Update: Twictures seems to be permanently down.

Update 2: updated the links to the Twictures and images.

It’s a nice wee gimmick that renders your latest tweet in the style of your choosing, like this:

or this:

or this:

(For those of you who aren’t up to speed with the lingo: a “tweet” is something you say on Twitter.)

Allergy New Zealand supports and advocates for New Zealanders with allergies. While getting hay fever in spring is an irritation, and feeling better when not eating gluten can be an annoyance, for many people it is much worse than that. Both my children have been rushed to hospital with severe allergic reactions, and my son still has a potentially life-threatening food allergy that means everyone who looks after him must be trained in injecting him with Adrenaline, just in case. Allergy NZ has helped us with support and education, and continues to advocate for better access to health care for allergy sufferers. Becoming a member not only helps this run-on-a-shoestring organisation, but also gets you their excellent monthly magazine and access to a great support and education network.

Capital Cause are an outfit I’ve only just discovered. If you like your charity with a bit of “what’s in it for me?” you should check these guys out. In supporting an orphan help centre in Nepal you become eligible to win a 16-day trip through Nepal, including flights from anywhere in the world. Truly awesome support from the sponsors!

World Vision are one of many organisations doing sterling work in countries where people routinely starve to death. I’ve has a soft spot for them ever since doing the 40 Hour Famine as a kid, and I’m impressed by the way they work to help a community develop rather than just give hand-outs. Their child sponsorship programme has been running for a long time and is very well regarded.

It’s disturbing to hear of folks being beaten and killed because they have different beliefs to their neighbours. Voice of the Martyrs supports Christians (or their surviving relatives) who have suffered persecution around the world. Whatever your view on God and Christianity, Voice of the Martyrs is doing a good thing in a humanitarian sense. Look them up.

How can you help charities like these? I’d suggest

1. Money. Organisations like these are always short of money. Check where your donation goes: they’ll tell you if it’s going to their primary work or to administration. I believe that the charities above are very low-overhead.
2. You’ll have noticed that some of the charities above have web sites that might be described as “dated”. If you have some design skills why not donate some time and help their public profile?

Sadly this young chap (and/or his marketing-droid masters) doesn’t seem to understand social media. His first competition was to see who could spam the most.

This has not pleased some folk. Nope. Not at all.

In the Open Source spirit of “if you don’t like it, fix it” I’ve created my first Twitter bot. It parses the @vodafoneNZ Twitter stream and posts all tweets that don’t contain references to 3GGuy to @vfNZno3gguy. The updates aren’t instant, but should come through within half an hour or so.

The filtering is pretty basic at the  moment (it’s keyword-based; feel free to suggest modifications in the comments), but will be updated as I’m able.

Again, the 3Gguy-free Twitter feed is at @vfNZno3gguy. I hope this is of use to some folks.

Update:  the @vfNZno3gguy account was mentionned by @lancewiggs in his “how NOT to Twitter if you are a corporation” post.

Manually checking whether patches are required for the kernel or applications

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

becomes more of an effort when there’s more than one or two machines to manage. Enter apticron, a utility which will automatically email you when there are packages needing upgrading.

Configuration is simple; there’s a nice overview here.

Update: there are brief (but accurate) configuration instructions posted now.

Carved eggshells. Like nothing I've ever seen.

Slovenian (I think) Franc Grom carves these eggs using a small hand-held electric drill. His more complicated pieces have literally thousands of holes.

Franc Grom works on another egg.

There are a few more photos here, but precious little else that I can discover about him online.

A tweenbot gets help from a passer-by in NY.

The tweenbots could only drive forwards, and relied on the kindness of strangers to point them to the destination written on a small attached flag.

There’s more info, including images and video, at the tweenbot website.