Picture postcards
Psst, wanna buy an artistic postcard? Only £35 to you, guv. Later this month, the Royal College of Art will be holding its 10th annual Secret Postcard exhibition to raise money for its fine art students. The cards are secret because you don't find out who did them until after you buy them. This year's contributors include Damien Hirst, Terry Gilliam, George Melly, Nick Park and Milton Glaser. You can only buy the cards in person at the college in Kensington Gore, London SW7. But you should be able to view them online at the Bowieart site from November 22, and take part in a "guess the artist" competition. www.rca.ac.uk
www.rca.ac.uk
www.bowieart.com
Launch pad
If you want to follow the US presidential elections, E-democracy.org has provided a launch pad for each potential candidate and all the major parties. The non-profit organisation provides links to the "official candidate sites, unofficial sites (blogs, e-lists, satire, hometown news, etc.), and pre-set searches for today's news, text, audio, video, images, even content maps". www.e-democracy.org/us/2004/president
Mugshots
Mugshots make fascinating photographs partly because they don't try to be clever, and the Mugshots website has assembled a fantastic collection. They range from ones you might expect - Al Capone, Jane Fonda, Hugh Grant etc - to the ones you perhaps wouldn't, such as Martin Luther King Jr, Anna Nicole Smith and Larry King. (Having a police mugshot doesn't necessarily mean you're guilty of any thing.) The celebrities section will attract most attention, but the criminal one offers some sad subcategories including killers, sex offenders, and hit and run drivers. Unfortunately, the site lacks a search engine and it is often hard to guess under which name someone might be filed. William (Bill) Gates, for example, appears under B in the historical section. Gates was caught speeding in 1977. www.mugshots.com
Google words
Google will now define a word if you use the search syntax define: (with a colon). For example, define: nice returns 14 references, with some repetitions. The hits include "noting distinctions with nicety", a city in France, and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. Define: supplements but does not replace the dictionary feature, where the words you search for appears underlined in the blue results bar. Clicking on an underlined word takes you to its definition in multiple dictionaries at Dictionary.com, which delivers a much better result. www.google.com
Moot it
"Please be gentle with our beta server - who'd have thought a brand new search engine that did what it said would be so popular?" That's your welcome to Mooter, an Australian site offering clustered search results. Given the multiple meanings of many English words and phrases, this should be very useful. Search for Thatcher, for example, and it should separate out the results for Margaret, country craftsmen, the town named for the Mormon apostle Moses Thatcher, and so on. Mooter has a go, and it might deliver better results when it has a bigger database to work on. However, at this very early stage, it is not a threat to Vivisimo, let alone Google. Clustered Hits is another take on the same idea, and searches the Open Directory (DMoz) database. http://mooter.com
http://vivisimo.com
www.clusteredhits.com
Brainstorm
Happy birthday to Brainstorm, the British "mind assistant" software, which will be 20 years old at the end of the month. The latest version, launched last month, now has a "magic paste" function to paste text in from other programs, such as a web browser. The £40 program also offers a free trial version for download.
www.brainstormsw.com
New & noted
Trouser Semaphore
www.thechapmagazine.com/Trousers
How not to get sued by the RIAA
www.eff.org/IP/P2P/howto-notgetsued.php
Hello! redesign in progress
www.hellomagazine.com
Six of the best 48 days to Christmas
Christmas Shopping
www.christmasshoppinguk.com
Amazon
www.amazon.co.uk
Boots
www.boots.com
John Lewis
www.johnlewis.com
For the lads
www.firebox.com
Yahoo UK directory
http://uk.dir.yahoo.com
