Handy items for every Real Man^(tm)'s toolbox:

• Kamasa chubby ratchet screwdriver; six double-ended bits built into the handle, and small enough to go into your pocket. And it doesn't break after the first turn. This partly assuages the grief over my late, much lamented £2.50 Woolies ratchet set. (More pr0n in Kama's online catalogue.)
• Telescopic magnetic pick-up tool; curently 99p from your nearest cheapie hardware store (e.g. Wilkos).

Enhancing scanned images with ImageMagick

Having nailed down a faster b/w workflow for digital images, using Bibble, I've been considering something similar for scanned negatives. Obviously, the bulk of time is unavoidably expended on developing and scanning those negatives (which is why I now have four unprocessed rolls of film sitting in a drawer), but that time can be amortized over all the frames on a roll, whereas taking those scans through to a finished print absorbs more time per image. What I want is a quick, automated way to perform the minimum remaining steps necessary to produce an acceptable result.

With a little help from Classic Rock Announces Prog magazine (OK, that's not precisely the title but we like the acronym better), and carefully avoiding ITV in the evenings, we finally found some decent music.

ELC Baby Rattle

Shake and throw audible rattle for babies aged 3-12 months.

How this toy aids your baby's development:

• Develops hand and eye co-ordination
• Stimulates senses, including hearing, sight and touch.
• Strengthens muscles.
• Introduces principles of rhythm.
• Builds tolerance in adults.
• Develops an appreciation of nuclear physics, the environment and the more obscure Shakespeare texts.

Some time ago, I used a handy Perl script called fp2flickr to import some Fotopic collections into Flickr. It was crude but it did the job usefully. After a moderate amount of hacking and bodging, I've now modified it to import PhotoPost albums into Flickr: pp2flickr.

(Blows dust off category in blog.)

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that if you built up a billion dollar company over ten years but never did any backups, and then a massive data loss wiped out the organisation, you still wouldn't have lost as much money as you would had you tried to develop and manage a working backup solution in that period. Nevertheless, here are some interesting links on the topic that I've found recently.