead -- how practical is it to use such as an actual working drive, rather than just for backup etc?

Any thoughts / recs / etc welcome!

Top trumps with typefaces. Silly but brilliant, I shall get this when I'm next feeling self-indulgently frivolous.

Does anyone know, or can find out, the details of a service to which one can send a DNA sample and get back a report about one's ethnic mix -- a seen on that TV programme from last year or whenever it was?

I would expect it to be commercially available by now, as all sorts of other DNA-related stuff seems to be.

Yay, I finally got some money from Predictify. This is the site where you make wisdom-of-crowds type predictions, and if they turn out to be correct, you get a share in the money put up by whoever it was wanted to know the answer. I've so far shared in about 35 payouts, the biggest being $12.86 for predicting Clinton's % share of the vote in the Iowa caucus, and I've made a total of $41.42 (over a period of about 6 months). Which puts me 125th in the rankings -- the most successful predictor has made over $200.
I must admit that I'm highly doubtful about the business model¹, and I was wondering whether they were ever going to be able to afford to actually pay out. But they had a venture capital round to raise the money to do so. Click here if you'd like to give it a go!

In sadder news, one of my favourite webcomics, Rice Boy, has finished. I've probably talked about this before, but if you missed that, it's a fabulously strange and beautiful thing. The Wikipedia entry seems rather baffled but gives a little idea. Anyway, read it, it's great.

---

1 Partly beause the "game" aspect of it is somewhat broken, and when players realize this, they stop behaving in a business-helpful way. I can go into more detail about this, if anyone's interested (don't all rush at once though).

World Freedom Atlas is a terrific Flash thingy which displays various measures of political freedom, corruption, terror, lifespan, etc, as world maps. You can display variables agains tone another, show changes over time, etc -- all very beautiful and clear. Easy to spend hours mesing around with it. Interesting to compare eg. the Amnesty International vs the US State Dept measure of political terro by country. And the Hobbes Index, indicating to what extent life is short, nasty, solitary, poor and brutish.

WikiDashboard is a Wikipedia-analysing tool. "The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia." They do this by showing, for each page, a neat visual summary of which users have edited it most, and when. The idea is that you can then check up on those users and see if their other eidts suggest hobbyhorses. Not a tool that will transofrm Wikipedia into a wonderful paradise, but useful enough that I think it would be worth building into it.

Ktrak, for a bike that thinks it's a snowmobile. Convertyour bike with one of their kits, replacing the wheels with a cat track at the back and a ski at the front. I suspect going uphill would be fairly hard work...

The TV Tropes Wiki is a home for plot tropes used not just in TV but also in a variety of other media. Originated as a tool for scriptwriters, but fun just to browse around. For example, see For Want of a Nail vs In Spite of a Nail.

Vatican, the board game -- unlock the secrets of how men become Pope! And it is always men these days, after that nasty business with Pope Joan. "VATICAN, historically accurate, is more compelling than the depictions of the Catholic Church in popular culture. Reality and truth are always more interesting than fiction... VATICAN is a fascinating way for all to understand a central point of Catholic identity, and will appeal to a wide variety of audiences, whatever their religious preferences." The users on BoardGameGeek are not very flattering about it, but then they're probably heretics who are going to burn in hell.

Today I got in change a pound coin with a sticker obscuring one face. The sticker says "Exchange this pound for a FREE Fruit Sourz at <bar>".

Now, call me obsessively pedantic if you like -- but to my mind, if you have to exchange a pound for something, that's not quite the same as it being "FREE". In fact, some might say that this would be slightly more accurately be described as "it costs a pound". But what do I know about the economics of running bars?

This is quite cool I think -- an online collaborative flowcharts (etc) app. And it all runs in the browser. Even exports SVG. Free while in beta, afterwards they plan to have a paid-for version and an ad-supported version.