I’ve found some pretty weird things wandering through Feedmap and checking out my local area, but this actually has me very interested. SecretGeek.net, who just so happens to live and blog within a nice Sunday drive of myself, has just released v2 of TimeSnapper, a program that will sit in your memory taking screen captures every few seconds.

Now admittedly, when I first saw this I had to ask why anyone would want a constant journal of their computing activities. But on thinking about this a little more, I remembered the number of times I’ve been writing, coding or just plan messing about and accidently deleted something really, really important that had taken me ages to do. (This happened to disasterous effect a few years ago with a large assignment and a damn undo key that just wouldn’t undo!).

I’m assuming this little thing is firmly aimed at programmers where a constant record of the ever-changing code would be extremely handy for those situations when ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’ and then turned out not to be, but I can see applications for the general population as well.

And before the paranoid amongst us (myself included) ask questions about the security of this baby, the new release allows selective capturing depending on the program being used. So you can capture while doing the things you should be doing, but turn it off automatically when you are, say, checking your personal email on the work computer or paying your bills at lunch time.

For myself, my inability to actually launch programs on my work computer that haven’t been through the rigorous testing and justification phase is pretty much going to keep this out of my reach. I’d have limited use for this at home; work is where it would really shine. Oh well, I’ll add it to the list of things that would make my work computer more productive.

For everyone else, Windows only and you’ll need your dot.net.

I’m a bit of a science geek. I wanted to be a biologist for a long while growing up and I still tend to get a little shuddery over sciency things. So when I read that the Royal Society had digitised their catalogue and were opening it up for two months to the gen. pop., I proceeded to tell just about every other science geek I know. And I actually know more than I thought.

So, for two months only, get your fill of science-geek goodness from the last three and a half centuries. Read about Franklin’s electricity, Pavlov’s dogs and oodles of other fascinating experiments from the very people that lived them.

Did I mention I was excited?

I always get a certain thrill out of seeing fellow Australian doing things online.  Face it, we are only ~22 Million people out of billions, and we have a tendency to get lost in the crowd sometimes.  Start thinking closer to home, and the chances of running into someone from the same state is lower still.

So when I discovered Feedmap, I was pretty excited about the prospect of being able to find fellow bloggers in my ‘neighbourhood’.  And find I did!  16 local blogs in my general area, and a bunch more close by.  I’m starting to feel the neighbourly love.