Between 14:00 and 16:00UTC today (2008-05-07), I received over 600 “undeliverable email” response messages.

Looks like there’s a new spammer on the block!

We should have more books like this for kids.

Who could resist a book with this description?

For students, DIY hobbyists, and science buffs, who can no longer get real chemistry sets, this one-of-a-kind guide explains how to set up and use a home chemistry lab, with step-by-step instructions for conducting experiments in basic chemistry — not just to make pretty colors and stinky smells, but to learn how to do real lab work:

• Purify alcohol by distillation
• Produce hydrogen and oxygen gas by electrolysis
• Smelt metallic copper from copper ore you make yourself
• Analyze the makeup of seawater, bone, and other common substances
• Synthesize oil of wintergreen from aspirin and rayon fiber from paper
• Perform forensics tests for fingerprints, blood, drugs, and poisons
• and much more

I have rebuilt my Friends of Monkey World site from scratch using Wordpress. It should be much more useful and user-friendly now, especially as more stories are added.

I’ve also created a forum for the site.

The G-Shock Hacker’s Handbook is now up to version 0.7, and 37 pages.

Do you know what the hardest part of writing and editing this book is? The index. I would never have believed just how hard it is to come up with a sensible, consistent indexing policy. Does “Phillips screwdriver” come under “screwdriver, Phillips”, and does “screwdriver” itself come under “tools”? How about “screwback case opener”? I can think of several different categorizations for that one!

I think I’ve got a reasonable policy together now, but it’s amazing how some concepts force me to rethink everything all over again.

Seeing Bernard Cribbins in Doctor Who has reminded me how much I used to enjoy the Wombles back in the 1970s. (Cribbins narrated the BBC TV series.) The Wombles were recyclers years before the green movement became popular, salvaging bits and bobs of stuff that humans had thrown away, and turning the junk into something new - a bit like dumpster diving these days. They were “improv engineers”, of a sort. Especially Tobermory.

The Wombles were anarchic in a way, a trait they share with the Doctor.

Nice little fan joke in The Sontaran Strategem when the Doctor says that he worked for UNIT “in the 70s… or was it the 80s?”.

This is a reference to the UNIT dating controversy, in which different pieces of evidence from the classic series contradict each other regarding the years in which the UNIT episodes are set.

The Asus P750 is a great PDA. As supplied, it has QVGA resolution, but it actually uses a VGA screen.

Some clever guys in Russia have managed to produce a hacked ROM that allows you to use the VGA screen at its full resolution. I’ve tried this ROM myself, and it does work. However, the one problem with it is that it suffers from a memory leak, so the ROM isn’t quite ready for the big time yet.

If you want to try it yourself, here’s how to upgrade the ROM.

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Humphrey Lyttelton has died aged 86.

“Dear Mr Titchmarsh: This morning I went out to dig up some dandelions and a giant hogweed on my lawn. The filthy beast! Yours faithfully, Mrs Trellis.”

I’ve started a new project to produce a book on hacking G-Shock watches.

The project site can be found at: gshockbook.co.uk.

To complement my VX Commander repeater list, I’ve now created a Python script to generate Point-Of-Interest (POI) files containing all the UK repeaters (as listed at ukrepeaters.net).

The Python script (repeaterpoi.py) takes the repeaters.csv file from ukrepeaters.net, and produces csv files containing the POIs .

These files are then loaded into POIEdit, and exported to whatever format the GPS requires.

Many thanks to Jon G4TSN. I wanted to build a complete solution for myself, and I used Jon’s .ov2 files to see what format I was aiming for.