These are my bookmarks for June 23rd from 10:20 to 11:48:

• 35+ Horizontal Websites for Your Design Inspiration | Vandelay Design Blog – Websites that use horizontal scrolling in addition to, or instead of, vertical scrolling are becoming more popular. While this trend isn’t a good idea in every situation, the sites showcased here may give you some ideas or inspiration for using this approach in one of your own projects.
• Powerful Images to Give Lessons Punch | The Whiteboard Blog – One of the benefits of having an Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom (or even just a data projector) is the opportunity to display full colour high quality images instead of grainy acetates or posters. With a powerful image you can really add some “punch” to your lesson. Put images up while students are coming into the room – use them as part of a lesson starter – stimulate questions.
• Shop for music tee shirts, men’s tee shirts, women’s tee shirts and lyric tee shirts – i/denti/tee – lyric inspired T-Shirts. Beautiful

I haven’t blogged much lately. Since leaving the agency I have gone through phases of thinking ‘I need to be busy’ , phases of ‘heaven knows I’m miserable now’ and others of ‘hey, this is a pretty good life I’ve got here.’

I seem to be in a positive phase right now which seems to be coupled with a lack of blogging. Before I left the agency, I started reading ‘Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.’ It is the diary of Roger Deakin, who had already gained publishing success with his books ‘Waterlogged’ where he swan the length of the country in rivers, streams and moats ; and ‘Wildwood, A Journey Through the Trees’. ‘Notes from Walnut Tree Farm’ were his diary writings from his home in Mellis, Suffolk. His diary talks about the butterflies that land on his flowers, the ebb and flow of the moat on his common and many other wonderful minute aspects of this natural world that we miss thundering to work or running to yet another meeting.

So I am trying to be more like Roger. Trying to enjoy more of this wonderful county and its amazing wildlife. It is actually quite hard, this computer seems to have a very large tractor beam drawing me back to sit down and do something.

Our ducklings are growing at a rate of knots, we have 13 ducklings and they will eat of my hands so they are going to be very tame. The ‘wild’life is still in plentiful supply, the Heron making a daily visit to the pond. I actually started clearing the pond last week, clearing vast amounts of weed which smells like seaweed but looks like mermaid’s hair – I must find out what it is.

As I was clearing the pond, I found spotted newts which are good to see, and leeches. I have never seen a leech before ‘in the flesh’ – it was quite thin and about 4 inches long. I kept it in a jar to show my daughter before returning it to the pond.

I also attended an open day for RAF Bentwaters – a massive US airbase in the heart of Suffolk that was mothballed in the mid – 90′s. It was good to see more of it but the thing that really sparked my imagination was the ‘radio ham’ club. In the days of instant communication globally, via the Internet, it was wonderful to see the excitement of talking to someone in Australia by bouncing radio signals off the ionosphere. Old School but very cool.

Finally found a new web host last week and will be transferring this blog over during the week, so I have done a little bit of web stuff.

These are my links for June 18th through June 21st:

• Strange Maps – A great map related blog.
• NASA To Fire Exploding Rocket Into the Moon: Follow it on Twitter and Facebook – NASA has always done cool things, but its latest mission is really a sci-fi geek’s dream come true, as it includes flying a rocket into the moon, triggering a huge explosion.

These are my bookmarks for June 17th from 13:13 to 17:11:

• Royalty Free Stock Photography : Matton Images UK – A great new royalty free images website
• Yellowsn0w becomes ultrasn0w, iPhones everywhere swoon – iPhone Dev Team displayed their inimitable talents with a live video demonstration of yellowsn0w’s
  big, bad, unstoppable brother: ultrasn0w
• Nest Unclutterer – It's a new web app called Nest Unclutterer and it simplifies the process of knocking out those Twitter friends who are no longer bringing you value.
• Good.ly – the URL shortener for Twitter that generates cash for charity – If you use Good.ly to make a product recommendation on Twitter (it’s also at @good_ly) and people click on and then buy what you suggested, Good.ly gives 55% of any earned referral fees to one of its nominated charities.
• Parallels Plesk Panel 9.2 — Demo, Tutorials & Screenshots – Possibly the best demonstration suite I have ever seen. You effectively get to trial using the system in a sandbox rather than watching a video.
• Job Listings on ScriptLance – A place to get freelance designers working on your specific script requirements
• Reseller Hosting, Web Hosting & Domain Names | Web Hosting Heart Internet – Good hosting company recommended by EggBoxRobin

