flanerie.org

A geeky guy has created a web page that figures out your gender based on your browser history.

It is a clever idea - it works out what colour your browser shows links in, since visited links will be a different colour. Or color, depending on your disposition. So although a browser does to give history information to other sites directly, it accidentally blabs with colours.

According to the script I am 95% probably a male.

See how you score.

[found on El Reg]
Scientists have created an onion that won't cause you to cry using Australian-developed biotechnology to switch off the gene behind the enzyme that brings on the waterworks.

Using gene-silencing technology, the New Zealand-based research institute Crop and Food pioneered the breakthrough and hopes could lead to a prototype onion hitting the market in a decade's time.

Colin Eady, the institute's senior scientist, told the Herald Sun that the project started in 2002 after Japanese scientists found the gene responsible for producing the agent behind the tears.

"We previously thought the tearing agent was produced spontaneously by cutting onions, but they proved it was controlled by an enzyme," he said.

"Here in New Zealand we had the ability to insert DNA into onions, using gene-silencing technology developed by Australian scientists.

"The technology creates a sequence that switches off the tear-inducing gene in the onion so it doesn't produce the enzyme. So when you slice the vegetable, it doesn't produce tears."

Mr Eady said that by stopping sulphur compounds from being converted to the tearing agent and redirecting them into compounds responsible for flavour and health, the process could even improve the taste of the onion.

"We anticipate that the health and flavour profiles will actually be enhanced by what we've done,'' he said.

"What we're hoping is that we'll essentially have a lot of the nice, sweet aromas associated with onions without that associated bitter, pungent, tear-producing factor.''

The discovery has caused concern overseas, following an international symposium in the Netherlands and after the trade journal Onion World featured Eady's work on the front cover of its December issue last year.

Mr Eady, who has developed several model onion plants at the institute, said despite the excitement about the prospect of a "no tears" onion in every home, it would be 10 to 15 years before this was a reality.

Burnt toast could soon be a thing of the past thanks to the world's first transparent toaster.

The new concept glass toaster, which lets you see your bread as it browns, is from product developer Inventables.

The idea is based on transparent heating glass technology and the idea is that the glass heats up enough to toast the bread.

It means people can keep their eye on their breakfast and eject the slice at the moment it turns the perfect colour.

This would eradicate the need to put the bread back down and run the risk of having to scrape burnt toast.

However, a traditional timer dial is still incorporated into the design, for people who are too busy to keep an eye on their bread.

A downside to the current design is that it only fits one piece of bread at a time.

[from Ananova]
A new hi-tech toothbrush has been launched with built-in "satnav".

Maker Oral B claim that as you clean your teeth it transmits information by radio to a separate miniature display screen, telling you where you should clean.

It also tells you how long you should brush for and if you're brushing too hard or not hard enough, reports the Daily Mail.

The manufacturers are hoping their new gizmo - called Triumph with SmartGuide - is going to be this year's Christmas must-have in the bathroom.

It comes with a wireless LCD display which can be stuck on to the shaving mirror.

Oral B says its research suggests that people using the device are four times more likely to spend two minutes per clean than if using a manual brush.

The firm's dental expert Dr Surinder Hundle said: "We are dedicated to helping improve the way people care for their teeth and gums and taking a lot of the guesswork out of brushing.

"Triumph with SmartGuide does just that, guiding the user in real time to help improve his or her brushing habits."

The Triumph is on sale nationwide from next month and will be back with a big advertising campaign in the months running up to Christmas.

I am a member of Zopa, an online lending exchange. It works by matching up people who have spare money with people who need to borrow.

Which is what banks do, of course, except that they skim off a massive slice in the middle.

Zopa skims off 0.5% from the borrower and 0.5% from the lender. Apart from that, everything is between the lender and the borrower - so the lenders gets a better return and the borrowers pays less interest.

And because the borrowers are all people, lenders know that their money isn't being lent to corrupt regimes.

