Have you ever wondered what day Easter is going to fall on?  Well so have I.  Wikipedia has been my source of this information for the last few years but it only gives you the date for the next 15 years or so.  What if you want to know when is the next time Easter is going to fall on March 23rd? (2160)

Having found a formula for calculating the date I threw together a spreadsheet and did a fill down.  Did you know that in the year 3000 Easter Sunday is going to be on April 13th?  That’s assuming Easter is still celebrated, the Gregorian calendar is still used or that humans still exist.

What’s more, I have been kind enough to publish this formula and data (until 3176 - until someone asks for more) on Google Spreadsheets at the following url:  http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=prVVEmxcBM2cS0KU6TrF7cA

At some point I may add other useful associated dates to the spreadsheet, such as Shrove Tuesday & Ash Wednesday.

I promise this will be the last post for a while to include a QR-Code.  If you don’t know what a QR-Code is, go read about it on wikipedia.  There are several QR-Code readers out there but I have personally chosen to go with the Kaywa Reader.  I also use the Kaywa QR-Code generator.

The reason for this post was to play with an idea I came up with after reading the Wikipedia article on QR-Codes.  One of the images they show is of an picture encoded into the code.  Whilst I haven’t yet been able to figure out how they encoded the image into the code I have made another discovery.  It turns out that QR-Codes contain a lot of redundancy.  It is possible to loose up to 30% of the code and still be able to read its content.

I’ve found that it is possible to paste an image over the top of the QR-Code.  My experiments so far indicate seem to indicate the image needs to cover less than 30%.  I haven’t had to time to find out how the QR-Codes are structured.  It may be possible in re-structure the data so that more of it can be lost to the embedded image.

Most people that are reading this will probably already know that I use Flickr for hosting photos. Most people will also know that I have, in the past, ordered MiniCards and NoteCards from Moo.com. It is true that I have fallen in love with their simple but effective ideas and the top quality products they produce.

Yesterday I was pleasantly surprise when, having recently fix my website contact form, I got an email from Rachel Bremer. She wanted to let me know that Moo.com has just released another product for your Flickr photos called StickerBooks. The book contains 90 stickers on 15 tear-out sheets and is a bargain at only £4.99 ($9.99 US).

This time the picture on Moo.com contains hands holding the sticker books to give a bit of scale. My guess is that if each sheet contains 6 stickers, each stickers is going to be about the size of a postage stamp.

I’m impressed that Moo.com has taken the effort to contact people that are talking about their products. Seeing as they have got free postage during July I’m definitely going to ordering me some stickers. This is one case of direct marketing that has worked. And, if their aim was to induce a viral marketing campaign then I am quite happy to assist.

Technorati Tags: Moo.com, Flickr, photography, stickers

I found out today that the Guernsey Press is testing an online edition of the newspaper.  I don’t mean a new version of thisisguernsey.com, but an online reader for the actual print paper.  Whilst this, at first glance, seems to be a move in the right direction they really need to look at the way they’re doing it.

Firstly, it seems that it will only be available to Internet Explorer users.  I presume they’re going to be using some proprietory ActiveX control for viewing the paper. This is a really bad move if you ask me, whilst IE 7 is an improvement in past version it still falls short of the mark and many people prefer alternative browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konquerer).

Secondly, it seems that they’re planning on charging £10/month for the service.  Which, if you exclude Sundays, works out at about 36p per day.  This is only 4p less than the physical paper costs.  Quite how they can justify this price when they don’t have to cover the costs of the physical paper (raw materials, distribution, machinery, etc.) is beyond me. 

Thirdly, it isn’t very well written.  On the login page, every time a key is press, when the password box has focus, a javascript funtion is called to see if the enter button is pressed.  This is totally redundant as any half decent browser will provide this functionality for free.  If that is how the login page is written I dread to think what the rest of the site is like.  I have another reason for concern about the programming of the site but I need to contact the developers before I make it public.

I found a cool site (via Makezine and Digg) that generates a DNA styled profile for a given url. Whilst its not terribly easy to understand what it means, it apparently show how the site is constructed, old style messy HTML or new style clean XHTML, and also about the content, whether it contains mostly text or if there is lots of images and flash.

