A trip to London on Saturday, in practise. Leave Ely 16:26, arrive Kings Cross 10 minutes late. Change to Piccadilly line and stand outside the closed barriers for 15 minutes because of overcrowding. Give up on the tube, catch a number 59 bus to Aldwych: 10 minutes to reach Euston (faster to walk) and gave up after sitting in gridlock on Russel Square for 15 minutes. Eventually get rather empty Piccadilly line from Russel Square to Covent Garden, arriving 18:50. Oh, and then the restaurant said it would be a two hour wait for a table for four.

That said, the return journey wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs. The tube was behaving so that took the expected ten minutes, but then we just missed the train back home and the next train wasn't for over an hour. Jump into a taxi to Liverpool Street to catch the 22:26... to discover there are engineering works and we'd have to get a bus for two hours. Attempt to get the tube back to Kings Cross... more engineering works so that was out. Another taxi back to Kings Cross and we finally get on the last train home, arriving at 00:35.

Just for extra fun I'm in London for the Moblin 2.0 Release Party on Monday and there are yet more engineering works, so if I miss the 22:15 I'll be on a bus for half the journey. Stab stab stab.

NP: Repercussions, DJ Distance

Sunday:

Total of 5 Calls while abroad 00:23:20 £31.402

Money grabbing tight fisted evil bastards. This includes a rate of £1.25 a minute to receive a call.

NP: Los Angeles, Flying Lotus

Growing nicely.

The problem for mainstream pop since the 70s is that metal has siphoned off many of the best freaks and losers.

It's not often you read an article in the Guardian about Adam and The Ants, Finnish Battle Metal bands, and being "cool", but today I did.

The smooth Galaxy way to enjoy dark chocolate... deeply smooth, intensely delicious and not at all bitter.

This should be called Galaxy Fail. It looks like dark chocolate but is pumped with sugar so it has a weird sickly sweet taste, nothing like the creamy taste of the original Galaxy. I predict this product will be binned soon.

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning. Last week I watched, open-mouthed, a Newsnight piece on the spread of "Brain Gym" in British schools. I'd read about Brain Gym before - a few years back, in Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science column for this newspaper - but seeing it in action really twisted my rage dial.

Charlie Brooker in The Guardian gets deservedly angry over Brain Gym, after seeing an article about it on Newsnight (1, 2 on YouTube). The creator of Brain Gym was destroyed by Paxman, rather too easily to be honest.

NP: Voices, Vangelis (via Last.fm)

12 weeks and one day, to be precise.

Vicky is pregnant!

In other news, the new Lightroom 2 beta is very nice.

Original source, although the image was just pulled from the site.

• Bathroom scales
• A safe
• An Orange Pay As You Go SIM
• A wooden chopping board
• A Bluetooth headset
• Six iPod cases
• A Bodum teapot
• A radio walkman
• A Sharp portable minidisc recorder
• A Nikon APS camera
• Five belts
• Two boxes of word fridge magnets
• A 802.11g CardBus card
• An external USB sound device

It sounds a little like the Generation Game, I know. Combined with a bin bag full of junk, I can actually see the bottom of my drawers now!

If you were wondering why I haven't replied to your mails, reviewed your patches, or if I've been ignoring you, then I'm back! I can't promise that I won't continue ignoring you though...

NP: Sounds Like Murcof, Last.fm

The readers are never wrong. Repulsive, maybe, but never wrong. - Piers Morgan, as editor of the Daily Mirror, referring to how he lost circulation due to the paper's stance against the Iraq invastion.

Flat Earth News is a great book, and I can recommend it to everyone who is disappointed with the state of global journalism, and even more to anyone who thinks journalism is in general doing a good job.

NP: Untrue, Burial

OFFERED: 7 Blank Dual Layer DVD+R

was using them for xbox 360 games however found they failed alot. ideal for home movies or backing up data.

NHS primary care trusts are slashing funding for homoeopathic treatment amid debate about its efficacy and the drive to cuts costs, a study has suggested.

