The Pirate Bay  court case if over, and the owners of the service have been marched down the plank. The four were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement (2, 3).

Now, are the users of Pirate Bay to be deprived of their bits of torrent?

Well apparently not. The owners foresaw this as a potential ending, and distributed the servers far and wide. So, despite the verdict, all the users can still sail the high seas, and go where their bandwidth will carry them.

Have you ever gone looking at Threadless? There are some nice T-shirts there. It is a community driven T-shirt site. People submit designs; they get voted on; and if the votes are enough they get their T-shirts printed (& US$2000).

Since I don’t have time to do up designs at the moment I thought I’d have a play with it’s sister site, TypeTees. Similar deal, but this time you submit slogans to be voted on. Though, since they are so easy to submit there is a lot of chaff with the wheat.

So, I thought I’d start with some Japanese, something different from the rest. Unfortunately my initial attempts produced errors, the slogan was too long.

ねこと
いぬが
ふったら
かえります

There is a 65 character limit on slogans, and TypeTees converts the input box to HTML escaped Unicode. So at 8 letters per Japanese character it is a bit long. Limiting you to a max of 8 characters (65/8=8.125).

My next try was a nice short enter in Katakana.

ファーキュ

And it was accepted without error. Unfortunately TypeTees displays the slogan as HTML entities.

& #12501;& #12449;& #12540;& #12461;& #12517;

Which is unlikely to get many votes.

It is a pity that TypeTees has a limited character set. I’ll just have to go and use Japanese slogans elsewhere.

For those that can’t read all the text on the movie poster:

presented by
OFFICE OF FILM AND LITERATURE CLASSIFICATION

Stephen Conroy as Guy Montag

Fahrenheit 451

2009?

staring STEPHEN CONROY and STEVE FIELDING director AUSTRALIAN COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA AUTHORITY producers APATHY, CONFUSION and KNEE-JERK REACTION executive producer AUSTRALIAN TAXPAYERS distributor NATIONAL BROADBAND NETWORK

R18+ May not be available on the Internet in Australia

So, how did I come to make the image?

I went looking for information about lists of banner books in Australia. One of the points stressed about the censorship regime of the previous government (but not that of the new one) is that while the list of banned books is available (or you can test for them), but the list of banned sites is not.

It was interesting to see that ‘Fahrenheit 451′ was amongst the lists I found, because of coarse language used. Which sparked the above poster.

The current government is trying to impose a blank filter on all Australians. This is despite the reports received about the effect on network speed, and the unreliability of filters.

Perhaps the movie should be called Centigrade 435 after the temperature at which network cables ignite?

(Network cables have a PVC covering, which has an ignition temperature of 435C)

Commentary about censorship in Australia:

• Somebody think of the children
• No Clean Feed

Some interesting sites about book banning:

• Banned in Australia: Introducing Australia’s Bibliography of Banned Books
• Yippee! A banned book list!
• Books : A - I - That have been Censored, Banned or Challenged
• Australia Won’t Say What Websites They Ban

Family First Senator Steve Fielding wants hardcore pornography and fetish material blocked under the Government’s plans to filter the internet, sparking renewed fears the censorship could be expanded well beyond “illegal material”…

read more | digg story

Stephen Conroy, Australia’s Minister For Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, gets called to task by an Australian newspaper for ignoring bad results from Internet filtering field tests and for attempting to stifle his critics.

read more | digg story

The Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography.

read more | digg story

Been taking geotagged photos with a camera phone here is Japan. I though this would make it easier to add photos to Maps in flickr.

Well it doesn’t!

I spent a long time trying to workout where the ‘use geotag data in jpeg’s EXIF‘ command was when adding images to the map. It doesn’t exist. No where to be found.

It appears though, there is a setting hidden in flicker that tells flickr to use the geotag data in photos as you upload them. In flickr go to Your Account, click on the Privacy & Permissions tab, and you can find the Import EXIF location data setting.

But it only works for new or reloaded images, not existing ones.

Bit of a oversight don’t you think?

You would think that, if your jpg has EXIF geotag data, when you went to add it to a map flickr would think “hmm, this this photo has geotag data. I’ll ask the user ‘Would you like to use the geotag data to place your image on the map?’“. But no, it doesn’t work that way.

So you are stuck in an all or nothing situation. Either all your images with geotags are marked on maps, or you have to add them all manually. Come on flickr/Yahoo, it shouldn’t be that hard to implement it for individual images.

(I’d like to say thanks to Jannis Hermann for having a post about geotags in flickr. Everything else I found was about how to use flickr to geotag photos.)

Seeing as Necronomicon is not running this year another group decided to run their con at Easter, Eyecon. From their FAQ they intend to run it each year. Will it be the new Easter convention in Sydney?

I went and signed up to see how their registration process works, and to see if there was anything worth registering to play.

It was interesting to note that their site tracked how many places in games were available each session, and displayed them to people registering. And that while a couple of game were full, many were very empty.

Hopefully they will get more people turning up tomorrow morning to fill out some of the games. But is begs the question…

Has the Sydney RPG convention scene died and some people just don’t want to accept it? With what seems to be a change from all the Sydney cons being run by one set of past BNGs to another, are they just moving the deck chairs on the Titanic?

(See below for game spaces available at the time I checked tonight, the night before the con.)
(more…)

The latest Iron Web Master specs are up. The round 5 theme is fitness. And the sites are due up Thursday 20 March at 3pm PST (-800 GMT?).

But what can I use as a parody theme this time?

I had thought of doing Exercise, but that is too close to the last one. Maybe ‘Get on your bike’? Thought I can’t think of any other bike jokes.

So, I’m suffering from a little writer’s block. Anybody got any good ideas that I can borrow?

My latest offering for the Iron Web Master competition if Go To Hell.

The theme for round 4 of the competition is Travel, where should you go, how to get there and what to take. So I though why not advocate travel to a destination most people wouldn’t necessarily want to go. And the double meaning is fun

You can rate my entry here. There are a couple of more hours to do that.

The humour in this site is a little more blatant as people voting for the previous sites didn’t seem to get the joke.