_   _ _____ _  __ <*the* weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the uk>
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                              happy sysadmin day!

                                >> HARD NEWS <<
                               summertime blues

         And the long summer days continue to drag by. What shall we
         waste our copious and collective free time on, especially
         now that none of us have any jobs? NTK's old business
         manager, TERRY SHUTTLEWORTH writes in to suggest we should
         all enter the free "International Star Trek Guru of the
         Year" contest, but then he would, being connected in some
         Ferengi fashion with the Paramount Franchise Collective. But
         what about the other, negligible non-Trek parts of our
         brains? Looking over last week's memepool, we're still
         inspired by MATTHEW SOMERVILLE's dynamic recoding of the
         godawful Odeon site into something that's usable (and
         accessible) by people wanting to actually give Odeon money.
         Long time NTK curmudgeon STEF "up yours, street" MAGDALINSKI
         senses in his bones that there might be one or two other
         sites that could be successfully recoded in this way. And
         it's about time we had another legally-dubious competition.
         We're still thinking about how to do this, but the first
         step's easy: send us the sites that you hate to use, but you
         think could be given a working makeover. We'll collect a
         list of the worst/potentially most useful, and go on from
         there. We sense a great deal of interstitial Flash in our
         future.
         http://www.startrekguru.com/
- good for reassuring that you're *not* the biggest trek saddo out there
         http://www.odeon.co.uk/
                                                  - fuxx0red sites...
         http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/
                                                              - fixed

         In other competition news: the (already arbitrary) closing
         date for our contest to come up with a "Japlish" slogan for
         NTK has now been extended, as most entrants so far have
         taken it as an invitation to auto-translate one of our
         existing slogans into Korean or something and then back
         again. Not that we didn't enjoy PAUL DOODY's "They're steel
         iron is in our transposition. Our steel iron is now that
         back", or JOHN12's "*The* English with weekly high
         technology because of NTK sarcasm renewal" - it's just we
         were hoping for more like ADRIAN FURBY's "Heat up auto
         battle is exciting scene. Fight!" or  WILL HARRIS's haiku
         "Friday refreshness? / Let's heartful communicate!/
         ntk.net". So, please keep them coming until you get bored of
         them (or we do) - don't forget that you could win one of
         five copies of the official UNNOVATIONS spinoff book, a
         filth-packed adventure into techno-despair in any language
         you care to name.
         http://www.engrish.com/clothing/
            - *Ground* is storongest technic; there is exciting scene


                                >> ANTI-NEWS <<
                             berating the obvious

         at last, a company spokesman who corrects himself in brackets
         afterwards: http://www.ntk.net/2003/07/25/dohlge.gif ... why
         C4 seem to be repeating the same episodes over and over again:
         http://www.ntk.net/2003/07/25/doh10th.gif ... self-defeating
         user interfaces: http://www.lian-li.com/proclass.php vs
         http://www.ntk.net/2003/07/25/dohbad.gif ... glaringly obvious
         (right side of): http://www.3m.com/ergonomics/ ... seeing
         popularity on Amazon, DOOYOO attracting prank reviewers too:
         http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/electronics/camcorders/sony_dcr_trv_33
         ... and while you're at it, could you remove his phone number?
       http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2003Jul/0108.html
         ... a pinch and a punch - puerile GOOGLE GOOFS of the month:
         http://www.google.com/search?q=vaginia+state , "honk kong",
         "carless driving", "anti natal", "unclear weapons", "defecto
         standard", depratment - and "I'm Feeling *Very* Lucky" on "lager"...


                               >> EVENT QUEUE <<
                         goto's considered non-harmful

         Never mind all these-newfangled Games, Fringe, Jazz, Book, TV,
         Film and Erotica Edinburgh festivals - doing their best to
         provide wholesome working-class entertainment for the locals
         this year will be the 4-day UK UNIX USER GROUP LINUX FESTIVAL
         2003 (from next Thu 2003-07-31, George Watson's College,
         Edinburgh, UKP12.50 concessions, commercial UKP100+VAT). Last-
         minute bookings are still available for Stephen Tweedie's
         off-Broadway hit "Inside the Linux Kernel", while the other
         attractions include the usual flown-in Hollywood stars (Andy
         Fenselau of SGI presents his acclaimed one-man show "New
         Breakthroughs in Linux Supercomputing") - plus student stand-
         up from Cambridge Footlight Matthew Garrett, whose multimedia
         odyssey "Dasher: An Information Efficient Text Entry and
         Control System" is said to conclude with the audience throwing
         him Alphabetti Spaghetti for him to catch in his mouth.
         http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2003/
         vs http://www.eigf.co.uk/siteContent/intro/welcome.jsp
         http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.html
         - we're joking of course; it's actually very good
         http://www.iainaitch.com/
         - reader Iain Aitch gigs at Vox 'N' Roll on Thu in London
         http://www.ccc.de/camp/2003/index.en.html
         - Thursday after: Berlin Chaos Communication Camp!


