After about 48 hours of trialling ecommerce systems I think I’ve finally found the one I can hack into enough to achieve what I want. I’m making the mother of all baby stores and it’ll look amazing. More on that soon.

Slideshow from The Guardian: “Peter Walker talks to North Korea expert Nick Bonner and photographer Charlie Crane, who have produced a book of photographs from the country’s capital, Pyongyang. The pair travelled to the city three times to photograph people, tourist sights and hotels. Laid out as a guidebook, the pictures in Welcome to Pyongyang are accompanied by commentaries from North Korean tourism guides.”

Follow Me Now: The Zigzagging Zungazung Meme: “Do read the following, then, as but a draft of a more measured, more textured cultural and social history — a zigzagging story about the migrations and manifestations of a well-traveled musical figure. I will continue to version these texts and sounds no doubt, on the blog and — before too long we hope — in a book.”

The Atlas of the Universe. There’s quite a lot of stuff less than 10 light years away.

Listen to: A brilliant heavy dub and roots mix CD called HEAVY SOUND SYSTEM STYLE mixed by MadMongos.

Watch: The first part of the first episode of Filthy, Rich & Catflap:

This morning I saw that The Guardian has redesigned it’s website.

Although there was nothing wrong with the old style I do like this new redesign. The home page has been broken down into specific sections making it easier to access the items of news you want whilst still keeping a lot of white space so it doesn’t feel cluttered. It’s all done with CSS positioning and the markup is very clean but I found the load time quite high, probably due to the 20 or so scripts it loads.

Anyway, it’s an improvement.

My business website is getting a makeover too. I’ll be launching it this Saturday.

Are you a budding economist? If so you’ll find this study of alcohol content vs price very interesting. Cider is the clear winner.

Or a budding installation artist? Take a look at Lars-Erik Fisk’s VW Bus Ball.

No, you fancy starting a company, right? Better choose a good name for it though. Here’s how the world’s leading brands chose theirs.

Why not work in advertising. Here are nine of the best tips on creating a corporate image.

Actually, it may pay to be a futurist. Check this Ministry of Defense report on what the future holds for us.

No, I think Glamour Photography is the way forward. No need to do your own though when you can just trawl through some specially selected photographs at Flickrdreams.

I know it’s really sunny out there but when the usual April weather returns here are some online goodies to keep yourself amused with.

Peggle from PopCap Games. This is one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played. A cross between Bust-A-Move and bagatelle, this game starts off quite easy but soon toughens up. Free download for PC only.

Mastermind. Here’s an online version of the old boardgame Mastermind retitled Guess The Colors. I’m sure this game used to be hard but I seem to be winning this all the time. Play online at Games For The Brain.

Cisco Binary Game. Probably the geekiest game ever made. Do your binary addition using this funky application. I nerdily did quite well on this. I’d turn off the music if I was you too.

SkyChart. What with all the clear skies it’s now perfect for some stargazing. This interactive chart will tell you what’s in the sky and when.

Ah, the old ones are the old ones. Here’s a comprehensive list of jokes based on locations in the world, of the type:
- My wife’s gone to the West Indies
- Jamaica?
- No, she went of her own accord.

A Brighton man who runs a message in a bottle service has been asked to “investigate some of the many other ways to send messages overseas.” I just don’t think email is as romantic as that.

Gah! My eyes! I hope I’m nvere asked to make a website as cutesy as this Japanese website I discovered. Here’s Pet Salon Angela.

Science. An article about Superconductors at BBC Science. I remember watching Tomorrow’s World when I was young, seeing the levitating sheets of metal and thinking there would be skateboards like that one day. Seems like there’s still going to be a bit of a wait.

PDF Mags. A brilliant collection of downloadable design magazines from across the world. I’m hoping I get some inspiration from these.

A good video about the future of Net Neutrality.

My latest site. Simple one-page website for a new female plumbing business in Brighton. Introducing Girlz On Tap.

Colorstrology. A really good looking Flash website which will tell you the colours associated with your day of birth. I may start using this for clients!

Seminars about Long Term Thinking. It’s always good to have an idea of what the future holds. This site has a collection of audio seminar mp3s to listen to all based around what the future holds.

Not much this week. Here’s some interesting sites:

videojug.com - Life Explained. On Film. Brilliant YouTube inspired site with videos showing you how to dop almost anything.

UK HDTV Buyers Guide - Which kind of recommends not bothering to buy one for a couple of years.

The Wilhelm Scream - Funny video showing the same scream sample being used on hundreds of films.

Transformers Movie Trailer - This doesn’t look too bad actually.

I’ve been so busy since my last post working on a couple of amazing looking websites so here’s a week’s worth of posts in one big go.

The new Die Hard 4 teaser trailer:

The new man at Upton Park, Alan Curbishley. I think we’ll put 3 past Man Utd on Sunday.

He-Man sings 4 Non Blondes. A very messed up YouTube video featuring a camp He-Man singing a dance version of What’s Going On. I can’t get this out of my head now.

30 Essential Pieces Of Free Software for Windows. Superb collection of links to applications that will enhance your PC experience.

Boycott Christmas. Cartoons from the Christmas Resistance Movement.

The international contest of logos, trademarks and corporate identity Identity: Best of The Best 2006. Superb graphic design.

Look around Paisley Park. Take a 360 degree look around Prince’s home.

