Kew Gardens have just released a series of photographs to promote a new book detailing the inner working of plants, fruit and seeds. The following photographs are all from the same series as part of a project by the Millennium Seed Bank - copyright belongs to the holder, listed below:


© Papadakis Publisher, Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler.


© Papadakis Publisher, Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler.


© Papadakis Publisher, Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler.


© Papadakis Publisher, Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler.


© Papadakis Publisher, Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler.


© Papadakis Publisher, Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler.


© Papadakis Publisher, Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler.


© Papadakis Publisher, Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler.


© Papadakis Publisher, Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler.


© Papadakis Publisher, Wolfgang Stuppy, Rob Kesseler.


Kew Gardens: Official Site
The Millennium Seed Project

I spotted this service a year or so ago on BBC Backstage but it has recently been revamped and seems to work a bit better now too. All it does is use the BBC Radio Now Playing data feed and displays song information pulled from a variety of other sources.

I'm not sure how useful all these resources are but I find the service is great for finding out what song is playing on the radio as the BBC seem to hide this information, I've tried googling for it before, but to no avail.



The design of this service isn't great (looks a bit dated in my opinion) but it has a good function - and uses Ajax to update the page when a new song starts playing so it can be a good visual accompaniment to the radio.

TrackPlaying: BBC Radio Now Playing Service

I was recently undertaking a project for a homepage that would draw in data from a Facebook status RSS feed and display each update as a story on the page. In theory, this job isn't too hard - but it involves using a GET request (in this case using LWP:Simple in Perl) and not all sites / feeds allow a computer access to the file (just a browser).

This seemed to be the case with the Facebook feed so I looked for a solution. I ended up getting it working using a Yahoo Pipe, that first took the feed in and then spat it out in a slightly changed format - this output worked fine using the GET request and the problem was solved.


The resulting stories working on the site.

The Yahoo Pipe was supposed to alter the feed to remove the username etc from each post but this didn't work so I did this manually - the pipe was still very useful though!

How to use your Facebook status RSS feed
Yahoo Pipe: Facebook RSS

I was reading an article on Wikipedia the other day when I stumbled across this photo of an "early mouse". This was, in fact, the first mouse I used (age 5?) - I hadn't seen one in 15 years or so (we dumped our old Macs ages ago), good to see the old guys again :P



Apple Mouse on Wikipedia

I've looked at making a nice, Flash-free image switcher before and have had some success but thought I'd adapt it a bit for a new set of pictures.

My previous image switcher efforts used a menu system, but this time I'd like to use 'forward' and 'back buttons, meaning creating an image map for each photo. I've also opted to use an iFrame this time, guaranteeing all the files are in the right place!



I think it works pretty well and is a code-light app, so nice and easy to replicate!

The founder of XKCD doesn't hide his geekiness and some of the sketches are only really funny if you know your maths and physics, but a lot of the sketches span general themes.

It's worth taking a look anyway - might be to your fancy :) The following is totally true...just one example, check out the full site below or click the image - I've also selected a few that I particularly liked:



XKCD: Official Site

Here are a few I particularly liked, the first four should be viewed in order:

XKCD: Barrel Part 1
XKCD: Barrel Part 2
XKCD: Ferret
XKCD: Barrel Part 5

XKCD: Walking Paths
XKCD: Frustration

Now I'm not a huge Bob Dylan fan, but if I were I'm sure his website would make me very happy! Not only does it have a 'random page button', but it also has a very impressive music player.

Click at the top of the page and you get a full menu of all his records, which an be selected and any tracks previewed. They even spin on a nice little Flash record player - and best of all it all runs smoothly:



You can click the pic above to go to his site or click the link below - Music websites often frustrate me but this one definitely gets the thumbs up!

Bob Dylan: Official Site