Currently 50% off, today only. If you have an iPod Touch or iPhone then you really have to buy one of these. I can’t tell you how many times it’s saved my screen from getting scratched.

Seriously, buy it now using the coupon code memday09

OK so I checked CR this morning and the site worked but had no content. So I went into panic mode, got myself a coffee (decafe) and chatted about the weather for a bit. It’s lovely and sunny, thanks for asking. Then tried to find out what was going on.

The posts table was marked as crashed, I found out using myPHP, and it needed repairing. I did that via myPHP again and everything is all working.

Remember to do backups folks, you never know when something is going to go wrong.

I’m going to spring clean the backend server that hosts CreationRobot. It’s long overdue and the latest spanner that the server has thrown me is preventing me from editing old posts. Pretty frustraiting.

While I do this I’m going to update pretty much everything, including the theme. I’ve already done this with WordPress. It’s a good idea to keep that patched at all times. I’ve also done it with my plugins, so the theme is my next big step.

I use a modified version of Cutline, so I’m going to have to take the modern version of Cutline and hack it to work with CreationRobot. This will take time so please bear with me if you see some oddness or Cutlines default graphic at the top of the page here. The title graphic will probably be the last thing I change.

Anyway, lets blow off the digital cobwebs and get going.

Cutline 2.2 is UGLY. I’m going to investigate other options because I’m not using that terrible theme. Grey URL links? You thought that was a good idea? Really?

Just installed intense debate, a plugin that connects your blog to other social sites, facebook, flickr, twitter and so on. Has anyone used this plugin and seen if it is effective?

My profile on intense debate is http://intensedebate.com/people/jackdaw.

You still don’t believe in UFOs? Well I do, in the literal sense. As in, a lot of stuff we just cannot identify, which means in simple terms it is undentified. If the unidentified object happens to be flying, then it is a UFO. OK, so now in the literal sense you believe in UFOs? Good. On with the posting:

“On February 21, 2006 (the paper was only published recently), the venerable space telescope spied a UFO in an area of space where there should have been nothing at all.

Stranger still, the object disappeared almost as mysteriously as it arrived, about 100 days after the initial observation. It got very bright over time, to the 21st magnitude, then faded just as fast. Kind of like an explosion… Not much else is known about the celestial phenomenon, and it hasn’t reappeared since 2006.” Gizmodo.

The mystery object did not behave like any known kind of supernova. It is not even in any detectable galaxy. “The shape of the light curve is inconsistent with microlensing,” say the researchers. They recorded three spectra of it — and its spectrum, they write, “in addition to being inconsistent with all known supernova types, is not matched to any spectrum in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database” of vast numbers of objects. “We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class.” Sky and Telescope.

Some deep space explosion? Star wars? Bueller? Who knows.

Via Sky and Telescope.

Space is screaming – It’s some 6 times louder in space than anyone predicted.

In the words of Alan Kogut from the Goddard Space Center, “The universe really threw us a curve. Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming ‘noise’ six times louder than anyone had predicted.”

Of course, there is no sound in space. What NASA’s ARCADE system received was actually deafening cosmic radio background, and the source is completely unknown at this time. Normally radio telescopes pick up electromagnetic chatter in the 10 MHz and 100 GHz, coming from what are known as “radio galaxies.” But according to our existing models and theories, the signal shouldn’t exist, as there are “not enough radio galaxies to account for the signal.”

As detailed by Jesus when this story initially broke earlier this year, NASA said that to create this signal, “you’d have to pack [radio galaxies] into the universe like sardines. There wouldn’t be any space left between one galaxy and the next.” That’s obviously not the case.

The discovery, while amazing, also carries with it a substantial negative. Remember all that cool stuff about dark flow and the edge of the universe from earlier? Well, the BOOM complicates our efforts to detect it more accurately.

Originally via Gizmodo.

Really nice post over on Wired today, covering art and encryption all in one. I may be strange but that is a nice thing to run across first thing in the morning. Read through it, it’s worth it.

The most celebrated inscription at the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used to be the biblical phrase chiseled into marble in the main lobby: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” But in recent years, another text has been the subject of intense scrutiny inside the Company and out: 865 characters of seeming gibberish, punched out of half-inch-thick copper in a courtyard.

It’s part of a sculpture called Kryptos, created by DC artist James Sanborn. He got the commission in 1988, when the CIA was constructing a new building behind its original headquarters. The agency wanted an outdoor installation for the area between the two buildings, so a solicitation went out for a piece of public art that the general public would never see. Sanborn named his proposal after the Greek word for hidden. The work is a meditation on the nature of secrecy and the elusiveness of truth, its message written entirely in code.

I tried to jailbreak my iPhone 3G earlier. No go. Not sure why, it just looped at the Apple logo while the software, pwnage, declared happily all was well. It wasn’t well. So now what. After a google I found some easy to follow instructions on how to recover your iPhone and get it working again if it appears to be bricked. So here we go:

Recovering your iPhone

You need -

iTunes installed and working (Windows or Mac)

iPhone USB connector cable

A bust iPhone

Internet

Nice to have –

A backup of your iPhone from before you tried jailbreaking it.

1. Make sure your iPhone is NOT plugged into your computer, run iTunes.
2. Press and hold the top button for a few seconds, hold the home (bottom) button, now wait for your phone to turn off and keep holding the home button.
3. Connect your iPhone to the computer with iTunes running. Keep holding home until the connect/ed to iTunes graphics come up.

That’s it, now follow the onscreen instructions from iTunes. This will recover your iPhone. Be careful out there kids!