[gorjuss] Links for Wednesday, 8th February 2012

[Giles Turnbull]

Blimey. So busy. Not with work, but with the rest of life. Family
life, social life, seeing friends for fun, seeing friends who need
help. Sleeping. It all adds up.

There was a Lolita meet in Bradford on Avon a week or so ago. I only
know because I saw this group taking pictures of themselves outside
the tea shop, and my "Bradford on Avon" Google alert brought me to
this page. I have no idea what a Lolita meet is, and I'm reluctant to
search for more information about it, but the video towards the bottom
of this page explains the basics, I think.

http://yattamagazine.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/lolita-meet-first-of-2012/

Alfred for OS X has been updated, and as ever there are some lovely
little touches inside it. Now there's a new option that grabs the
selected text and prepends it with your chosen search engine keyword
(in my case "d" for DuckDuckGo), all ready for you to hit return and
see the results in your browser. It's a bit hard to find unless you
already know your way around Alfred's prefs, mind you - look under Hot
Keys, then click the little plus button at the bottom-left, and choose
"Show Alfred".

I really love Alfred, in the same way that I used to love Quicksilver
back in the day. I've just switched to using Alfred for text snippets.
I was using TextExpander before. Alfred is slightly more fiddly to use
for snippets, but I've had quite a few problems with TextExpander
since the Lion upgrade, so hopefully the extra fiddling will be worth
it. I only have a dozen or so snippets I use regularly anyway.

http://alfredapp.com

Unicode 6.1 includes a character called "PILE OF POO"

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm (thanks
@oliverhumpage)

Here's an eye-opener. The most expensive place to live isn't
Islington, it's Luanda in Angola. $360 for a child's birthday cake?
Yup.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16815605

>From last week, an entertaining LUV and HAT on the subject of "Giraffe bread"

http://luvandhat.tumblr.com/post/16968829373/giraffe-bread

Over at the wonderful Ask A Biologist website ("We're not here to do
your homework for you"), (and thanks *again* @oliverhumpage) here's my
favourite question of the day: "Why don't our eyeballs fill up with
photons until they're full?" Turns out we absorb the photons. We
absorb WITH OUR EYES. Our eyes are colourful, glistening, tear-soaked
machines for photon absorption. Splendid.

http://www.askabiologist.org.uk/answers/viewtopic.php?id=7737

Meanwhile: dogs dressed as bees. This is probably old.

http://beedogs.com/