Thanks, Tom--the chown worked just fine--navigated the apparently unrelated paths precisely well enough that I can update from my main account now. Fie on the application for requiring me to be the owner, rather than just another member of the admin group.

I've been using a 3GS for a week and a bit now, I'm pleased to say it's pretty stable. I suspect the extra RAM helps compared to my first gen phone. Battery life is still not as good as I'd like. Video functionality is amazing, they should have called it the 3GV.

So far my experience with Windows 7 has been pretty good. It was just as easy to install as Ubuntu, which is saying something. Everything else has been pretty smooth too. It is quite Vista-like but it seems snappier. The memory footprint seems lower too, when doing video encoding, word processing, playing mp3s and burning a disc all at the same time; there was still plenty of memory left. The taskbar seems better sorted as well. One problem, I should have gotten the 64-bit version to try out instead of the 32-bit. I might see if I can grab that and redo the install.

One disappointment that has nothing to do with Windows 7. Ubuntu's video playback when running in VMServer isn't good enough to be useful to me.

LED clock munches bugs and converts carcasses into energy

Shades of Little Shop of Horrors' Audrey with this LED clock from Brit designers Jimmy Loizeau and James Auger. Part flycatcher, part timepiece, the gizmo harvests insects on a sticky roller covered in flypaper, before dropping the corpses into a microbial fuel cell.

The dead bug is then digested by the bacteria within, and the chemical changes are used by the cell to power the clock. Simple, huh? Well, simple if your mind moves in mysterious ways, I suppose. There's a close-up for fans of six-legged snuff porn below.

It looks pretty cool too.

13 year old kid reviews a 30 year old Sony Walkman

BBC Magazine gave 13-year-old Scott Campbell a gen-one Walkman in place of his MP3 player for a week, then gathered his impressions on the device:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, "Walkmans eat tapes". So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day.

That is classic.

Awesome!!! Too funny.

Next? We give him Pong™.

Two weeks ago I managed to forget a 256 Mb Compact Flash card from an old camera in my pocket when I did the wash.

Resigned to the loss of the data, I shrugged, tapped out a bunch of the water, and tossed it into the commercial dryer with my clothes.

Then I set it aside until today when I said "what the hey" and tried it in an old computer with a Compact Flash slot.

It was recognized and all my pictures appear to be there.

Wacky.

I use Coffee Cup HTML editor for submitting works to on-line publishers. It lets me compose in visual editor so I can concentrate on writing, then produces very vanilla html that can be plugged into just about any blog template or online content management without messing it up.

But I've never really been comfortable composing in it. I still like composing in word processors, but none of them produce anything like as clean html. Coffee Cup has of course tons of capabilities that I don't use, because I'm not making a web site - I'm submitting my deathless prose to someone to format as they like, with only very basic formatting on my part. Is there something out there that is frankly a better word processor, and even if a worse html editor, but can still do the whole "very vanilla html" thing.