#clog

It’s President Barack Obama!
And a green toilet plunger!
On Saint Patrick’s Day!

Yes, it’s a real picture.

Tube delays light display

Tracy Tsang, an MA student at Middlesex University sent an email recently to let me know that she is using the my London Underground tube delays RSS feed to activate a piece of hardware, which she calls “The Tube”, to display line status information via LEDs in a plastic tube. This forms part of her MA thesis.

The Tube shows all the lines on the London Underground that are currently running with delays. The strip with corresponding colour is lit up using LEDs as the data is received from the TFL website.

Having checked site logs the other day, I realise that this RSS feed is actually the most popular thing on this site. Has anyone else done anything interesting with it? Answers on a postcard (or email) please.

World survives Big Bang, originally uploaded by kronoc.

I had better pay that credit card bill after all then.

At one point his PR people think he’s really going to blow it this time.

[hat tip to Jazz Biscuit]

Herself has recently been getting a lot of telephone messages for some midlands socialite named Mark. Neither of us know who he is, but the voicemail keeps coming. Spookily the phone doesn’t ring for him, ever, but still the messages appear. Thanks to the magic of the internet, using the audio player below, now you too can marvel at these random voice messages.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[Background sample courtesy of Real Rhodes Sounds, from The Freesound Project]

It’s 2008 and still bombs from WWII are being found in the neighbourhood. Train and tube journeys have been disrupted as a result.

The Guardian reports:

A massive unexploded second world war-bomb began to tick as experts worked to defuse it, police said today.

The 1,000kg-device (2,200lb) was found in a river at Sugar House Lane, near Bromley-by-Bow tube station, in east London, on Monday.

Army disposal experts from the Royal Engineers were brought in to make the half-century-old weapon safe. Police said that at one point during the operation the bomb began to tick, but stopped again when it was doused with liquid.

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