Social Machines is an interesting article from the August 2005 issue of Technology Review:

Continuous computing: the proliferation of cheap mobile gadgets, wireless Internet access for everyone, a new Web built for sharing and self-expression… suddenly, computing means connecting.

ineedsugar.com. very beautiful.

Felix has them. Camera in the right place at the right time. Reminds me of a story my friend Jill Abson told about taking Bill Kimball’s car to Toronto one time. Bill was notorious for having old cars on the edge of operability. When they arrived back from Toronto, they pulled into the driveway and all four wheels fell off.

Our cousin Gus Bodnar died Friday. Although we never met, his legendary hockey career loomed large in our family. The Toronto Star described Gus yesterday as “one of the finest gentlemen to pull on a Leafs sweater.”

I remember the day Stan Rogers died in 1983: it was big news in my hometown of Carlisle because Rogers was born in nearby Hamilton, and all the radio stations covered it. What I didn’t know is that he was only 33 years old when he died. Amazing that someone who died so young could leave such a musical legacy.

I’d forgotten too that he died not in a small plane crash, like many musicians do, but of smoke inhalation on Air Canada flight from Houston to Toronto, along with 22 other passengers.

My friend Stephen Regoczei headed off yesterday for six weeks in France. He’ll be in and around Nantes: if you run into a Canadian speaking Hungarian-accented French on the west coast of France this summer, say hello for me.

I stumbled across this photo of Feldmarschalleutnant Georg Freiherr Rukavina today. It’s part of Austro-Hungarian Land Forces 1848-1918, a website that aims:

…to document the organisational history of the land forces of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy from just prior to the outbreak of the Great War until the collapse of the monarchy in 1918.

BBC dashboard widget:

Activate your BBC Listen Live widget to hear live radio from nine of the BBC’s national radio stations without the need to turn a switch or load a webpage. And if that’s not enough - why not pull out multiple widgets to represent different radio stations that you regularly listen to? Always present, always ready - it’s like having a radio installed in your computer.

Pointer from Ben Hammersley.

After several summers of really bad customer service from Cafe Diem it looked, this year, like they were getting things right: lots of friendly staff, free Wifi, a good selection of fresh pastries, and a renovated interior that makes the right subtle corrections to the interior space.

So I started sending people there, telling them it was safe to go back in the water again.

This morning, though, a negative report. An anonymous friend, let’s call him “Eduardo,” went along, based on my recommendation, for an early coffee and tasty chocolate croissant this morning at 8:00 a.m. only to find:

• The espresso machine “wasn’t ready yet.”
• There was only one chocolate croissant available, a day-old.

Eduardo went home and made himself a coffee.

I’m not ready to call this a return to the bad old Café Diem, but they’re obviously not firing on all cylinders if they can’t serve coffee and croissants when they open.

I welcome additional reports from the field, positive or negative.

I haven’t seen this elsewhere. The new iTunes 4.9 doesn’t support auto-syncing of podcasts to the iPod shuffle (emphasis mine):

Why not?