As Dan so succinctly put it, about freakin time. That said, the BBC are still a little wooly on the scientific side of things:

...and some scientists argue the solution is so diluted it does not contain any active ingredients at all.

Both sides generally agree it doesn't contain any of the active ingredient, that's pretty much the entire point of homoeopathy verses conventional medicine or poison (depending on what the active ingredient is). Scientists point out that a remedy can't do anything if there is nothing but water in it, homoeopaths insist that water has a mysterious (and bounded, unless tap water in old houses doubles as the homoeopathic remedy Plumbum Metallicum) memory which makes it magically work.

They said:

The Government's equality chief Trevor Phillips recently said the fear that migrants are jumping council queues for homes is fuelling tensions.

Well if the government are scared that migrants magically jump up the council house queue, then it must be true. Or is it. The Guardian has the full quote:

Mr Phillips [chairman of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights] said tensions were driven by a widespread perception that newcomers often received unfair advantages. "Specifically, that white families are cheated out of their right to social housing by newly-arrived migrants," he told the [Local Government Association]. "I have never seen any reliable evidence to back up this claim. And there can be no doubt that much of the public feeling is driven by the careless media and racist parties."

If you ever wonder how low the Express and co. will go to get a quote or statistic, this is a good example. In a quote where the essence of the message is that the scum-class tabloids and racist parties are fueling anti-immigration views, they managed to get a quote to support a story against immigration. Well done, Tom Whitehead, you really do deserve a special place in hell.

NP: Skreamizm Volume 4, Skream

These are not just bad sales figures. These are M&S bad sales figures.

NP: Herbstlaub, Marsen Jules

Camera bag: Lowepro Toploader 65AW. Very good condition: it's mostly been in a cupboard apart from three weeks in India a while ago. I'm thinking £25 including delivery to the UK.

Lens case: Lowepro 1W. This is as-new, and has never left the office. £10 including delivery.

If anyone is interested, drop me a mail.

NP: Another Late Night: Zero 7

Yes, it’s that time of year again. No sooner does an important traditional religious holiday roll around than the PC-brigade feel the need to strip-mine it of its original significance, just so’s no-one’s feeling get upset.

However, it doesn't quite continue as you were thinking.

It is the Christians who have the most gall of all, daring to attach the name of some first-century Palestinian to a once-proud British festival. ‘Yule’ I can live with, despite its being a continental bastardisation of our British pronunciation ‘Geola’, but ‘Christmas’ is just wrong. You even have to mispronounce ‘Christ’ to say it.

An excellent piece of satire from Nathaniel Tapley on Liberal Conspiracy, which is well worth a read for a good laugh.

NP: Giant Steps, John Coltrane

NP: Bossa Très Jazz: When Japan Meets Europe, Various

A classic example of the Mail taking a valid scientific press release (that is a surprise) and twisting it into a scare story for no real reason. I wish I could understand how this works to sell papers, although I guess at the end of the day regurgitating a press release with added anger and Moral Outrage without doing any relevant research is a pretty cheap way of filling column inches.

NP: F♯ A♯ ∞, Godspeed You Black Emperor!

Dear Mark Prisk,

Recently I wrote to you regarding the "homoeopathic hospitals" EDM, and your response included the following paragraph:

"All therapies should be considered equally, and decisions on whether or not to provide them on the NHS should be evidence-based, as is the case with all other conventional medicines and treatments."

I wholeheartedly agree that all therapies provided by the NHS should be judged on openly peer-reviewed evidence of their effectiveness, because otherwise we'd still be using leeches, performing exorcisms or practising blood letting. However, as far as I am aware there is no scientific evidence that homoeopathy is any better than placebo, so could you tell me where you saw the evidence for homoeopathy that you are using to justify homoeopathic hospitals because I'd like to see it myself. Indeed, evidence that it was in fact better than placebo would be welcomed with open arms by the scientific community, because this would open entirely new realms of both medicine and physics.

Yours sincerely,

Ross Burton

All therapies should be considered equally, and decisions on whether or not to provide them on the NHS should be evidence-based, as is the case with all other conventional medicines and treatments.

