semicircular.net

• Main Page - Geo Hashing - (tags: gps wiki xkcd)
• Giant 'telescope' links London, New York - CNN.com - Just plain cool. (tags: art installation internet webcam)
• Ross Gittens - Pseudo battlers should get a grip | smh.com.au - "I, too, find that being a grumpy old man helps keep me going. And nothing annoys me more than hearing the comfortably off trying to convince themselves - and anyone who'll listen - they're really battlers." (tags: australia economics gittens politics taxation)
• Budget 2008 - The Real Losers | newmatilda.com - The pregnant, alco-pop drinking luxury car driver. (tags: austraila budget cartoon politics)

• Wired Review: Asus Eee PC 900 Is Even Better Second Time Around - I just want one! (tags: asus computer hardware laptop review)
• Sony Bravia Play Doh Rabbits in New York | Duncan's TV Ad Land - This really is a cool ad. (tags: advertising sony stopmotion)
• Facebook Developers News - Using Facebook Chat via Jabber - "Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat." Nice one. (tags: facebook jabber xmpp)
• 1.50 australian dollars per litre in dollars per gallon - Google Search - ... and Americans think $4 a gallon is expensive... (tags: australia energy petrol usa)
• Phun - 2D physics sandbox - Wow. (tags: amazing physics science simulation)
• Drop.io: Simple Private Exchange - Great idea; upload a file, get a tinyurl style URL for it, no accounts required, with optional password protection. (tags: online sharing tools upload)

• Welcome — Little Bird Electronics - "We distribute the open-source physical computing platform called Arduino" (tags: arduino australia electronics hardware)
• Common shell script mistakes - Some good tips here (tags: bash programming script shell tips)
• Stevey's Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back - (tags: dynamic languages python toread)
• Instant Rimshot - Tell a bad joke, push the button. (tags: audio drumroll funny)
• Déjà Vu Dining - New York Times - "There were no seats in the bar or waiting area, of course. They had long been snared by people who appeared to have taken up semipermanent residence and were perhaps even having their mail forwarded." (tags: franchise newsarticle restauraunt review)

An annoyance with the latest Firefox 3 Beta.The ctrl-scroll wheel (aka mousewheel) page text resize shortcut inexplicably reversed itself since the last version of Firefox I was using. That is, Ctrl-WheelDown now makes the text smaller, whereas before it made it larger.

In fairness to Mozilla, this change actually makes the behaviour more in line with guidelines and probably, if you were a brand new Firefox user, it'd be more intuitive too.

But for those of us who have grown accustomed to the old behaviour and don't want to bother retraining muscle memory, here is the secret... go to Firefox's about:config settings page (type about:config into the location bar) and find the "mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines" setting, and change it from positive one to negative one. That is, after the change, the relevant prefs should be:

mousewheel.withcontrolkey.action = 3
mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines = -1

Problem solved. More information at Mozilla bug #141476.

Update: You may also want to install the excellent NoSquint extension, also available at the official Firefox addons page. It remembers your preferred zoom levels per site. I'd also recommend setting your primary zoom method to Text Zoom only... but that's more personal preference I think.

• Keyboards, Keyboards :: dirtystylus - On keyboards. Why can't manufacturers get it right? I for one quite like the old Compaq / new HP desktop keyboards. (tags: keyboard typing)
• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Clay Shirky - "For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV." (tags: blogpost humanity productivity society tv)
• Textism: On cameras and flies - Dean Allen buys a Nikon DSLR and loves it... "I feel like someone handed a slice of hot toast spread with cultured butter after a lifetime breakfasting on Skittles and government cheese... Ahem. Gonna go take pictures of my feet." (tags: camera nikon photography)
• And the Latte Indicator Says... Economy Screwed - Silicon Alley Insider - "In the salad days, of course, many Starbucks fans argued that $5 Mocha Frappucinos were no longer 'consumer discretionary' items but 'consumer staples' ..." Not so much these days! (tags: coffee economics funny starbucks)

• ongoing - Multi-Inflection-Point Alert - "Damn, there's a lot going on. Is it always like this? Well, no, it hasn't been. But in the future, it may be." (tags: blogpost business technolgy)
• best of craigslist : Open Letter to the Roaches in My Apartment - "A couple of times, I even turned the lights off and stood motionless for five minutes, then flicked them back on and rained horrible death upon whichever of you had been lured out. I really thought this would have been enough to make my point. " (tags: cockroaches craigslist funny rant)
• Facebook | Lexicon - MMmm, graphs! Check out "birthday" search as well, interestingly dips around Dec 25 and around Feb 29, but perhaps not as much as you'd expect. (tags: facebook graphs lexicon via:qwghlm zeitgeist)

• Oxford, England - A Pub Crawl Through the Centuries - New York Times Travel - "The Kings Arms is a linchpin of Oxford life. Situated at a junction in the heart of the city, it has spacious, airy front rooms, and at the rear three or four small rooms, all thick with honey-colored wood and irregular in shape." (tags: pubs travel uk)
• Harmony Project home page - From the same researchers who developed Unison file synchronisation... "Harmony is framework for defining, updating, and synchronizing views over strings, trees, and relations." (tags: code research synchronisation)
• The Rather Difficult Font Game - "Rather difficult" being quite the understatement. (tags: ajax design fonts quiz)
• YouTube - Wii Fit Parody - "Don't want to invest $3.19 on a hula hoop? Why not pick up a Wii for just $300!" (tags: funny nintendo wii)
• Hardy Heron -- Clean or Dirty | Linux Journal - "As the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS rapidly approaches, the all important question is beginning to form in everyone's mind. Upgrade, or freshly install." No question for me, I dist-upgrade. (tags: linux release ubuntu upgrade)
• Summize Realtime Twitter Search - "We index Twitter's public timeline in realtime, thread together associated tweets, and give you the search tools to dig in." Impressively responsive, too. (tags: api search tools twitter)

• List of The X-Files episodes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Thanks Wikipedia... "This is a list of episodes from the FOX science fiction television series The X-Files." (tags: guide scifi tv x-files)
• Top 25 LinuxJournal.com Articles of All Time, Part 1 - (tags: linux networking popular)
• Twitter / THErealDVORAK - John Dvorak (of This Week In Tech and Cranky Geeks fame) starts twittering, gets 3000 followers practically overnight. (tags: dvorak twitter)
• Psystar Corporation - OpenMac - Clone Apple hardware? "The highly extensible OpenMac is a configuration of PC hardware capable of running unmodified OS X Leopard kernels." (tags: apple cheap clone hardware mac)