The Surrey Comet. Nothing special about this article entitled “Marksman called in to kill Kingston’s pigeons” but check out the comments below. Funniest thing I’ve seen this week.

Hot UK Deals. Amazing list of the latest cheap and free things to get online.

If you’re one of the lucky people to own a Nintendo Wii and have Orange Broadband, formerly Wanadoo, with a Livebox and have had problems getting online using Nintendo Wi-Fi then these tips may help.

First, you have to log on to your Livebox admin control panel using your PC. You can do this by using this URL in your internet brower: http://configuration.adsl/index2.html
When promted for your username and password use ‘admin’ and ‘admin’ if you can’t remember ever changing it before. Make a note of your Livebox name. Mine is WANADOO-B7E8.

Now go to Security -> Firewall and turn the setting to Low (disabled) and press ’submit’. As long as you have a firewall on your PC then it’ll still be safe.

UPDATE: I no longer think you need to do this last step. The default MEDIUM position should be fine.

Then go to Configuration -> Advanced -> Wireless and make sure your setting is ‘WEP security only’. ‘WEP and WPA’ may also work but unless you’re running a WPA encrytped device it’s unnecessary.

Now go to Security -> WEP Connection and make a note of your WEP Security Key. Keep the letter in CAPS as they wont work otherwise. It should be 26 characters long.

Turn on your Wii and go to the Wii Options (bottom left) then select ‘Wii Settings’. Now select ‘Internet’ and then ‘Connection Settings’. Select ‘Connection 1′ and then ‘Wireless Connection’.

Select ‘Search for an Access Point’. The Wii Now looks around for all the signals it can find. Press ‘OK’ and choose the one that matches the Livebox name we wrote down earlier. Move your Wii pointer over the password area and using the virtual Wii keyboard type in your WEP Security Key you found earlier. Press CAPS to make it easier, the number is in Hex so all the characters will be from 0 to 9 or A to F, no ‘I’s or ‘O’s please. *Do next step before anything else.

Go to your actual Livebox itself and look for two little black buttons in a small panel at the back. Press ‘1′, the one on the left. You now have 10 minutes in which to connect your Wii.

Back at the Wii hit ‘Yes’, then ‘OK’, then ‘OK’, then ‘OK’ again. The Wii will now test the connection. Hopefully after 30 seconds you’ll get a ‘The connection test was successful’ message. Well done!

You can now decide whether to perfom a Wii system update, I’d select ‘Yes’ if I were you. The Wii will then spend the next few minutes downloading the latest firmware. Now if you ever use a Wii service that needs the use of the Internet it will automatically connect. There’s no need to ever change any wi-fi settings again!

* Note, this site is not responsible for your Wii if anything were to go wrong with it by following the instructions here.

So, I hope that was of use to people out there. I’ve probably saved you a few hours of frustration or calls to Nintendo or Orange so feel free to send me a bit of cash using this nice little PayPal donate button here if you’re feeling generous or browse the online game stores featured above. Thanks! And have fun!

Hiding away on BBC4 earlier this year was one of the funniest programmes about television ever made, Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe. His caustic and sarcastic look at modern television and it’s audience is a breath of fresh against the season-long X-Factor/Strictly Come Dancing/Big Brother monstrosities we have on our screens.

Here he is in action highlighting some idiots desperate for fame (warning, contains swearing):

And if you’re in the mood for some online television here’s are some alternative YouTube videos I recommend:

Battle of the Album Covers (3 mins) - Famous album covers come alive and fight each other.

Charlie Brooker’s look at R Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet (2 mins) - This has to be seen to be believed. The world’s first hip-hopera.

Richard Dawkins lecture at an American college (37 mins) - Brilliant reading of some of Dawkin’s God Delusion book.

Japanese footage of today’s release of the Nintendo Wii (5 mins) - I should be getting mine at midnight on Thursday!

del.icio.us is one of a new generation of community sites that handle your links, posts and articles in interesting ways. Del.icio.us prides itself on being the most popular social bookmarking website allowing users to keep their favourite links or bookmarks online, rather than on their PCs. Nothing too remarkable about that you may say but the clever bit comes when they combine this information to use it in other ways. Then you can see if other people have similar links to you, just how popular your bookmarks are and you may find some links that are more useful than your current ones.

Today I decided to add the ’send to del.icio.us’ links to the bottom of my posts to allow people to automatically add them to the network. This should have been easy as the del.icio.us Save Buttons page has some code there I could use specifically for the the WordPress files which run this website. Unfortunately it didn’t work.

I’ve never programmed JavaScript before so I was stuck on how to make this work. So after around four hours of reading JavaScript primers and some pointing in the right direction online, I managed to fix the code myself.

So for anybody wishing to put a pop-up javascript del.icio.us link on their WordPress posts then please try this code:

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post" onclick="window.open('http://del.icio.us/post?v=4&noui&jump=close&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=< ?php the_title() ?>','delicious', 'toolbar=no,width=700,height=400'); return false;">Save to del.icio.us</a>


The reasons the original code wasn’t working were the encodeURIComponent functions in combination with the apostrophes. I removed them, as they’re both url encoded anyway, and it seems to have worked. So if you come across this page from a search engine or one of the other new social/community/network sites then please save it to del.icio.us as this could help some more people out.

I may be adding links to the other popular sites such as Digg and Reddit but I’ll need a long rest first.