http://www.cussedness.com The natural cussedness of things in general. Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:25:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I went a bit nuts a few weeks back and spent a slightly silly amount of money on a Sigma 4.5mm Circular Fisheye lens.  It is brilliant fun.  Here is the slideshow of my Flickr set: I don't regret a penny of what it cost (although I didn't pay full price, ... http://www.cussedness.com/2008/12/02/fisheye-madness/ Five Weeks In A Balloon, the very first Voyage Extraordinaire, was incorporated into the series retroactively after Hatteras was published, but is most definitely of a piece with the other early Voyages.  The themes of exploration and adventure are as strong here as in any of Verne's other well known ... http://www.cussedness.com/2008/11/14/five-weeks-in-a-balloon-by-jules-verne/ Jolly good show. http://www.cussedness.com/2008/11/05/hooray/ Also known as The Lottery Ticket, as the British translation was entitled, Ticket No. 9672 is one of Verne's mid-period Voyages Extraordinaire, and is one of those rare things, a Verne novel with female characters. But despite having pivotal roles in the plot, neither of the two main women ... http://www.cussedness.com/2008/10/28/ticket-no-9672-by-jules-verne/ As I'm sure you're aware, De la Terre à la Lune supposedly inspired the famous, entertainingly bonkers Georges Méliès film Le Voyage Dans La Lune, which apparently began the great cinematic tradition of completely ignoring the source material upon which films are based. It has a moon in it, ... http://www.cussedness.com/2008/10/26/the-moon-voyage-by-jules-verne/ As an amusing aside in chapter six of Bad Science Ben Goldacre discusses the origin of the often semi-seriously held belief that carrots help you see in the dark: the RAF made it up to explain their pilots' uncanny ability to spot Luftwaffe bombers at night, so the Germans wouldn't ... http://www.cussedness.com/2008/10/21/bad-science-by-ben-goldacre/ This is our entire DVD collection sorted into order of decreasing nerdiness (as defined by me) from left to right. I got bored of tidying up the cupboard where they're usually stored. I put this image together using Calico, which is designed to automatically stitch together panoramas taken from one ... http://www.cussedness.com/2008/10/18/ocd-of-the-day/ Last night a spider built a web right in front of the infra-red webcam (aha!) in my front porch, repeatedly setting off the motion detector, uploading a load of pictures of it to my server. I stuck the resulting images together to make the following movie of a luminous spider ... http://www.cussedness.com/2008/10/16/spidercam/ There's a passage towards the end of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, the first official Voyage Extraordinaire, that is so fantastic I really have to share it.  The captain and his few remaining crew members are making their final approach to the north pole through a terrible storm, in a ... http://www.cussedness.com/2008/10/04/the-adventures-of-captain-hatteras-by-jules-verne/ For some reason the usually excellent Eclipse IDE sets the default encoding of JavaScript files to ISO-8859-1, which is pretty much wrong and can be problematic.  The correct path to configuring things so that they are right is rather non-obvious; Google failed me in the quest to fix things this ... http://www.cussedness.com/2008/10/02/javascript-and-utf-8-in-eclipse/