If you’re building your own threat-condition monitor, the folks in charge of making sure you don’t feel secure in your homeland have provided a couple of handy hooks: http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition returns an XML element with an attribute describing the current level, and http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage provides an image for putting on your page, thus: <img src=”http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage”/> yields The image […]

Are you a smelly hippie type who can’t shake the old blood-lust? Check out pasture raised meat in your area, with the added bonus that you can see if you and your pals can eat a whole pig.

Have you read Unshelved? You totally should. It’s even better than User Friendly, but I may have a professional bias.

Take for example this lovely Saddomo Table (partial nudity, probably not work-safe). Might be funnier to someone who reads Russian.

Top ten toxic substances listed in ToxFaq that could be good female first names, possibly good gaming names. 10. Ethion 9. Toluene 8. Toxaphene (“Toxie” for short) 7. Beryllium 6. Cadmium 5. Phosgene/Phosphine (tie) 4. Mirex 3. Endrin 2. Dichlorvos (drumroll) 1. Antimony

FBI endorsement of Macs’ hardness. I’m confused by the assertion that Macs are somehow harder to recover data from than “Unix-based machines”, what with MacOS X being Unix and all.

Yes, the FP crew are a bunch of language nerds, so it is with confidence I direct you to Word Spy. Neat! There is a Word Spy book coming out next week. Also, if you have access to the online OED (check your local library if you live in Washington state, hooray for the statewide […]

GM cress changes color in the presence of the by-products of explosives’ decomposition (NO2), giving a handy map to the minefield beneath. If I weren’t such a cynical bastard, I wouldn’t interpret the land-mine-clearing charity’s objections as "Hey, we’ve got a good thing going here; don’t rock the boat." All my minefields are already sown […]

It took nearly a year since the last time my entity-reference-encoded email address got spam, but it’s happened again, so I guess it’s time to change it. fpcraig is dead; long live blogboy. As an experiment, and because I knew I’d be deactivating fpcraig soon anyway, I tried the “remove me” link provided in the […]

As previously reported, the AFA was doing a poll about attitudes toward gay marriage, with a view to reporting the results to Congress. But now that the poll’s results aren’t reflecting the AFA’s religious-political-extremist agenda, they’re declining to follow through.