On Wednesday, Jeff sent me an email saying that the spillage from the bird feeder and amount of seed that was going out was probably due to a squirrel. Well, I still haven’t seen a squirrel in the bird-feeder, but yesterday I noticed that the feeder was over half-full at one point, and then about an hour later was nearly empty. It may not be a squirrel, but something is tipping the feeder enough to spill out much of the seed. I think when I refill it today I’m going to move it over to the clothesline pole which should be out of range of squirrels jumping at it, and see if that makes a difference. If nothing else, it means fewer steps through the snow to get to the feeder for me.
- Smoking ban to come into force on 29 March in Ireland. They’d planned to have this in place for the first of the year, but implementation took a bit longer. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the pub business, since a similar ban in California shut down a number of bars. [holy schmoly]
- Tests show dogs are almost human in their ability to pick up on non-verbal clues from humans. In fact, they’re better at it than chimps. It seems to be due to their long association with humans.
- Now Preening on the Coffee Table: The TiVo Remote Control tells how TiVo designed theiir remote and why it’s so good. Except for the little problem where it’s difficult to know which end to point at the TV [scripting]
- @ symbol added to morse code, the first change to morse since well before World War II. Apparently hams exchange email addresses often enough via morse code that something had to be done.
- Sorting e-mail friends from foes: Identifying networks of mutual friends helps filter out spam. And correctly categorizes about half of the email. There’s still half of your email to deal with, but that’s at least half of the email out of the way.