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!

Monty you terrible cunt! For sale for just(!) 145K GBP is the long abandoned property where Richard E Grant and co were filmed for Withnail and I.

Sounds like an amazing place. If only I were rich.

Isolated Sleddale Hall near Shap, will be put up for sale by water giant, United Utilities, with a starting price of £145,000.

The ramshackle building, known as Uncle Monty’s Cottage in the cult movie, still contains many of the original features used during filming.

It will come under the hammer with Savills on 16 February.

The farmhouse has been unoccupied for many years and is only accessible via a dirt track, it is almost two miles from the nearest public road.

1. Coupon Mountain offers “free coupon codes, bargains and sales from more than 2,000 online stores.”
2. Coupons.com allows users to browse current grocery coupons and then print them at home. US Centric.
3. DealCatcher “is updated daily and features coupons and deals for online merchants as well as printable coupons for local stores.” Again, US Centric.
4. Currentcodes.com “has a full-time staff of trained individuals whose only job is to find new coupon codes and discount codes and verify the accuracy of the existing database.”
5. FatWallet You can find online coupons and compare prices. But the heart of this site is the discussion forum.
6. The Absurdly Cool Freebie Finder, an automated free-stuff aggregator.
7. RetailMeNot is another smart source for online coupon codes.
8. mygrocerydeals.com. Want to learn what’s on sale this week at your local grocery store?
9. The Grocery Game is a for-pay site designed to maximize coupon savings.
10. Prescriptions Discounts
11. The Coupon Clippers is “the nation’s largest online grocery coupon clipping service, offering more than a million national-brand coupons at any given time in our warehouse and shipping center.”
12. Ben’s Bargains tracks deals, coupon codes, rebates, and freebies.
13. Coupon Cabin provides up-to-date online coupons.
14. Flamingo World is yet another online coupon code aggregator, but this one offers a UK version
15. Deal Locker offers a treasure trove of online coupons.
16. Slickdeals.net “the most frequently updated and complete deal site on the web.”
17. Dealio is “your source for the best deals on anything, anywhere. Search for deals directly from our Web site or use our arsenal of FREE deal hunting tools to find the best deals while you’re on the go.”
18. Hot-Deals “a collection of websites and RSS feeds built by deal seekers. This website is updated continuously…We only post deals that we truly feel are hot deals, which is why our users call us the most trusted deals portal site on the Internet.”
19. Techbargains offers a human-generated collection of links to “the best deals in tech”.
20. Woot, an online store that sells “cool stuff” for cheap.
21. http://www.antirebate.com/
22. http://dealhack.com
23. http://dealmac.com/
24. http://dealnews.com
25. http://eDealInfo.com
26. http://www.clipfire.com
27. http://www.couponmom.com/
28. http://www.dodtracker.com
29. http://www.mrcheapstuff.com
30. http://autobrag.com Car Specific
31. http://clearlycontacts.ca Contact lense specific, Canadian
32. http://www.diyplanner.com Free planners
33. http://123deals.com
34. http://www.hotcouponworld.com
35. http://www.promotionalcodes.org.uk, UK centric

Some of these (1-20) are from Get Rich Slowly. The rest are from all over the place! I will be adding to this list as time goes by.

I used to be more shy than I am now, it’s pretty rare that I appear shy these days. As a kid it would have been good to have the internet and go through some methods of beating shyness. If you are shy, it can be overcome.

1. Understand Your Shyness

2. Turning Self Consciousness into Self Awarenessowards any change or life improvement.

3. Find Your Strengths

4. Learn to Like Yourself

5. Not Conforming

6. Focus on Other People

7. Releasing Anxiety through Breath

8. Releasing Anxiety through Movement

9. Visualization

10. Affirmation

11. Do Not Leave an Uncomfortable Situation

12. Accept Rejection

13. Relinquish Perfectionism

14. Stop Labeling Yourself

15. Practice Social Skills

16. Practice Being in Uncomfortable Situations

17. The Three Questions – During social settings where you may experience nervousness, periodically ask yourself the following three questions. Doing so will distract yourself from more self-destructive thoughts. Make it your mantra:

1. Am I breathing?
2. Am I relaxed?
3. Am I moving with grace?

18. What is Comfortable for You?

19. Focus on the Moment

20. Seek and Record Your Successes

See here for the full list and explanations.

Cute robots all built by Ann. Warning, site has some annoying flash. Wow, I must have made 8 spelling errors while typing those last two sentences, crazy.

Ann P. Smith’s Robots.

The handy and free Name Mangler. Well worth it for those tasks where you have to rename a lot of files at once, or worse, rename them sequentially.

Name Mangler
If you need to rename several files at once every now and then, this is the application you have always been looking for. Name Mangler is a batch file renamer that supports all common renaming tasks: Find and Replace including support for regular expressions; Number Sequentially; Change Case; Set Extension; Add Prefix/Suffix; Remove/Insert Characters.

Want to pick how fast your fan is running in OS X? Use smcFanControl2. Now why doesn’t something like this exist for Windows?