Random links of interest

Here are a things I've been looking at recently:

Favicon generator:
http://www.dagondesign.com/tools/favicon-generator-tool/

The Daily Mash - satirical news, similar to the Onion, only ruder:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/

Statistics on the UK's armed forces:
http://www.dasa.mod.uk/

Statistics on many aspects of British life:
http://www.fti.communities.gov.uk/

Voodoo Sabotage, a Kleptones video mashup:
http://www.vimeo.com/7663931

The temples of Damanhur, the 8th wonder of the World:
http://www.thetemples.org/

CMOS batteries ate my email

Maybe it's the cold weather, maybe it's a batch of duff CMOS batteries, but I'd advise all you PC-repair nerds to grab a spare CR2032 battery, on the off-chance that you get asked to investigate odd Firefox behaviour. I've had two call-outs in the last week, both from people who use webmail through Firefox, and were getting "This site's SSL certificate has expired" warnings. In both cases, the user's CMOS battery was weakening, meaning their PCs thought we were living either in the past, or in the future, which affected Firefox's ability to guess whether an SSL certificate is valid or not. Maybe Firefox uses the system time to check, and maybe if it does, it should use a web service to an atomic clock! Anyway, a new CMOS battery solved the problem, but it took a while to figure out that this was the root cause.