Zopa do credit scoring and background checks, and also break lenders' money down into bite-size pieces. So if you lend £500, it would typically be lent out to 50 different borrowers at £10 each (although you could choose to lend in 5 chunks of £100, which isn't particularly advisable).

The rates for borrowers are usually mcuh better than the banks will give them, and again the borrower has the comfort of knowing the interest is going to another person, not an overpaid bank executive.

Zopa isn't perfect for everyone, but it is well worth considering and at the moment they are offering a £50 cash bonus for new members who join using my referral link, and go on to lend or borrow (it is £30 after the end of February). Membership is free, so sign up to take a look around.

I receive an equal cash bonus, so we both win.

It is UK only at the moment, but there are plans to expand into the USA and then take over the world.

Follow this link to join Zopa

Any questions, let me know.

At 10am today, Norton Internet Security was executed for crimes against flanerie.

It has been replaced as Grand Vizier of laptop security by ZoneAlarm. Thanks to those who suggested it.

Initially I was going to use the free version of ZoneAlarm but then decided to pay for it. Why? Well, I think that basic software should be free for everyone. One way to help that come about is for some people to choose to pay those companies that offer a decent free version.

I guess that's software socialism combined with market forces.

Firefox pushed out an update overnight, taking the version to 1.5.0.4 and Norton decided to remind why I should have uninstalled it months ago.

The Norton personal firewall decided to automatically block Firefox - no message, no option, no warning. But looking in the firewall settings it was still showing firefox as 'permit all', so it was even lying about blocking it. Tosser.

90 minutes of my life later, I had it all fixed. If you are similarly afflicted, here is what you need to do:

- Go into Norton Internet Security, click on Personal Firewall and click configure.

- Go to the Programs tab

- Click ctrl-A to select all the programs, then click remove. When asked if you want to remove from all locations, click yes

- The list may or may not be empty now. If it is not, repeat the last step until it is.

- Although you click yes to all locations, Norton might not have done it, so cycle through the locations drop down at the top of the page and repeat the remove step until all locations are clear of all programs.

- Now do a program scan, at the end click all and add to all locations

You should now be good to go. For the next couple of days Norton will ask you if you want to allow certain programs as it rebuilds its firewall list.

If you have Skype it might get autoblocked by Norton - I selected the automatically configure option when Norton asked me about Skype and it decided to permanently block the application and I needed to go back into firewall settings to fix that.

My next step is to find a firewall that isn't so lame. That shouldn't be a difficult task.

Google used to say 'do no evil'

Now they say, 'did we say no?'

I am not talking about the China thing. Google are merely the latest in a very long line of money-grubbing corporations prostrating themselves to the laugh-a-minute democracy of China, and saying the Google shouldn't have joined the orgy is like saying that it's wrong to steal from an unconscious mugging victim.

Maybe I need to work on that analogy.

But what is really cranking my rhino today is Google's censorship of aquatic pachyderms.

Search for the exact phrase and Google returns 30 results, and then reckons 16 aren't worth the hassle of listing. And flanerie.org isn't even one of the 30. Bitches.

Ok, so maybe it isn't that common a term, and maybe they haven't indexed me recently.

But wait... search on Yahoo! and you get 37 results (with flanerie at number one. nice). And on MSN there are 792 results. That's seven hundred and something more than Google, or many many percentages.

So how about that? Huh? How about that?

Algorithmic anomaly? No.

Sinister conspiracy? You betcha.

Google Earth continues to be impressive beyond mortal words.

When the killer inventions of the first decade of the 21st Century are tallied up, the iPod will be there for sure but, if there is any justice, Google Earth will be there too.

Smart idea, awesome implementation and spectacular result.

I was planning a route for tomorrow when I found this hi-res photo of an Air Canada jet flying over Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, UK. The detail is so good you can see the hazing effect of the jet exhausts.

