Obviously, because it’s a Spotify playlist, you’ll need Spotify to play it, and because it’s a Spotify playlist there’s a good chance it randomly won’t work because the sky is the wrong shade of grey or there are leaves on the internet or something.

Click here for playlist

Low – Just Like Christmas
David Gray – Please Forgive Me — Radio Edit
The Holloways – Generator
Slow Moving Millie – Beasts
Taken By Trees – Sweet Child O’ Mine
The Big Pink – Dominos
Andrew Bird – Eugene
Kate Nash – Mariella

Because I have a couple of half-written lengthy draft entries that I don’t have the energy to finish before I collapse into bed for the night, I’ll share some (admittedly work-based) links with you instead.

Typekit
Typekit can be summarised as font replacement through javascript, which in turn can be summarised as “magic happens”. I’ve not played around with this as much as I’d hoped, but if you read this on the site (as opposed to the RSS feed), you’ll notice I’m using it for entry titles (and all other h3 elements, too). Disturbingly easy to implement, this is something I’d genuinely pay for if the choice of fonts improves.

Brizzly
Managing more than one Twitter account? Brizzly is the best solution I’ve found, making it suitably difficult to announce your personal secrets to your work account. Now includes Facebook integration and has seemingly managed to get over a bizarre bug where it finds search results over and over and over again, announcing them as new every time. This wouldn’t be so annoying had I not posted the tweets that triggered the search finding in the first place… (Still invite only, I think. Leave a comment or send a message to @whoopdedoo on Twitter if you want one).

Mobile website development
Without giving anything whatsoever away about what I’m currently looking into for work purposes:

• Smashing Magazine on Mobile Web Design Trends. Despite my own prejudices,  Smashing Magazine do actually produce consistently useful articles, all of which must include the word “trends”.
• Cameron Moll: Mobile Web Design Book.
• Jakob Nielson: Mobile Web Usability

How to Understand Your Users with Personas
PONIES!

I’ll admit it: I really don’t mind Windows. In fact, I quite like it. I could happily use Linux if it could run Photoshop with any proficiency, and I’m sure I’d love a Mac if I could just find a relative I could sell in order to buy one, but despite all of the hoo-hah, and once all user account warnings have been disabled within an inch of their lives, the Windows of 2009 is really not that bad. This is quite a useful thing, given that for the second time in two weeks I’m watching Windows 7 install onto a machine at a speed that would make a snail quake in its boots. You know, if a snail could wear boots. Or install Windows 7.

The first install was planned, a full install on a brand new Vista laptop, and went smoothly apart from that small issue with the graphics driver and the webcam only showing upside down images. You want to chat with someone who appears to be hanging from the ceiling? I’m your girl. The second install was not so planned, but ended up being an upgrade-ish from Vista to Windows 7 on my desktop’s shiny new hard drive, a hard drive that talks to my computer and works and everything. I say upgrade-ish, because you can’t upgrade from Vista Home We’re Awesome Edition to Windows 7 We’re Suit-wearing Professionals Edition, and so it makes up a story about how it’s doing a clean install. This is a blatant lie, incidentally, but a happy lie from Microsoft for once.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying, I love Ninite. The first thing I normally do after a reinstall is open Internet Explorer and use that to download Firefox. Once Firefox is sorted, I then start the three-day-long process of working out what it is I actually use, remembering only when I go to use a program that I still need to download and install it. Ninite takes out the guesswork. Open IE, head to IE, tick boxes for almost everything I use on a daily basis — including Firefox, Thunderbird, Notepad++, Spotify, Adobe Reader, AVG, VLC and WinSCP — and I can download a custom installer that gets it all done at once. This means that the only software I need to manually install are the biggies — Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, and any drivers that need to be argued with (assuming that those drivers are available before mid-November, that is. Just sayin’, Hewlett-Packard.) So kudos, Ninite — you have made the past two weeks infinitely easier.

