I have a new (and more science-themed!) blog, at Moth Eyes. For the start, I’ll be reading through and blogging Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle.

A lot of the functionality of this site will start to transition over there as well – I’ll be able to set up a proper page for Seraphiel & its updates, for example.

Seraphiel 0.84 is out – this fixes up some annoying bugs that have developed lately. These are:

• Removing the kingdom name from the kingdom page (preventing Angel from working)
• Putting the monarch message and date on the sidebar
• Not recording the date
• Buildings calculator not working after construction has been ordered.

All these have been fixed in the new version. Go install it now!

This version is updated for the new age. Reloading thievery operations seems to work again as well.

There are a few changes to the war room as well:

• Attacks are reloaded once immediately after being made. This happened a while ago, but was lost in a bug.
• When not reloading an attack, the number of generals is set to a default of 0.

This version will most probably not be compatible with the new Genesis, a new update will be needed once I know what URL that will be on.

Go install it now!

Seraphiel 0.75 is now out! 0.75 will work even if the DNS servers running Utopia are having difficulties. If you’re wanting that sort of thing, install it now!.

Seraphiel 0.73 is now out – it’s updated for age 39. Download it now!

Seraphiel 0.72 helps further advance the cause of total quality, by means of having a buildings calculator that doesn’t break when you reach 10k acres.

Install Seraphiel now!

I can only wonder what tormented system could have managed to price a technical book at $2,143.75.

One of my favourite desk toys is some nice silly thinking putty. Anyway, I was messing around with it a bit today, spreading it out thinly. And then… I wrapped my hand in it. Try it at home!

Anyway, next, I tried spreading my fingers out, with my hand encased in putty. Turns out that’s pretty good hand exercise. And whilst you’re there, you may as well make the Vulcan salute:

Also, try curling your fingers over to touch your palm, and then spread them out again. If your hand starts to look like a swamp monster, or emo-Peter from Spiderman 3, well, that’s good too.

For a few weeks now, I’ve been using DVD rental site Webflicks. It’s… ok. Turnaround could stand to be a bit faster (so far, I’m finding that if I return a DVD the day after I get it, a new one turns up a week later).

To date, the only DVDs that I haven’t found in their catalogue are seasons of The IT Crowd – but, that said, it’s possible, at this stage, that some of the DVDs in the catalogue aren’t actually there. But I don’t know that. I don’t think I’ve been with them long enough to properly evaluate their range – so far, they’ve been sending me DVDs *mostly* from the first few preferences.

Ok, enough with the reviews. The big thing that irks me about their site is that their user interface is a bit… unusable. I really, really wish that their cookies didn’t expire so fast, they override the “Enter” key in all their forms in unfortunate ways, and the commonly used Account pages take more clicks than they should to get to.

Webflicker is an attempt to fix a few of the problems. It doesn’t make their cookies last longer, though it does automatically redirect you from the useless home page to the login page. It doesn’t stop the overriding of the “Enter” key (yet…). And it provides a few handy links to commonly used (I think) Account pages on the left hand side of every page.

Anyway, hopefully this will prove of use to someone. Enjoy!

Arrrrrhhh, me hearties, it be Talk Like a Pirate day, says I. Avast, you’d best all be keelhauling me for that title.