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?

Having talked about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript recently, today along comes the Antikythera Device, also beloved of peculiar conspiracy theorists.

Not quite as mysterious, as we pretty much know what it was for -- astronomical calculations. But there is the puzzle of how it was possible, 2000 years ago, to manufacture such an intricate and precise mechanism. Time travel? Aliens? Very good craftsmanship? Make your own choice.

The new story is that some guy has built a functioning replica, and here's a New Scientist video of him explaining it. You do have to wonder how much "educated guesswork" he had to use to fill in the sizable gaps in what is firmly known about its workings and detailed purpose. But it's still pretty impressive.

St Peter's Brewery sends out an irregular email newsletter, with offers and so on, but it doesn't actually include a link to, or even the url of, their website so you can go and buy stuff. Charming amateurishness in this over-commercialized age, or bewildering incompetence?

Anyway, they currently have Organic Ale and Organic Best on special, to mark National Organic Week or some such bibble -- that's £16 for 12 * 500ml bottles, down from £22. Add a fiver for shipping, that's still pretty good value I reckon, for two very nice beers.

Every now and then they clear short-dated beer out at just £10 or £12 a case, which is clearly even better value. So it's worth signing up to the newsletter, even if you then have to oh-so-laboriously use your bookmark to go to the site.

In other annoyance news, my wireless network connection has decided to go on the blink today: it keeps going in and out every few minutes, causing web sessions to drop and so on. I am at fairly long range for the aerials, but it normally works OK. Obvious suspicion was that one of the cats was sitting on the router, but no. Maybe next door has installed a big electromagnet: I heard a load of banging earlier. Have any of you experimented with Pringles-tube-waveguides etc to improve wireless transmission?

A few things that have caught my eye recently:

• BgPatterns is a terrific resource for generating background graphics. Choose your motif, colurs, canvas texture, rotation, scaling, opacity and basically every tweak you might reasonably need. Preview it live on the site, then save it locally as a jpg for your own use. Really nice implementation.
• The Nietzche Family Circus is a small and silly idea, but an effective one. Pair a random Family Circus cartoon with a random Nietzche quotation, step back and admire. This is my favourite so far.
• Essex have introduced what they grandly term Essex Cricket Television. The only clips up so far depict various Essex players humiliating hapless Yorkshiremen last Wed with bat and ball on a screen too small and low-res to identify players, devoid of context such as the current score, and in my case at least the sound wouldn't work. Well, it's a start I guess.
• Rather better are Tim Hunkin's short films about the workings of slot machines in general, and his Under the Pier Show in particular.

Following a link from languagelog, I learned some things about predictive text.

Did you know that the commonest predictive text system is called T9? I didn't. But I do now.

I'm pretty far from being plugged into the hep youthful argot of the streets, but even I've heard people referring to something as "book" to mean "cool". And of course everyone knows that "Smirnoff" is really "Poisoned". But I hadn't come across "chubi" to mean "bitch" -- I guess my friends are too well-spoken to need that.

And I had never noticed that "Ask the cool barmaid for nine pints of beer" could mean "Ask the book carnage for mind shots of adds". Had you?

Apparently in Swedish, if you try to type gästlista (guest list), T9 will instead recommend hästkista (horse-coffin). You may wonder why horse-coffin is even in the phone's vocabulary.

What I want to know though is: on my old phone, the first suggestion for 99 was "xx", quite useful when signing off a text. On my current phone though it comes up with "wy" first. Wy on earth would anyone choose that ahead of kiss-kiss? I can only think of "wyvern".

Edited to add: and here's a blog for people who want to get words added to the dictionary. "Corned beef (it has beef, but not corned)".

Apols if you've already seen this courtesy of ar_gemlad, but I thought it was too good not to circulate.

Everyone knows and loves CAPTCHAs, those distorted pieces of text that you have to decipher and type in to prove you're not a spambot, right? You may even use them on your own sites -- we do in a few places, because some of our forms were getting exceedingly spammed.

Well, now you can turn them to good use -- instead of generating text and distorting it for the purpose, why not use pieces of extant text from old printed works which are sufficiently unclear that they've baffled OCR attempts to digitize them? You can get plugins for various common blog etc applications, and libraries for various common programming languages, to allow your own CAPTCHAs to contribute to Carnegie-Mellon's effort to digitize the many scans of books held at archive.org.

(There's all sorts of clever stuff about how they make sure what the user types in is right, but I won't go into that here.)

OK, they are somewhat more complex inside than incandescent bulbs, and contain a little mercury. But this set of instructions seems a bit over-cautious. (Via Snopes.)

The very first such bulb I had, this was ten years or so ago when I was first living at what later became The House with No Name, fell out of its socket and smashed to pieces on my bed, during the night when I was in it, within a couple of weeks of installation. It had cost something like 12 quid, so I was not pleased, and would have been less so had I had to buy a disposable dustpan, mercury spill kit, etc to get rid of it. As it was, ignorant of the dreadful health hazard, I just scooped it up and slung it in the bin.

Since then I've never had one break, or go phut, although I suppose it's only a matter of time. I think we're not allowed to put them out with the other recycling, have to take them to the tip for special handling. Have you any experience of such things?

This looks like fun -- guy plans to shoot himself 20 miles into the air using a giant crossbow and a jet engine. (If the FAA'll let him.) I had a look on his own site for more details, but it seems out of date. Surely must be a fairly hideous amount of gs, though?

Bah, my lovely new shredder has jammed at just the second time of using, on a particualrly chewy piece of shrub. Anyone got any tips on unclogging? I've tried running it backwards, but it's jammed that way too. And I can't take it apart, it's fastened with special pecularily-shaped bolts.

Just in case this is of interest to anyone, I've been looking into the practicalities of using a Gmail account as a backup device. I was thinking it could be quite useful to be able to store copies of key stuff on Google's servers, 2GB is plenty of space to hold all I need to keep, and it ought to be straightforward and painless to keep the backup up-to-date via ADSL line.

( RoamDrive vs Gmail Drive )