I'm about to write to him, asking for this evidence. I haven't seen any, and I'm sure the medical profession would like to see it too.

NP: Burning Off Impurities, Grails

NP: Oneiric, Boxcutter

Second, the Flickr team have just added some new features, specifically a world map with popular tags overlaid and a new Places interface, providing a summary of a particular location. The new map has temporarily lost the ability to zoom in straight away (press Search then Go to get the zoom bar), but the Places interface is amazing fun.

NP: People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, A Tribe Called Quest

I recommend reading the article to anyone who thinks that homoeopathy is better than placebo or agrees that homoeopathy has a place in treating AIDS and malaria. Or people like me, who like watching homoeopathy get slapped down. For the medical geeks out there, there is the companion article in the Lancet too.

Unfortunately, your piece is a mixture of ignorance, misinterpretation and speculation. I couldn't care less about your intellectual capacity to absorb the data, but you have included my name in an article that conveys a false impression of what the study was about.

In other news, today I discovered that the epitome of British retailing, Marks and Spencer, was co-founded by a foreigner! Michael Marks was born in Belarus, and came to England to avoid the persecution of Jews. The warehouse in Leeds where they started up has a blue plaque commemorating the event. What would the Express or Mail say to this?

As much as I admire your determination Tina, I really do think that you should give in on this (from Manchester Evening News via Good Math, Bad Math).

NP: Groove Salad, Soma.fm

Some people appear to believe that having a letter in the Granuiad is sad and I should be shamed or something. Honestly, I thought the email was going to be in some online forum thingy, not actually printed, but can I help it if even my brief flippant replies are insightful? Anyway, you can't shame me with newspaper clippings, I've had a like-cures-like homeopathic treatment against that.

Foreign workers have taken every new job in Britain for the past four years, astonishing figures show.

Is this from The Daily Mash? NewsBiscuit? No, it is the real genuine Express article. More evidence that the Express has been covertly taken over by satirists.

Vicky got a new job in September, and I'm pretty certain she isn't a migrant.

Physically the SoundBridge is pretty good looking: a sliver and black ten inch cylinder about two inches in diameter, with a large LCD panel on the front. When turned on it found my wireless network, asked for the WEP key, and promptly upgraded its firmware. Once all that was done, it let me select from two libraries: Vicky's Music or Internet Radio. Vicky was running iTunes on her laptop which exports the library over DAAP, so I listened to Tori Amos whilst I explored the Internet Radio options. Then I listened to the most excellent Groove Salad on SomaFM (apparently the #4 station on the Roku Radio charts). At this point I discovered that there was a SoundBridge link in Epiphany, the SoundBridge uses mDNS to publish the web control panel: a useful application of clue from Roku. Then it just got better. The SoundBridge will stream from DAAP and UPnP servers (they pimp mt-daapd and SlimServer), and announces the web interface over mDNS and UPnP. There is a web site which indexes Internet radio streams, currently it has over 5000 entries. This site uses a Java applet (currently only tested in Windows though, I haven't installed Java yet) to talk to your SoundBridge so it can show the currently playing station and tell it to play another station. Then I discovered this in the manual.

Geeks - read this. The M-bridge has a command line interface that you can telnet to for piddling abut. You will need to telnet to port 4444. Type "?" at the command prompt to see a list of commands. ... M-bridge has a built-in UPnP AV "media renderer". This protocol can be used to control the M-bridge from your own software.

The SoundBridge supports both a custom protocol (documented in a 200-page PDF) and the standard UPnP protocol for controlling it. They even documented the signals the remote control uses. This is probably one of the most hackable "consumer" devices I've seen for a long time, short of the N800. Well done Roku, you've created a damn neat product which actually does just work out of the box.

NP: theJazz, Internet radio

As a discussion about climate change grows longer, the probability of stating that China is building a new coal power station every week approaches one.

When used as a defense for not attempting to reduce climate change I'd like to also invoke the sudden death variant, where the discussion is finished immediately.