Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• The joy of pdb.set_trace() [from Simon Willison's Weblog]
• Seven JavaScript Techniques You Should Be Using Today [from Simon Willison's Weblog]
• The Dojo Offline Toolkit [from Simon Willison's Weblog]

Fauxto is a neat little photo/picture editing program, free for use and entirely online. It runs using Flash (pretty much ubiquitous nowadays) and has all the regular tools you might expect for picture editing plus a few nice effects and filters.

It’s multi-layered and sits somewhere between MS Paint and a cut-down version of Photoshop (Elements I guess?). Since it’s all online, you’re always running the latest version and the developers seem quite active.

Well worth taking a look if you need a quick and handy photo editing program.

Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• Quick Nokia E61 review [from Tom Raftery's I.T. views]
• Windows Home Server beta gets a new build [from jkOnTheRun]
• Back to basics [from Official Google Blog]
• Searching without a query [from Official Google Blog]
• HTC confirms no Via in the Shift [from jkOnTheRun]
• Google Spreadsheets Adds Charts [from Google Operating System]
• Let’s Talk About Backing Up Those Photos [from Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection]
• We’re expecting [from Official Google Blog]
• Google supports GeoRSS! [from Brain Off]

Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• I’ll have that Xbox to go, please [from jkOnTheRun]
• Virginia Tech students were emailed a warning… Useless. WHERE was the text message warning? [from SMS Text News]
• Google Apps Demo [from Google Operating System]
• MyOpenID relaunches [from Simon Willison's Weblog]
• Crushpad lets you make your own wine from the comfort… [from kottke.org]
• Google Maps for walks [from Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO]
• Do cows or other farm animals get sunburn? [from I did not know that yesterday!]
• The Old Well pub in Southwater [from CVW Web Design]
• Nokia N95 photo example. I’m still lovin’ it! [from SMS Text News]
• Psychedelic rock band consists of 90-somethings [from Boing Boing]
• USB key simulates a jiggling mouse [from Boing Boing]
• Flickr SmartSetr Update: Now Supports Up to 20,000 Photos in a Set [from Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection]
• Linux gains quiet momentum in the mobile market [from jkOnTheRun]
• 200GB hard drives at 7200 rpm- yowza! [from jkOnTheRun]

Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• SoundManager 2 [from Simon Willison's Weblog]
• Kate Spicer writes about her experience with an extreme diet… [from kottke.org]

Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• Most HTML templating languages are written incorrectly [from Simon Willison's Weblog]
• Is Microsoft bidding up acquisitions on purpose? [from Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger]

Sorry if your feed reader has been going a bit crazy - I’ve been playing with a new script intended to copy my Shared articles from Google Reader over to here. It now seems to be stable (I did test it on a test blog but missed a few odds and sods). Perhaps shortly I’ll publish the code (it’s only about 15 lines of Python)

Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• Is Microsoft bidding up acquisitions on purpose? [from Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger]
• Are cellphones killing bee colonies? [from Boing Boing]
• “Hole in wall computer” LIFT talk up now [from Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger]
• Google Checkout arrives in the UK! [from Official Google Blog]
• A Simplified Version of Google’s Spell Checker [from Google Operating System]
• So You Want to Shoot a Rock and Roll Star [from Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection]
• quakr [from Simon Willison's Weblog]
• Quakr 7d Tiltometer [from Simon Willison's Weblog]
• Hamster-powered shredder [from Boing Boing]
• Showing Arrogance [from Photo Matt]
• Scan a File Using the Top Antivirus Software [from Google Operating System]
• Symbian-Guru.com: Using his N73 as a ‘computer’ for 30 days [from SMS Text News]
• Sexcameron [from Neil's World]
• Cool virtual architecture video and powerful grid architecture video [from Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger]
• Sussex Geek Dinner with Glenn Jones speaking on Microformats [from Simon's Software Stuff]
• Robotic jumping flea [from Boing Boing]
• What’s in Thomas Hawk’s Camera Bag? [from Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection]
• mail rail on Flickr [from Simon Willison's Weblog]
• The Canon EF 50mm f/1.2, A Pretty Nice Lens, But Is it Worth the Money? [from Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection]
• The problem with pixels [from Simon Willison's Weblog]

Wednesday night I made another trip to Brighton to attend the latest Sussex Geek Dinner. Attendance was good, although not full - it seems quite a few people (a third?) didn’t turn up for one reason or another - a little annoying considering the numbers are limited to thirty and spaces went pretty quickly.

The speaker was Glenn Jones (right), a developer and Creative Developer of Magdex Ltd. in Brighton, which “delivers websites and web based applications for the publishing and recruitment sectors”

The subject was (for the most part) Microformats, an attempt by various people and organisations to construct a psuedo-standard by building a condensed form of various existing standards to insert directly into web pages.

The idea is interesting - many developers find building around existing standards tedious and with little visible benefit. With microformats, developers can use classes for semantic markup (classes are often thought of entirely in the context of CSS, but they are also non-presentational markup).

Once implemented in the page, they are available for readers to pick and offer the user ‘value-add’ options based on the contents of the page. For example, if a calendar event is embedded in the page, the user can add that event to their own calendar. There are a couple of decent readers for Firefox: Tails and Operator.

Glenn spoke broadly about microformats and gave a good rundown of the various sites already using Microformats, as well as speaking about good practice for URL construction.

The event was helped by the organisation of a radio-mike (courtesy of Joh), although Glenn didn’t seem to like using it. Unfortunately the last event suffered from really poor acoustics so a mike of some kind would be useful - perhaps a hands-free mike next time?

As ever, thanks to Simon for organising a great event and I look forward to the next one.

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Good news Glastonbury fans - there are tickets available on eBay. Unfortunately I don’t think they’re quite official…  good news for Michael Eavis then.