These are my links for August 29th from 17:22 to 17:22:

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Jodie Silsby has produced the Portsmouth Vernacular Map.

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A lovingly created map of Portsmouth with roads replaced by local phrases (there’s also a dictionary). Super, it almost makes you want to move there. Apparently London is next for the treatment — come do Birmingham instead please.

(via D’log)

A platitude that is sitting in my brain, please ignore.

Big companies research the market before launching a new product (doubly so before “relauching” an existing one). Then they try to hit their target, shaping the product to “what the users want”. Tiny companies, or people just doing it for the love, make what they want to see.

As few can articulate what they want until they see it chasing what people say (or your research says) they want is a path to average.

So, do what you want rather than what you think people might want and you have a chance of being above average. But you might fail.

The Nation’s Favourite

Originally uploaded by diamond geezer

I’ve been reading KLF-er and artist Bill Drummond’s new book 17, it’s fascinating in it’s surface honesty and deeper ambiguity as is most of his stuff. In it he mentions a video he shot, supposedly instead of doing what Alan McGee told him to do (make a promo for a single from his obscure album ‘The Man’). For all KLFologists, here it is:

I’ve just finished reading a excerpt from Haruki Murakami’s book about his obsessive running, and in particular a 100KM “ultramarathon” he completed (it’s taken me a while to get round to, it was in the Observer in July). He’s been one of my favourite authors in recent years, but something has disturbed me about finding out he was into running (a pastime I find incredibly dull).

I now feel the same way that you do when you find out a girl you like is a dog person rather than a cat person, or that someone likes Oasis, or watches Eastenders.

It’s not as bad a discovering someone votes tory tho’.

I’ve been experimenting with different ways of getting twitter notifications by SMS now twitter has turned that off in the UK.

If you search “RSS to SMS” on Google you find Pingie - which seems to offer the ideal solution. It will send text updates from an RSS feed (and you can get a feed from twitter of @messages by using tweetscan, or your friends timeline from the bottom of your twitter home page).

Unfortunately, Pingie seems to be US texts only — but it also sends email updates if you put an address in,  and fast too.

So — if you can sort Email to SMS you’re laughing. Surfing around I found a page that might offer a solution.

Here goes nothing, here’s how to get your tweets on via text:

• The page on Mutape will work out your UK phone provider’s email to SMS gateway service email address and tell you how to activate it - either online or by a text. For O2, T- Mobile and Orange anyway — For O2 for example it’s your international phone number +447etc@mmail.co.uk.

I’m not sure this is free, but it seems to be - Mutape says :”Most networks provide this service completely free, but some do not. It is advisable to check with your own provider to check this out before using the service heavily. In most cases the cost of the message is covered by standard texting plans (e.g. free texts).” Use at your own risk etc.

• Get the RSS feed URL for the tweets you want - all from twitter.com/home at the bottom, @messages from a search at tweetscan for your twitter ID.
• Pop over to Pingie and set up an alert for the RSS feed and, here’s the cool bit - use the email address you’ve just worked out.

And Bob will perhaps be your uncle. I’ve had both bits of this working separately, I’m going to try both together now…

After Through the Wall, and a dodgy (by which I mean rubbish) text adventure called Planet of Death (of which no record exists), one of the first games I played on my ZX Spectrum was Football Manager. It was slow, written in BASIC, and the amount of control you had over the success or otherwise of your team was minimal. You could pick the best team you had, but there were no formations or tactics or anything complex like that.

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Despite all that, Football Manager was a great game — the highlights left you in a nervous clinch with the speccy. If you looked away, would your goalie boot the ball to safety (no graphic characters left for diving or any animation like that)?

To celebrate the coming of the new football season, I present famous footballing scenes — as depicted through the eyes of Football Manger on the 48k Spectrum. God bless Kevin Toms.

Maradonna's Second Goal V England, World Cup 1986

That’s this goal, the greatest off all time? Hmm…
You can see a little pixel Peter Reid trailing in his wake.

Gordon Banks's Save from Pele, Mexico 1970

That’s this save. The greatest of all time, I think.

And to finish, the second most famous goal of all time:

Geoff Hurst's Third against West Germany in '66

Want to play Football Manager now? You can via the gift of java emulation.

Supposedly shocking “leaked” memo by Tony Blair to some of his New Labour buddies makes the Mail:

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Shocking, to me, as the fool uses the word “dissed” without apparent irony.

Googlewacker and America crosser Dave Gorman has being trying to sort his broadband out this week — he’s written up two accounts of his dealings with BT tech support:

I kept hearing the following phrase:
“Your case has been escalated to the complex faults team but due to a system error the task has failed.”

I kept asking the helpdesk staff to explain what this ridiculous sentence meant. On every single occasion, they just repeated the phrase as if repeated listening would make its meaning transparent. Then, when locked in a two-hour conversation with one of them and having long reached a state of tetherlessness I started trying to break it down.
“What is the system? What is the error? What is the task and how has it failed?” I asked.
“Due to a system error the task has failed.”
“Yes. But I don’t know what that means. I need you to explain the words to me. What task has failed?”

Guess what? What it meant was: we’ve sent a message to the engineers but due to a cock up, the message hasn’t got through.

It goes on…