PigPog

Boing Boing have linked to this free eBook about The Beatles’ Revolver album. I’ve only had a quick glance (it’s more Sam’s sort of thing than mine), but it looks like an interesting read – he’s trying to cover the stuff that others have avoided, or been happy to gloss over. Well under 1Mb to download, and around 100 pages to read.

A Cute Overload of tongue-sticking.

Gahhh… This stifling, sticky, soul-melting stinky heat is really starting to piss me off now. I’m much more of a winter gal, I can cope with freezing temperatures and having to rely on extra jumpers, blankets and cuddles from Michael to keep warm. Summer isn’t my favourite season at the best of times but right now, with this heatwave, it’s putting me in a mood that can only be described as “crabby”. It’s good to know I’m not alone though, as Scott Adams explains in his blog post today:

Recently we had a heat wave in California. My air conditioner broke because, I assume, it is not designed to operate in hot weather. That was the bad news. The good news is that I solved the problems in the Middle East. Allow me to explain.

During the several days that it was 112 degrees and I had no AC, all I wanted to do was build an IED and kill the AC guy who kept driving right past my office and helping other people. In fact, I wanted to kill everyone who didn’t agree with me on just about any point whatsoever.

Read more, including his discovery that could inspire peace in the Middle East here.

Meanwhile I’m going to go and watch the November Rain video over and over. And not for the usual reasons. I just want to drift off into a beautiful fantasy where it’s November, and it’s raining. Mmmm, lovely cold November Rain… ahhh…

I’ve not tried it out yet – I’ll have to find or take some suitable shots – but this looks like an interesting idea…

• Tourist Remover from snapmania

You feed it a series of shots of the same scene, and it will remove any parts that change between shots. So, if you take several shots, with people moving in each shot, it will replace the people with the background in each case. You’ll probably need a lot of shots, as presumably it needs to see every part of the background in at least one shot, but if you’ve got a series of shots with just one or two people wandering across each one, it should be able to do a good job.

(Thanks to Boing Boing.)

Publicenergy has a fun experience, trying to end a contract with Carphone Warehouse. This sort of thing seems to be becoming a real problem – companies that get you signed into a contract, then make it very difficult for you to cancel again and get out of it. Surely trapping a customer into continuing to be a customer by refusing to cancel the contract without them jumping through an assortment of strange-shaped hoops can’t be good for business? Don’t a large percentage of them spend a long time going around complaining to anyone who’ll listen about how crap you are? Like publicenergy just did?

I’m not sure if there’s an easy solution to this. Legislation would be an obvious thing, but is probably unlikely here, and I really can’t see the Americans going for it. With politicians paid for by big business, they daren’t do too much to upset those who pay for their campaigns. The more likely answer is making reputations more important, and empowering ordinary customers like us to affect that reputation. Like the Internet is doing now. Hmm. Maybe the problem is on the way to solving itself?

I’m not quite convinced they’re taking this whole lifehacking thing seriously enough. I’m very tempted to start tagging things in meatspace now, though…

• Flickr Lifehack Group

When Philofaxy discussed bags recently, he mainly spoke of his favourites – Tom Bihn. They’re also well known for their ‘Treason Label‘ hidden message in the washing instructions – very cool.

They certainly look good. I think I’m a long way from needing a new bag right now (I have two perfectly good ones, and I never go anywhere), but if I file this away here, I’ll know where to find it later

I’ve just signed up for YouGov – they do online surveys, and you earn (small amounts, presumably) money for completing them.

I tend to avoid these things, as they usually seem to be rip-offs, but YouGov seems to be completely legit – some well-known columnists, and they have some very big-name clients.

If you fancy giving it a go too, you can sign up here, and I’ll get a bonus for any surveys you do too, which I’ll be very grateful for, because I like free money.

Truely.

Packt Publishing are after nominations for their Open Source CMS Awards. Since it does such a great job of running PigPog, we’re voting for Drupal.