If you've recently updated Garmin ANT Agent to 2.2.0 and your activities are missing from Garmin Connect, despite claims to the contrary in the status window, create a meaningless goal of type "Any Activity Type".

That seems to free up the synchronisational confusion caused by "Could not download goals" (I had no goals) and get your activities transferred correctly.

Apologies if I've covered any of these already.

http://laughingsquid.com/the-ultimate-hamburger-by-modernist-cuisine/
Mushroom? No chips? RUBBISH.

http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/dyn/35672/an-urban-emoticon-that-measures-the-happiness-of-cities/
Someone buy some EL wire and make a UA version of this please

http://www.bridgestone.com/corporate/news/2011112901.html
Yet more "airless tire" vapourware (see what I did there?)

http://www.loweringthebar.net/2011/12/the-homeland-security-snow-cone-machine.html
Anti-terrorist snow-cone machines

http://www.loweringthebar.net/2011/12/the-homeland-security-snow-cone-machines-were-also-over-priced.html
...are over-priced.

http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/12/funny-fruit.html
Fruit abuse

http://sutured-infection.tumblr.com/post/14015285437/craniopagus-parasiticus
"No, you have a big head"

http://circuitousroute.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/teabags-into-potholders/
Random word poetry

http://www.myinnergie.com/MCT/Default.aspx
This is just for David

http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/12/best-ad-placement-ever.html
When real-life imitates The Far Side

http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/12/goat-tower-caprine-condominium.html
Because goats occasionally need alone time

Dudley Moore was an awesomely talented pianist

http://enwandrews.tumblr.com/
Postcards from virtual worlds

http://undertheinfluenceoffood.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/banana-cranberry-bread-pudding/
Might try and make this at the weekend, it sounds lovely

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150415177928920
Making PHP go like the clappers involves magic, unicorns, and tracelets

http://mindhacks.com/2011/12/12/explore-your-blind-spot-free-ebook/
We've all got one; why not nurture yours?

http://comicsansproject.tumblr.com/
Logos reimagineered with Comic Sans

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/12/mommy_why_is_that_man_covered.php
Creationists are the dumbest of the dumb

It's not that I don't trust you - I do - but I don't want to put my surname in. Most places I go by a single name that people know and love*.

Why insist on first name and surname? What's the rationale? It's not like it even has to be my real name since I can create new Paths with fake names.

Really, what's the point except inconveniencing me and jwz?

* people may not actually love it.

I've not gone mad, the world hasn't ended, and I was slightly more productive than usual in that I managed to write some code for moving posts between Posterous sites and ... that all went horribly wrong.

In a vain attempt to regain control of this blog, my instagram cross-posts have moved from here to zimpenfishtagram.posterous.com.

Thanks to Posterous for their posterous gem which made this a very simple task.

Trying to shamelessly copy @lipsticklori's idea of a twitter-free week and being scared at how embedded Twitter is in my life:

• iPhone gets DM notifications from Tweetbot (turned off, app moved off homescreen)
• Blackberry gets notifications of mentions and DMs (signed out)
• Email gets notification of DMs (turned off)
• tweet.im is on my Jabber contacts list (de-friended)
• A select bunch of people are irc-tweeted via a bot (muted via /ignore)

I'll still be sending my Instagrams to @zimpenfish_p which is possibly cheating but I can live with that.

Moved to zimpenfishtagram

Moved to zimpenfishtagram

One piece, no glue.

I've been running a webcam pointing at the sky to generate pictures and timelapse movies of clouds for a few months now. After a daft conversation on the Jabbers, I thought it would be interesting to see if some image processing trickery could be used to automatically spot contrails.

The answer appears to be "Yes ... but."

Using the LSD algorithm (entirely through their sample code, thank you) to detect line segments and some Perl to look for "pairs of lines which are close together, going the same way, mostly parallel, and a reasonable length", I have alpha 1 of "Contrail Spotter".

Unfortunately the false positive rate is too high. Rain and clouds easily confuse the algorithm. Tweaks will be made. More on that later.