This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Epiphany, the Gnome web browser, has a nice feature where it will automatically discover websites on your local network and add them to your bookmarks list. It occurred to me that this would be useful for a workshop I'm running later this week; have some materials in a website, and then everyone at the workshop will just have it appear in their bookmarks. Well, they will if they're using Epiphany, or Konqueror, and (since most of them will likely be Mac people) they will in Safari as well (I think). So, I thought: I want a piece of that action. I want to create such a website and have Safari etc pick it up. But how do you do that? Ross Burton to the rescue; Ross explains how to advertise a website over Zeroconf (Bonjour for Mac people, but it's all the same technology). So, just drop a file in that /etc/avahi/services folder and it all works. And then I thought: how do I test it works? (I don't use Epiphany, I use Firefox.) BonjourFoxy to the rescue too; it browses the local network for websites that are so advertised and displays them in a sidebar; works for all platforms. So, this oughta work. (People with both Macs and Ubuntu; I'd appreciate it if you could use Ross's docs to advertise a local webpage with a specific path on the Ubuntu box and then see if Safari on the Mac picks it up.)

Unbelieveable. Photographing a police officer may now be unlawful in the UK.

The Metropolitan police in London have unveiled a pernicious, paranoid new poster campaign encouraging Londoners to report their neighbours for doing things which "look suspicious". Boing Boing skewers this Fatherland-like approach pretty effectively, and have run a poster remix campaign to encourage people to remix the posters with some more appropriate messaging. Now you can do the same with the greatest of ease, through the "Make your own Metropolitan Police terrorism poster" site.

I've just looked at Skitch after someone used it to share a screenshot with me, and thoughts floated across my head about how I might use that too. Then I thought, now, hang on a second, I already have a website to publish images on, but I have to save them, then scp them up, and so on, and that's fiddly and annoying. Then I thought, this could be easier. So, Places > Connect to Server, and fill in SSH details for kryogenix.org, with the folder being my "random" folder on the website, and tick "add bookmark" with the bookmark name being "kryogenix random folder". Now, to take a screenshot and publish it, I just hit Print Screen (which takes a screenshot and offers to save it), say "Save", and pick "kryogenix random folder" from the drop-down list of where to save it to. Publishing screenshots with three clicks. That'll do nicely. (Skitch does other stuff, as I understand it, like cropping images and adding annotations. It would be cool if the Gnome screenshot tool allowed these things too, but I can live without them.)