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:

I’ve finally finished my South African News aggregator website. It’s a website that collates news items from various news sources from South Africa and puts them on one page. You click through to the actual news story website if you want to read more than just the short excerpt.

Why South Africa and why do this?, I hear you ask. Well firstly I thought the domain name was funny so I bought it on a whim. I overheard a South African talking about his country in a pub and it did sound like Ifrica, but maybe Efrica is more accurate?

Then I was left with what I wanted to achieve with the actual site. Greedily I just wanted to earn money from advertising and get as high up certain online search facilities for the phrase “South Africa”. I suppose thats what every other commercial site wants. South Africa is hosting the 2010 World Cup so that gives me three years to climb those rankings and get a piece of that action. The World Cup will be a huge boost for the country and it could be possible to sell the domain name for a very nice profit.

Now I had to work out what to actually do with the site (I’m sure I’ve thought about this the wrong way round). I was toying around with RSS feeds and I suddenly thought of making one place where all the news from South Africa could be screened on just one page. Add some local bloggers and we have a site! Thats what’s up there now.

Over 2007 I’ll keep tabs on its search rankings, the amount of bandwidth the special Magpie RSS aggregator engine uses and the visitor statistics. If it does well then I’ll probably work on stage two of the site which would have the ability for people to select their local cities, choose sports and businesses, nominate their favourite blogs etc.. A little more interaction. We’ll see.

Oh, and if you know any South Africans please send them the site URL and ask them to forward it to their friends, thanks!

No, this isn’t a post about Allo Allo, just a collection of some rants I’ve seen on the net recently. We all love a good moan and here are some of the latest.

Warren Ellis took a well deserved shot at the inane celebrations of St Patrick’s Day by people who are not Irish. His Annual St Patrick’s Day Message is well worth a read.

Charlie Brooker loves a good moan too but in this article he stops for a moment just to watch the wonderful The Trap documentary by Adam Curtis. I’ve enjoyed the last two episodes and I hope he can knit it all together for Sunday’s final one.

I saw Casino Royale this week and though that Daniel Craig was a superb choice for James Bond. There are some people that disagree … a year before they saw the film. Their site is the imaginatively titled www.danielcraigisnotbond.com.

Julie Burchill has a good rant about my local council in Brighton & Hove. “Brighton Women’s Centre was shocked to find its modest annual funding had been slashed from £6,000 to a big fat zero. This at a time when the council could pocket £2m in parking fines in a six-month period without breaking sweat.” All this from her new book, Made In Brighton, coming soon.

What would make me moan? Possibly seeing this as I opened my door in the morning.

No, I didn’t go to see Fat Boy Slim yesterday. There’s some good pictures at The Argus though. Including this famous Brighton face I haven’t seen in ages:

The webstats for KingOfMyCastle during December really skyrocketed. This site had over 80,000 hits and nearly 6,000 unique visitors.

The BBC’s John Simpson looks ahead to World news events in 2007.

I finished watching The Wire Season 1 too and it’s so good I’ve ordered the second box set. Probably the best drama I’ve seen in a very long time. If you skip to the 2:20 in this YouTube video Charlie Brooker gives his opinion of it:

Had this in my mind for the last few days what with all the mid-term elections in The States. 15 minutes in Photoshop later:

Ha! Check this advert that was running on US television earlier this year.

This was created by the CEI, the Competative Enterprise Institute, which, funnily enough, is sponsored by Exxon.

It’s so nice to see the US winning the trust of the Iraqi people.

“Sean Smith, the Guardian’s award-winning war photographer, spent nearly six weeks with the 101st Division of the US army in Iraq. Watch his haunting observational film that explodes the myth around the claims that the Iraqis are preparing to take control of their own country.”

You can also see his image gallery here.

And to change direction slightly here’s something more entertaining coming from somewhere in Asia. A very cheap remake of Thriller with the worst music production I’ve ever heard:

Here’s a couple of games I’ve been playing this week:

First we have Line Rider. Just draw a simple line on the screen, press play and watch a man toboggan down the slope. You can redraw the line in more complicated waves as seen on YouTube.

Secondly we have Picto. This is a memory game where a new icon is added to the screen after every round. You just have to click the new one and ignore the others. It starts off easy but soon gets incredibly hard. I managed a score of 23 before my brain started to hurt.

It’s good to see the editting at The Argus is up to its usual fine standard, as can be seen with this article about durg-related crime.

And for some politics just check out Dan Olbermann’s special commentary on the Clinton vs Fox debacle. We always think of the US press as too government friendly but this goes to show that some networks aren’t scared to say what they think. The Guardian has also published Terry Jones’ latest letter to George Bush which is well worth a read.

And finally, from YouTube (again) comes this Simpsons classic, Dr Zaius.