50p minimum per unit? No!

So once again - they want to put more tax on our nations favorite tipple, and which tipple will be hit hardest? Cider. A bottle of typical cider could have up to three units of alcohol in it, but currently cost well under a pound. Under the current proposals this could nearly double. This would drastically hit the UK cider market, with drinkers choosing another drink instead - wine probably, as this would not be hit so hard by this new levy (1x bottle of wine is around 8 units so 4 quid), while the small producer of real cyder would probably be obliged to double the price of their produce, putting them out of business almost over night!
Spirits? A typical 75cl bottle contains 28 units of alcohol - so the minimum charge would be nearly 15 quid, so what would happen to all the own brand and value brands of spirits do when they suddenly cost the same as the 'premium' bottles?
Now - if they proposed to pump up the price of alcho-pops and other rubbish artificial youth aimed drinks, that would be another matter...

Twit or twitter?

Getting the hang of Twitter - certainly more efficient than Facebook and more accessible than an irc channel...kind of makes blogging a bit gratuitous!

Shell-Fu!!

Command line and shell scripting rocks, Shell-Fu isn't some seafood noodle dish but an online open blog of crafty one line commands to do nifty things from the command prompt. Now if I could only remember (or even understand!) some of these....

[shell-fu]$

Ohh! Hand drawn free fonts!

Just saw this on Digg:
http://naldzgraphics.net/freebies/45-most-wanted-beautiful-free-hand-drawn-fonts/
Not that i really use funky fonts very often - but can never find any when I do need some!

Cabinet Office discussion channels on Open Source

Looks like a good place to keep abreast of ongoing discussion about open source and government policy:

"This dashboard is designed to help track online discussion about UK government's use of open source and open standards, based on results from Google News, Google Blog Search and Twitter search. These results are automatically generated based on keywords or the tag #ukgovOSS and the Cabinet Office is not responsible for the content of any link featured here."

Although exactly what these search results yield and the significance/influence of these channels remains to be seen....

http://www.netvibes.com/cabinetoffice#Open_Source

Cheezy friends!

Rather than forwarding this .pps file presentation, I sucked it into my Google docs then used resulting embedded presentation thingy and stuck it here instead, to save you having to download and open it in some office app - neat eh?

Wot no Unicode copyleft symbol?!

After searching around - seems the Unicode folks never got round to adding a copyleft character, so next best thing was to find a reversed 'c' and stick it in brackets! To save you the bother of finding a reversed 'c' - here's one a made earlier - feel free to copy and use it - obviously!

(Ↄ)