217 Lemurs

Torosay Castle on the Isle of Mull is for sale. Asking price is £2.8 million. It is a grade A listed monument, includes 8 properties and has its own beach. It is also set in 800 acres of prime bits of the Western Isles. A bit of a bargain then?

I presume you also get the website thrown in for free.

Poistr seems to have taken off beyond its initial Beta announcement. Basically you map out the key points of interest on a map and the points are auto-magically translated to bits of a Layar layer for you. Easy augmented reality.

Bitcoin is interesting. A peer-to-peer virtual currency which is bascially anonymous that can be used to make purchases and has a fluctuating market in relation to transfer value with other currencies. The market suggests that a bitcoin is currently worth about £5 but obviously that could have changed by now!

This is quite interesting because it is a distinct ‘real’ currency but equally it is the mechanics behind creating bitcoins - they are effectively ‘mined’. Using your PC’s CPU is not cost effective as the cost of mining the bitcoins is more than it costs you to get at them (effectively the same problem as conventional mining operations). The professional rigs make use of the cheaper computing found in GPUs where the bitcoins effectively produce a surplus.

You can strike out on your own with the necessary hardware - and can even buy optimised mining rigs (between USD400 and USD2000) to undertake the job or if you can’t be bother with that then buy a mining contract from Marchenko or Bitcoin rigs. 

There is quite an extensive list of organisations that accept bitcoins but they are in the majority all a but geeky. Fortunately through various instruments it is possible to convert to conventional currencies (and Linden dollars).

I have the bitcoin plus applet running on my laptop but because the time to generate a bitcoin is random it is suggesting I’m six (now seven) hours away from generating the tiniest fraction of a single coin (0.00011152)…

Not as geeky as ThinkGeek (I think the name makes that fairly obvious) but some really unusual ‘stuff’ (to borrow a term from the princess in the Sky ads). 

I particularly like the games and cards on offer but my favourite is the Personal Library Kit - for that librarian that is lurking in us all (no really it must be there, I just put it down over there).

I think there is some other stuff there too… pity they don’t seem to deliver to the UK.

I didn’t know there were “watch geeks” - but there are.

But the magnetic gears of the Omega Megasonic does impress - even if you don’t wear a watch. So instead of the tricky teeth on cogs these just work on the opposing polarity of magnets to propel the cogs. Brilliant but I suspect you won’t be going near any strongly magnetised machinery in a hurry.

There seems to be only one watch on Ebay at the moment - you can buy it now (TM) for £375…

Ghost tube stations, Victorian Star Trek (I think that is called Sharpe but anyway), Steampunk cell phones, Mermaid anatomy - so many posts I don’t know where to look first.