Click the image for a larger view, then let us know what you think in the comments.

The first things you’ll notice are the banner change up at the top and the removal of the left sidebar. It seemed to us that in the old layout we really had 2 banners, one with an image and logo and the other with the text, just sitting on top of each other so to save space and get more content above the fold we’ve created a new stylised header from our logo. The left sidebar wasn’t being used for anything except showcasing the daily pictures but since that ran its course and was not longer being updated as frequently we decided to remove it. All of the old images can still be found in the gallery up the top and on the right we’ve established a flickr photo stream for the more regular but slightly less themed images we take.

The layout of the blog posts has also changed a little, moving the by-line and tags to the top and limiting the post width to a more standard and readable dimension.

And finally we’ve had to bite the bullet and include some advertising on the site. It’s only a very small amount and we hope it’s as unobtrusive as possible but we have always thought it would be nice if the site somehow in the future managed to pay for itself, so please forgive us this small sin. In the 2 days it’s been live we’ve had 1 advert clicked on generating an earthshakingly impressive 15p for the site so with a few more of those and all of your continued support we’ll be well on the way to breaking even.

If you spot any more changes or see some things that we missed or that you just love, do let us know in the comments!

My favourite quote from the article though comes right at the end where Ms Merritt, Symantec’s internet safety advocate, plays down the potential fury of Daily Mail reading types by saying…

“Any of us who have been teenagers are not surprised kids look for information about sex,” Ms Merritt told AFP news agency.

“I think we have all gotten over our shock that the Internet has porn.”

Very well said however what I found most interesting and truly shocking is that even though these computers were covered in parental protection software which presumably the kids were aware of, they still happily and regularly searched for porn!

Personally I’m convinced that the real search results and the truly gargantuan amounts of porn consumed by this age group will never fully be known because if I and my generation had enough savvy to find workarounds for this type of software today’s crop of teenagers with access to more portable bootable storage and software than ever before, certainly do. Or of course maybe it was just me that really REALLY didn’t want to have that awkward conversation with my mum about Google and teenagers today are just too bold to care.

” Patient TN was, by his own account, completely blind. Two consecutive strokes had destroyed the visual cortex of his brain, and consequently, his ability to see. His first stroke had injured only one hemisphere of his visual cortex. About five weeks later, a second stroke damaged the other hemisphere. An assessment of his brain function revealed that after two strokes, TN, in his 50s, was clinically blind.

Known as selective bilateral occipital damage, TN’s unusual injury made him the subject of much interest while recovering at a hospital in Geneva. Researchers began examining him and discovered that despite his blindness, he had maintained the ability to detect emotion on a person’s face. He responded appropriately — with emotions such as joy, fear, and anger — to a variety of facial expressions. Observed activity in his amygdala — the part of the brain responsible for processing emotions — confirmed the curious results.”

link

Just incredible reading, I’m constantly amazed by the brain’s capabilities even though by now I really shouldn’t be.

Non toxic glow in the dark dyes

USB software toolkit

Castro duped by chatroom sweetheart

Tortoises recover with pink plaster casts

This weekend will see the latest global protest by the internet group Anonymous against the dangerous cult of Scientology. Operation Sea Aarrrgh 2: Cruise Control is the latest in a series of protests Anonymous has organized against the Church of Scientology in its continuing mission to educate the public about the criminal behavior and unethical tactics of the cult’s management and this time it’s pirate themed. Unknown to us here at Stolengolem, the cult of Scientology has a Navy! And as every good navy knows, you’ve got to beware of Pirates. The alleged abuses that go on in this navy (Sea Org) are, like everything else to do with Scientology absurd and terrifying in equal measure and the more that is done to bring this shadowy organisation out into the light for public scrutiny the better I say. So if you feel so inclined, put on your pirate hat and have a look at what’s likely to be a pretty explosive if under-reported, global protest this weekend.

via

Within the next few days, some applications and mashups based on the Twitter API may behave unpredictably or even crash – at least that’s the warning given by Canadian software company WhereCloud’s Twitpocalypse website. This impending “Twitpocalypse,” much like the famous Y2K bug of 2000, is based on a data processing limitation.

Every tweet in Twitter’s system is uniquely identified by an integer value. For example, the system’s very first public tweet, “just setting up my twttr,” by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is tweet number 20 (presumably tweets 0 through 19 were used for testing). The maximum signed 32-bit integer value for most database applications is 2,147,483,648. This is a huge value, but the accelerating popularity of Twitter means has the amount of tweets is rapidly approaching this limit. If third party application developers haven’t designed their Twitter clients to store tweet IDs using something like the less restrictive unsigned 64-bit integer data structure, users might start seeing strange errors, such as tweets listed in the wrong order – or worse, applications not working at all.

There’s really no way I could have explained it better so I’m just going to quotelink the whole thing  and be done with it. Now to go find a rock to hide under until it all passes over… I’ll try to twitter from there for as long as I can and I’ll see you again after the Twitpocalypse!

As some of you may remember, on the day we relaunched this site the first post referenced the news that my pet tortoise, Hermes had been stolen overnight. Well following on from that we informed all the authorities we could think of and produced posters pleading for information, which we spread around the neighbourhood, libraries and anywhere else we could think of.

Then this morning, exactly 4 weeks later at 10:50am I received an incredibly encouraging call from a woman whose 6 year old daughter had found a tortoise lost in Clissold park! They handed it in to the park rangers to look after, remembered seeing one of the posters we had put up and decided to give me a call!

Obviously I was excited that somehow Hermes had escaped his captors, or maybe they had had a change of heart and decided to let him go so I dashed down on my bike to the rangers office barely stopping to lock the door.  Unfortunately but not unpredictably, it wasn’t Hermes, it was instead a really very cute 1 or 2 year old baby Horsefield tortoise and she was in terrible condition. She must have been out alone in the park for a couple of nights as her front legs had been mostly chewed away by rats leaving only a single claw on her front right paw, plenty of exposed bone and tissue and her wounds were covered in flies eggs. The rangers were more than happy to give her to me to look after and I immediately took her to the local herp vet some miles away for an emergency appointment.

Baby tortoise found in Clissold Park

She never complained, kept trying to walk, was alert and thirsty and was utterly adorable… I even had a name picked out if it turned out that I could save her. Sadly  after waiting some time and then observing a careful examination, the vet was of the opinion that she had lost too much bone and tissue and was likely to suffer from infections and lose both her front legs. She’d been through too much to continue and the decision was made that she had to be put down. He was right, it was the right thing to do but it was incredibly hard.  So sadly now Hermes is still missing, though presumed alive and there’s one less tortoise in the world, 120 years of potential snuffed out by a careless owner who let their tortoise escape and fend for itself against London rats.

Sorry about being so down, I just love tortoises and today was really tough for me. I hope in some way that this story might prompt others to take better care of theirs. An image of the damage can be found here, not a happy image so feel free not to click.

I have no idea how they’ve done it but we really could use some Dutch thinking in the UK where our prisons are overcrowded and fit to burst.