And a couple of my favourites from the many great Google Earth discoveries made by other people:
Crop circles
Profanity

Google has added rss-fed (you can read that as arse-fed if you like) headlines to the Gmail inbox, which is spiffy. It covers a range of feeds from American news to American recipes to American sports. But crucially you can add any rss or atom feed, just in case you are part of the 95% of the world that isn't American.

You can even add the lovely flanerie.org feed to your Gmail web clips, helping you to keep abreast of the wild wild world of flanerie.

It would also, possibly, increase flanerie.org's relevance in Google searches, so you would be doing me a favour. And since you love me (oh yes you do) that's exactly what you want to do.

Finally, by editing your Gmail web clip settings you will feel cool and empowered, which is no bad thing.

So step to it. Go to Settings within Gmail, then Web Clips, then enter http://flanerie.org/index.xml in the search box.

Join britblog.com, the portal for British blogs - we need to keep a corner of the blogosphere forever British, and britblog.com needs as many registered blogs as possible to help make it the one-stop resource for British blogs.

And the guy who runs it is a top bloke, so get to it. Thanks.

They got caught out by Firefox's new way of handling extension preferences and A9 have moved to a webpage-based preference system. The odd thing is that all my other extensions (forecast fox, tabbrowser preferences, gmail notifier and chatzilla) have all coped perfectly well with the change and are still using dialog boxes for prefs and settings.

It looks like the A9 workaround is simply that, and hopefully they will return to a dialog box format in due course.

The other odd thing was that the fixed toolbar was not flagged for extension update. So any user who is checking for updates won't be aware that a fix is in place - to find it they need to visit http://toolbar.a9.com.

Thanks for the fix A9, now you can get to work on the rest of my wishlist ;-)

Fix the freaking toolbar and then start innovating again.

Yes, I know you guys have been working on some very sexy features in the main site. And yes, I know the toolbar benefits from that semi-directly. But still, the toolbar is a major asset for you. It drives usage of A9 search, which is only ranked 27th in the US. Fix the toolbar and the main site will benefit.

Here are a few ideas for you:
1. Make the toolbar work with Firefox 1.5. You moved heaven and earth to port the IE toolbar to firefox. Now it is incompatible. I am forced to use IE to get access to my A9 bookmarks, and you KNOW how annoyed that makes me

2. Add a 'blog this' facility....

(a) 'Blog this site/blog this page' which creates a thumbnail of the site/page for the user to save to their host. Or offer a generic thumbnail from Alexa. The latter is simpler, the former is cooler.

(b) 'Blog this text' where the user highlights the text and hits the button. The text becomes the basis of the post and is linked back to the original location.

(c) Full configurability for 'blog this'. A user can have multiple blogs and mulitple post types within a blog. Keep a simple vanilla style as the default option, but allow full xhtml/css editing for advanced users

3. Complete the circle with Alexa. You use Alexa webstats on both the toolbar and the search site, and siteinfo.xml is smart, but you don't allow rating of sites. Users can write a review on Alexa/Amazon, but who is ever going to bother? Allow a simple rating of sites from the toolbar - one to five stars. Use the star rating to provide 'people who like this site also like...' type recommendations in the siteinfo dropdown (and on the main search site)

4. Implement site tagging or (preferrably) integrate del.icio.us

5. Drag and drop - get it working in IE then extend the feature so that users can drag to the search box

6. Implement favicons in the bookmarks menu

7. Enable export of bookmarks to the browser or to a text file

8. Create a 'mail this page to a friend' feature. The user finds a cool site and hits the button to mail it to a friend. This has been on Amazon for years and is a logical feature for the toolbar. Allow pre-configuration of 'friends' to make it a one-click process.

If you need any other ideas, I will work for lattes. Now get to work!

Virtual virus raging through a virtual world. Should we be worried? No, but save it for your next argument about GMO

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When Blizzard introduced the God of Blood - Hakkar to his mates - in a new World of Warcraft scenario called Zul'Gurub, little did it know it was summoning up the online equivalent of Ebola or AIDS.

