Dr Laura James's writings

Ah, a way of disposing of old mobile phones to a charitable cause, without needing to spend money on mailing them. How convenient, just as I try to declutter - I can get rid of stuff without simply migrating the clutter to my office.

Offshore windfarm pictures , including destruction in storms (not so pretty) and construction phases. (Thanks to Mum for the link!)

Last night I caught a new Radio 4 comedy show, Recorded for training purposes . I don't know that it will age particularly well, but at the moment it's fresh and funny. A mildly surreal look at modern life, with more IM and MySpace than your average Radio 4 show.

I just found Sizeasy , which lets you visualise the size of an item and compare it to known items. Useful if you are shopping for a new gadget, or designing one!

The new alertme bunny, ibunny28, is up and working. Emails to him are now enabled, so if you mail ibunny28@nabaztag.com he will read out the subject line, and play any mp3 you happen to have attached. NB: you need to have registered your email address on the Nabaztag site (as an account without a bunny, assuming you don't have one); this is to prevent spammers playing random audio at my desk. Poor old Razmatag is going to migrate, taking his newly upgraded ultrashiny ears elsewhere. I'm not sure where he will go yet - to the lab, perhaps, or maybe home.

I've been a fan of the Independent since it was founded, although it has developed and changed substantially over the years. I've had an annual subscription to the online form for some time now, as I rarely get around to buying a paper paper. Today, I was delighted to get an email saying that the Indy is moving to a free online version, and my subscription is being refunded for this year as content is gradually migrated through the paywall. It will be great to be able to send links to people at last!

Violet's servers seem to be back up, pretty much, and so our second company Nabaztag - the Nabaztag/tag - is up and running. This one is called ibunny28. Alas, there seems to be no RFID or microphone support yet, but the audio does seem to work better than on the old bunny. You can check out some of the internals here . Big architectural changes, including an ARM replacing the PIC of the original Nabaztag. It's complex in there - the number of custom plastic components is scary.