                                >> TRACKING <<
               sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

         A while back we asked if anyone had any IDEs that worked on
         PDAs or smartphones. Most of you assumed we were asking in
         much the same tone as that spammer who wants spare parts for
         his Dimensional Warp Generator time-machine, but we had some
         replies. We'd hoped to scare off the Symbianites by unfairly
         disparaging their newly open-sourced OPL, but unfortunately
         we misspelt it as "OML", so they got a look in. Zooko gets
         points for mentioning NTK's favourite time-waster, the
         smalltalk environment SQUEAK, which has Zaurus and Ipaq
         ports. Squeak's enduring some major refactoring work right
         now though, so perhaps you'll want to leave it for a little
         while. In the end, we settled on Paul's suggestion of Onboard
         C, which combines one of nature's finickety but trusty
         languages with Graffiti, one of nature's finickiest but
         trusty data-entry systems. It's an ANSIish C IDE for your
         Palm.
         http://opl.symbiandiaries.com/
                                                  - the Amiga of PDAs
         http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~ohshima/squeak/squeak-zaurus-e.html
         - squeak on a zaurus. but then you can get anything on a zaurus
         http://onboardc.sourceforge.net/
         - "others enjoy being able to code during their daily commute"
         http://www.anexium.com/stuff/star-trek-spam.txt
                          - don't reply of course, it could be a trap


                                >> MEMEPOOL <<
                    contains a source of www.snackspot.org

         sniff the POP3 passwords of entire Guardian G2 section staff,
         win prize: http://www.theisociety.net/archives/000789.html ...
         after "Masturbation cuts cancer risk", another great week for
         geek health: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/3086013.stm ... plump,
         slightly spotty baby required for demographically-confused
         photo shoot: http://www.snackspot.org/images/frenchfries.jpg
         ... "Pipkins" diet: only eat hare, pork, monkeys, chiming
         clocks... and we thought our "doh" collections were boring:
         http://www.scorpioncity.com/mscrash.shtml ... yodel view
         controller: http://0x2a.no-ip.org/mt/archives/000008.html ...
         EMAP "looking into" weekly email newsletter ... oh, these'll
         get you into university: http://www.personalstatement.info/
         ... http://lnk.to/ - raising (or lowering) the stakes in the
         competitive URL-shortening market: http://notlong.com/links/
         ... DRM reclaimed: http://www.drm.org/whydigital/globwhats.htm ...


                                >> GEEK MEDIA <<
                                  get out less

         TV>> wonder if Endemol will reuse the BIG BROTHER (9pm, Fri,
         C4) web data for FAME ACADEMY (6.30pm, Sat, BBC1) again this
         year? http://www.ntk.net/2002/10/11/dohfame1.gif ... Saturday
         night is Bill Paxton night, making heavy weather of CGI chaser
         TWISTER (6.25pm, Sat, ITV), which then segues into APOLLO 13
         (8.30pm, Sat, BBC1)... and look out for more NHS spectacle
         frames than at a Morrissey gig in Philip Larkin recreation
         LOVE AGAIN (9.15pm, Sat, BBC2)... THE HEAVEN AND EARTH SHOW
         (10am, Sun, BBC1) features Danny Wallace's made-up "random
         acts of kindness" cult http://www.dannywallace.com/joinme.html
         - apparently that's not all he has in common with Dave Gorman
         nowadays... James Cameron weekend begins with his writer
         credit for RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (11pm, Sat, BBC1), then
         explodes all over C5's TERMINATOR NIGHT, beginning 5.45pm on
         Sun with LAST ACTION HERO... as AMERICA BEYOND THE COLOUR LINE
         (7.10pm, Sun, BBC2) delivers a more careful deconstruction of
         "Black Hollywood"... Sarah Michelle Gellar turns out to be the
         opposite of SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE (11.15pm, Sun, BBC1)... "The
         Real George Orwell" is the subject of an all-Newspeak THE
         SOUTH BANK SHOW (10.45pm, Sun, ITV)... Asperger's spectrum
         docu MY FAMILY AND AUTISM (9pm, Wed, BBC2) not to be confused
         with Jo Brand celeb quiz NOBODY LIKES A SMARTASS (6pm, Mon-
         Fri, BBC2)... and expect face-pulling and overacting - and
         that's just the interviewer - in RUBY WAX WITH JIM CARREY
         (10.35pm, Mon, BBC1)... the "Japanese woman who thought it was
         real" http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/fargo.htm follows
         FARGO (10.40pm, Mon, C4)... GENERATION TERROR (11.20pm, Tue,
         BBC2) profiles 1970s Red Army lightweights Baader-Meinhof...
         and you don't have to seen the "My Wrongs" prequels 1-116 and
         118-8244 to understand what's happening in Chris Morris short
         MY WRONGS #8245-8249 & 117 (11.10pm, Wed, C4)...

         FILM>> must be the school holidays already, as "Distributor
         chose to cut sight of a dangerous imitable combat technique
         (double ear clap) to obtain a 12A" rating for this week's
         "Malcolm In The Middle" adolescent spy spoof AGENT CODY BANKS
         ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2003/agent_cody_banks.html :
         [Angie "Law And Order" Harmon] wears tight and cleavage-
         revealing outfits throughout most of the film)... but rendering
         on Linux http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59452,00.html
         (like the average cinemagoer can spot the difference) somehow
         hasn't prevented goddess of chaos and discord Eris from being
         portrayed as the *villain* of SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS
         ( http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ : Cut required for U to remove head
         butt in accordance with BBFC Guidelines and Policy. 12A uncut
         was available)...


                               >> SMALL PRINT <<

       Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that
         happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it
       on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have
     nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent.
                       Registered at the Post Office as
            "ahh, the 'switching protocols' HTTP status code. Clever"
                       http://unpythonic.net/jeff/ntk101.jpg

                                 NEED TO KNOW
            THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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