(Note: all credit for the pumpkin above must go to our next door neighbours. Sadly, I cannot take any credit for those artistically swirly eyes or the way our stairwell suddenly smells a lot like rotting veg. You don’t know how tempted I am to take the lid off and put the hamster inside, just having him knock on our door to get in again once he’s had his fill.)

If you’re from the UK, you won’t need a primer in Daily Mail Hate, and the quite worrying trend of people reading a Daily Mail headline or story and using that as an allegedly factual basis for some form of prejudice. In fairness, the DM also does a good line in cute animal photos and in quirky stories that BBC News will steal the next day, although they tend to be somewhat less contentious. But they have now published a headline that goes wildly, entertainingly, beyond even the DM’s usual standards: “English passengers forced to show passports when arriving in Scotland”.

In short, we Scottish people hate you English people so much, even though you pay for everything for us and we steal all of your money and give it to students and ill people that we now make you show us your passports at the airport. We think you are such a major terror risk that you might do an incendiary Morris dance or football hooliganise us all to death that we have decided to to inconvenience you slightly in order to make our point.

So let me do all of middle England a favour and translate the headline into actual fact: some passengers, regardless of where they’re from, are being asked to show their passports at some airports for security reasons. This, strangely, will probably also include some Scottish people, returning home to Scotland in order to deep fry a Mars Bar and toss a caber or two before nipping back down to Engliand to steal your votes. And so horrific is the abuse of our Scottish powers that the Mail end the piece with the news that “Metropolitan Police, which covers Heathrow and City airports in London, also use the powers on domestic passengers. A Met spokeswoman said: ‘From time to time we to stop people and look at their travel documents. It’s not that unusual.’” This would considerably undermine the entirity of the Mail’s argument but, erm, you know, that probably doesn’t count as kilt-screening because, erm, ooh, look what Sienna Miller’s wearing today! And is that a baby duck without a mother?

I admit it: I’m a bitter Scot who sometimes gets annoyed when Dorothy Perkins in Sussex won’t take my 100% genuine Scottish £20 notes without first treating me like a money launderer who’s put on a dodgy accent. I’ve had whole arguments with my English boyfriend when he won’t accept that the word “juice” covers all forms of drinkable fluids apart from water and alcohol. The words “answer” and “dancer” do not — and can not — rhyme. But regardless of that, even we money-grabbing, bagpipe-playing, meanies, who have sent our entire population to work in the Cabinet, really couldn’t care less about looking at your passport unless we have to, apart from to laugh at  your photo.

After all, our time is precious: we have chips we could be eating instead.

Like most people who have to be creative for a living, I go through troughs and peaks of inspiration. And sometimes the troughs are bigger than the peaks, with my most recent trough lasting, well, all summer.

One of the ways I store images and ideas that feed the idea machine, though, is on a big folder on my hard drive, not an ideal solution since I’m not always sitting at my desk when I need to be inspired, so I was quite excited to find ImageSpark. Free (for now), ImageSpark allows you to upload and share the inspiring images found online and, importantly, give some credit where it’s due. Fun even for those who don’t have to filter everything they see in life into Photoshop, I just love to watch the somewhat whimsical trends and patterns that emerge in what I like. Today, poster design. Currently, colour. Always, birds.

If you got an email from a stranger who said they’d donated $200 to the charity of your choice IF you’d have them (and a friend) to a vegetarian dinner, would you say yes?

I turned to the cleverly named 50DollarLogo.com, a site based in Sri Lanka or somewhere promising six logo designs, unlimited revisions, and a 1–3 day turnaround. Who needs messy things like research, insight, or even a modicum of information about my business, when I can have unlimited revisions?

This feels a lot like my life at the moment, only I am the one trying to make a decent logo out of cheese and Nazareth and the people I work for want something with more anthropomorphism.

The images is 100 metres long, and there are 178 people in the picture. All were shot from the same spot on Warschauer Strasse in Berlin in the summer of 2007.