Opera has always been a great browser. But it has always lagged behind the major browsers of IE, Firefox and Safari. The announcement this week from Opera is a great step up in the relevance chain but not a game changer.

From what I have seen Opera Unite offers the ability to share files on your computer through Unite, much like you could achieve with GoToMyPC or similar paid for tools. This is the first step of collaboration which I think will be the ultimate ‘next web’ and will give many people a reason to talk about, download and try Opera.

Unite has some cute functions like the fridge facility for sharing collaborative notes which points to the browsers potential for longer term [and wider] collaboration.

However, once Unite is set up it does not seem that you need to actively use Opera to harness its power. I’m off to download it now and will offer a further judgement in due course.

You can download it here, or watch the introductory video below.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microsoft removes Internet Explorer from European Windows 7 (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Mozilla punts Firefox 3.5 again, but pushes ‘Preview’ to beta users (computerworld.com)
• Safari 4 fast, but only minor tweaks from beta (thaibrother.com)

These are my links for June 16th through June 17th:

• Parallels Plesk Panel 9.2 — Demo, Tutorials & Screenshots – Possibly the best demonstration suite I have ever seen. You effectively get to trial using the system in a sandbox rather than watching a video.
• Job Listings on ScriptLance – A place to get freelance designers working on your specific script requirements
• Reseller Hosting, Web Hosting & Domain Names | Web Hosting Heart Internet – Good hosting company recommended by EggBoxRobin
• http://www.mailpress.org – With this plugin you will be able to send beautiful and styled html and plain text mails based on dedicated themes and templates for any e-mail notification issued for

I have been having a few issues with O2 lately. Naturally I turn to Twitter to see if I can fast-track some form of response. I tried it in the past and to be fair they were great, so great I blogged about them.

But recently I have had more issues and tried to reach out to them on Twitter to no avail. My frustration has lead me to criticise them on Twitter mentioning to others as ‘they suck balls’, which got me thinking that there was a person behind the computer that may actually be offended by the rant?

I put my thoughts up on Seesmic [posted below for convenience] and would welcome your thoughts.

Spezify is one of those websites that you marvel at for all of five seconds. Simply enter your name and it will pull in random content related to the words, in my case “jamie riddell”. Naturally there is a lot of my content appearing as well as other references, including the Riddell football helmet. I can’t see any purpose after that but its good for a quick play

With thanks to @henweb and @stuartwitts for sharing this on Twitter.

These are my links for June 15th through June 16th:

• We7 – Free Music, Listen to Music Free – music
• Opera Unite – With Opera 10, we are introducing a new technology called Opera Unite, radically extending what you are able to do online. Opera Unite harnesses the power of today's fast connections and hardware, allowing all of us to help define the future landscape of the Web, one computer at a time. Read about how Opera Unite is going to change the way we interact on the Web on labs.opera.com.
• The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) – The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses. The YUI project includes the YUI Library and two build-time tools: YUI Compressor (minification) and YUI Doc (documentation engine for JavaScript code).

I struggled to get a catchy title here, but the focus needs to be on the app. This little app is perfect for regular and occasional tube travellers in London. The app which works offline [so you can use it underground] – helps you find out where the exit is from any tube station in London. Small apps like this are utter genius and really enhance the iPhone as a life tool.

Tube Exits is available for iPhone and iPod touch on the iPhone App Store. There’s an introductory price of £1.79 (40% off £2.99 normal price) so it’s about the cost of a single zone 1 Tube journey.