Joshua Brewer created a brilliant icon for use with Helvetireader and Fluid which I have used since day 1.

However of late the way the Hr icon sat with my other icons started to bug me; most dock icons are tilted over to the left but the Hr one was not.

So a few minutes in Photoshop and I have Helvetireader Fluid Icon Redux which sits a little better in my dock.

Download

It seems that Psion and Intel have reached an “amicable agreement” and that

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Neither party accepted any liability. In light of this amicable agreement, Psion has agreed to waive all its rights against third parties in respect of past, current or future use of the ‘Netbook’ term.

I don’t know what deal was done, but I don’t feel that this rather grubby episode has done anything but tarnish Psion’s already diminishing reputation. Shame.

Work like this makes my licence fee seem like good value.

I highly recommend heading off to YouTube and watching this clip in its full widescreen HD glory.

But I have now found, what for me is, the perfect description; from Chris Hardwick in an interview with Lifehacker.com:

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Twitter is a guy you can always elbow in the side and say, “Hey, look, a guy in a clown suit just threw up!”

I’m using that from now on – marvellous!

I’ve just discovered a wonderful tradition; the caffè sospeso, or suspended espresso.

In Naples when a customer is particularly happy with their espresso they will pay for two; the second being the suspended espresso.

Then when somebody who is homeless, or down on their luck comes to the cafe they can ask if there are any coffees in suspense; and then have a coffee courtesy of the first customer.

What a lovely idea.

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For me, it’s all about my personal brand, Sam Brown is who I am and who I want to be known as. I do not want to be known as that “web designer from Scotland”. But herein lies the problem,SEO is a flooded market, everyone is trying to game the system, get a higher rank and profit from it, too many people spend too much time trying to get Number #1 rank on Google instead of focusing on improving themselves, their sites and their products. Doing this will not go unnoticed and links will grow organically.

I found this particularly interesting following my own experiments with optimising this blog for search. Shortly after that post this blog rose to 17 in Google UK’s search  rankings; but then almost as mysteriously dropped to the mid 40s. At this point I decided I had done as much as I could, and really should listen to my own advice:

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The biggest factor in getting that to happen is of course content; if you don’t have content of interest to people they aren’t really going to link to you are they?

Having said that I didn’t start writing more in an attempt to increase my search ranking. I have been writing and posting more because I’m enjoying it again, and because I feel I’ve got back to where I was when I started blogging: simply sharing my thoughts and the things I find online. A kind of digital scrapbook if you will.

Intriguingly, and reinforcing Sam and my points regarding quality and content, since I stopped focussing on SEO I’ve had articles linked to by a number of higher profiles sites including Boing Boing Gadgets. As the quality and quantity of posts has increased I’ve also seen the number of visitors increase.

The final surprise came last week. I thought I’d see where I sit in a search for David Hughes on Google UK. At first I thought I’d dropped even further down the rankings, but when I started from page 1 I was stunned to see that my little blog now sits at number 3 – on both .com and .co.uk. I was amazed.

I guess content really is King.

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I really really did really not want to go to my ten year high school reunion, so I hired a stripper to go, as me, instead. Really.

This really is very funny; watch until the end (slightly NSFW).

In the words of her grandmother “it should make a very interesting movie”

First seen on Boing Boing

I was never a big Stone Roses fan, the whole Manchester thing somehow passed me by, and so I wasn’t particularly aware of Ian Brown until I saw this video. I thought both the song and the video were fantastic and rushed out to buy Music Of The Spheres and his back catalogue.

Apparently a big budget, big production video, set in a graveyard was originally planned for F.E.A.R, but Ian Brown changed his mind at the last minute. This video was shot just hours in Soho, but the idea and execution are so cool it works brilliantly.

Whilst searching for this video it became clear that either Mr Brown or his record company do not want his videos available online; at least not in the UK. All Ian Brown videos on YouTube appear blocked in the UK which is a shame as I really wanted to share the Golden Gaze video with you as well.

Google it and see if you can find a copy in your country.