The site seems to be down at the moment, which is not surprising as it is probably being link to quite heavily having made it onto the Makezine and Digg.

A while ago I posted about Fold.com, a Web 2.0 homepage, had closed down and that the domain and source code for Fold was being sold off for the meagre sum of £750,000 (1,100,000 Euros). I have just been back to Fold.com to see if the site had been sold, and it seems that Fold is back on.

Whilst is doesn’t explicitly state that the fold Web 2.0 homepage is returning, I take the countdown timer & original Fold style to be an indication that it is indeed returning. This make me wonder about a few things:

• Was the reason for shutting down Fold really due to the fact that Axel Wolf didn’t have the resources to support it further?
• Has Alex Wolf worked out a business model which will allow him to make money from Fold?
• Was the price he gave for the Fold source a sincere offer?
• Has someone actually paid the asking price?
• Is this new count-down yet another stunt to get publicity for Alex Wolf?

I don’t know the answer to any of these but you can bet that I’ll be watching closely on Sun, Aug 6 2006 at 8:35am when the timer is due to expire…. viral advertising at its best!

I noticed today, whilst looking for a detailed map of Guernsey, that Guernsey Digimap has released a kmz file for Google Earth that provides higher resolution aerial images of Guernsey than what are normal available through Google Earth.

Layer contains 10m, 3m, 50cm and 10cm per pixel images that are centered around the Digimap Ltd offices. However, ‘m not really satisfied with only having high res images of the Digimap offices, I want high res images of where I live and where I work (and the rest of the island in time). I also found that it is possible to search for high res images on the Digimap website. Admitedly the high res images have got a big copyright logo in the middle of the unless you pay for the image but its better than nothing.

So I have combined the two, I took the base kmz file provided by Digimap and I have added my own selected images from the Digimap photo search site. I have uploaded the resulting kmz file to my website for others to use.

Note to Digimap: I haven’t copied the images, so don’t bother accusing my of breach of copyright.

I’ve been checking the Google Analytics reports for www.gringod.com/fold and noticed that there have been a couple of referals from protopage.com.

Protopage is another AJAXed start page like Fold. Although from an initial play Protopage seems to be more advanced than Fold in several respects:

• Works with IE (I tested with IE 7 beta)
• Style themes
• More configurable backgrounds
• More standard widgets
• Multiple pages
• Docked panels
• Expand panels by dragging

One of the first things I tested was whether or not it is possible to use my Foldlets within Protopage, and I’m please to say that they seem to run just fine, although I am thinking of adding a parameter to the search foldlet to allow you to configure how many search results are returned.

Because you can run Protopage in IE, it is posible to set it as an active background for your desktop (in MS Windows) so you can have your AJAXed start page as your actual desktop. I wouldn’t advise this if you have lots of panels as it is likely to be a bit of a memory hog.

However, for all its advantages over Fold, Protopage seems to be lacking something in its feel. So for the time being I think I’ll stick with Fold as it is still in beta and is likely to be improving in the not too distant future.

I found another toy on the internet, Six Degrees of Wikipedia. It is a tool you can use to find the shortest path between two wikipedia articles. It takes its name from “Six Degrees of Seperation“.

Today I finally managed to find two topics which were seperated by six degress: Six_degress_of_seperation to Algea. Within a couple tries Damien, on the other hand, had managed to find six degrees of seperation between Alan Sugar and Bob the builder.

But he wasn’t going to stop there, another couple of goes and he found that there is no link (within the maximum of ten degrees) between hash table and Orlando Bloom. Then again, Damien has been editing wikipedia articles for some time now and has a fair idea of how the linking works.

Topics in the post:

• Six degrees of seperation
• Algea
• Alan Sugar
• Bob the builder
• Hash table
• Orlando Bloom

I recently blogged about Fastr, the tag guessing game based on Flickr. Well, today I was playing again and getting rather good scores even if I do say so myself, when I noticed that on of the other players names was a link (something about free laptops).

So I decided to figure out how it was done. I didn’t take that long. All you have to do is instead of putting a normal play name into the textbox, insert a html link, e.g. <a href="http://www.gringod.com">GrinGod</a>

Thats all there is to it… next I’m going to see what else I can do with the play name