According to a posting on WoW fansite Shacknews, anyone who ends up in a fusticuffs-style confrontation with Hakkar will be attacked with a magic spell called Corrupted Blood. It's a nasty one. There's little the victim can do to resist it, and it should do sufficient damage to wipe them out.

Except sometimes it doesn't.

The result: infected players become themselves infectious, and have started passing the plague on to other characters. WoW being an online game, with the virtual world ticking over while players pause for pizza, pee breaks and - now and then - forty winks, the contagion continues to spread from non-player characters to non-player character and anyone else entering the game.

As the poster claims: "Some servers have gotten so bad that you can't go into the major cities without getting the plague. And anyone less than like Level 50 nearly immediately die."

It's said that attempts have been made to quarantine the infected, but the efforts of what might be called the World of Warcraft Health Organisation (WWHO) appear to be ineffective. Plague-carrying players escape the curfew to lug the lurgey out into the wider WoW world.

The Corrupted Blood disease is, in short, out of control and rapidly taking on epidemic status.

WoW has more than 2m of players around the (real) world, Blizzard said in June. How many of their virtual incarnations are at risk remains unknown. We're awaiting comment from Blizzard.

The Zul'Gurub scenario was introduced last week with version 1.7 of the game.

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ripped off of The Register, which is THE place for tech news. Thank you in advance for not suing.

Being somewhat excitable when it comes to new browsers, I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 two days ago, and in the process lost my beloved A9 toolbar

The loss of the toolbar is grievous because it holds all my bookmarks - that way I have the same set of bookmarks whether I am using my work laptop or my personal one. A clever feature, although I have wondered in the past if I might be placing too much reliance in someone else's add-in (admittedly my employer's,) and thus heading for a fall.

My work PC is still on Firefox 1.06, so the bookmarks are rinky-dinky. Ok, not so bad then - work PC okay, home PC hobbled. But then yesterday my Tabbrowser extension imploded at work. Imploded in the sense that it tried to update itself, gave me a technie error message involving Chrome (oh, so 80's dahhling) and then got deleted. I am not sure whether firefox killed it for misbehaving or it committed hari-kari with the shame of a botched update.

Either way it is an ex-extension, has ceased to be and is resisting attempts at resuss.

Two unpleasant firefox incidents in two days. I wonder what will happen today...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4261522.stm

Nasa administrator Dr Michael Griffin said four astronauts would be sent in a new space vehicle, in a project that would cost $104bn (£58bn). "

And about time too. We need to get out into the solar system and eventually beyond - and a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, so hie me to the moon immediately!

The cost is fairly modest. The $100bn will probably be spent over several years, but concentrated in maybe four years or so. That is $25bn a year for a country that will spend nearly $500bn on its military in 2006.

The important thing is that it is an international effort. I think it is vital that China is on board, and preferably Japan and the EU too. Working together to a single purpose does strange things to people - it helps them to see each other as partners instead of competitors.

Space exploration has something for everyone. Natural resources in the asteroid belt for the capitalists, little green men for the trekkies, a united earth for the romantics, a big chap with a beard for the religious and Uranus for the perverts.

So let's get moving. I want to be ablewatch someone walk on Mars before my eyesight goes!

The caveman within me no longer desires a cave, an animal skin and a shag; he now wants a comfy sofa, a PSP and a shag.

Intelligence does manage to get the occasional word in edgeways, and it runs along the lines of 'you will only play it for a couple of weeks then get bored.'

True, true, but when did lust ever think beyond the next three hours? (yes, I flatter myself)

If the caveman had the benefit of a learned counsel, he would point out that MP3-player lust had longevity beyond consummation, and laptop lust likewise, but the caveman can merely point, grunt and scratch his crotch.

And it is hard to disagree with him.