bitful

The iPhone (and many other high-end phones) have a water damage sensor: a small white disc inside the headphone jack that gets coloured when in contact with water. [via garoo]
The Sound of Music is based on a true story (with alterations and omissions).
TV Genius (the TV listings and reminders website I use regularly) has launched [...]

There is no goalkeeper in rugby union. I noticed it thirty minutes into last week's France vs. New Zealand, did not dare ask any of the friends I was watching the match with, but silently Wikipedia'd it on my mobile.
In East Germany after the war there were so few men that they had to introduce [...]

With Oyster cards, you do not need a photocard any more
If you simply type 'time' into the search box, Google will tell you your local time. Type 'time' and a city, and it will tell you what time it is there. Type 'time' and a country with several time zones like Australia, and it will [...]

Stephen Hawking is 65 (I would have thought he was in his early fifties).
In Canada, informal hockey games are still called shinny (from shinty, a team sport played with sticks and a ball, now played almost exclusively in the Highlands of Scotland).
YouTube videos can now be forwarded without buffering. You used to need to wait, [...]

The Toblerone logo has a 'hidden' image of a bear (via Gordon).
The word seersucker 'originates from the Hindi words "shir shakkar," meaning "milk and sugar", probably from the resemblance of its smooth and rough stripes to the smooth surface of milk and bumpy texture of sugar'.
Ethiopia not only uses a different calendar (the year 2000 [...]

Pale Male (the Fifth Avenue hawk) is known to have sired 26 chicks with four mates. It is not the only hawk in Central Park, and they mostly prefer nesting on buildings (the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Trump Park hotel, a residential housing cooperative at 927 Fifth Avenue) rather than on trees.
UK [...]

Venice is to have a fourth bridge across the Grand Canal. Parts of it are being installed this weekend, and it will be completed by the end of the year. It was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. View my pictures of Santiago Calatrava's Olympic Agora in Athens.
Madison Avenue symbolises the advertising industry. I had [...]

The UK bans advertising of promoting infant formula for babies under the age of six months. Glamour model Jordan was this week shown feeding SMA formula to her new-born baby in OK magazine, right next to an advert for SMA formula for older infants. Clever, if hardly legal. Sadly, it is not illegal for Jordan [...]

If you play with a cod liver oil capsule for long enough, it will eventually pop and splatter all over your desk and the side of your keyboard. The very same side you probably clutch with your hand when typing and stopping to think. Marvel in astonishment when, three days later, your hand smells of [...]

Emoze plans to extend support for Thunderbird in late 2007.
I've been eating imitation Mozart balls (flat-based Mozartkugeln in a golden wrapper, unlike the perfectly round original Mozartkugeln in a silver wrapper) all my life. Not even made in Austria. I am gutted.
Steampunk (a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction) is a tongue in cheek variant [...]

Diabulimia is an eating disorder whereby people with diabetes skip insulin injections to lose weight.
Velcro is a contraction of the French words 'velours' (velvet) and 'crochet' (hook).
The white beads I keep finding on my face (cheek, eyelid and now a third one on my forehead) are milia, trapped skin cells that become walled off into [...]

Horses can mate with zebras. A zorse is the offspring of a zebra stallion and a horse mare; the rarer reverse pairing is sometimes called a hebra. I am not making this up. A hebra was recently born in Berlin. Wait, no, that's a zorse. Whatever.
Britons eat one-third of all the cod consumed in the [...]

Fabric softener can make your acne worse because it's oily and you rub towels and bed linen constantly on your skin.
A person who is attracted to an overweight sexual partner is called a chubby chaser.
Your RSS feed URL shows your Twitter user number. Via Steve Rubel.
The theremin was the first musical instrument designed to be [...]

If you want to set WordPress to display all posts for a given archive, you can type -1 in the options field instead of the maximum allowed figure. I found this in the instuctions for the excellent Custom Query String WordPress plugin (that lets you set a different maximum number of posts or days for [...]

It is getting harder and harder to transfer your credit card balance from bank to bank to take advantage of their interest-free joining periods. First, transfer fees were introduced. Now Lloyds applies a Minimum spend of £100 in the first 3 months.
If you copy some text in the clipboard, then Ctrl-V it when you are [...]

I lived in Paris for six and a half years but had not been there for three. Here are a few things I found out during our weekend in Paris a couple of weeks ago.

Despite being almost entirely underground (except Bastille station and for the Seine-crossing at Pont de Neuilly), Line 1 of the Paris [...]

You can resize your insanely ginormous desktop icons in Windows Vista by clicking on the desktop, then holding down the Ctrl key and scrolling with the mouse wheel. Faster than right-clicking on the desktop, then View > Classic Icons.
Arcade Fire are from Montreal. Watch two acoustic semi-improvised sessions for Neon Bible and Wake Up at [...]

I knew you made fish batter with beer. I did not know that you can replace it with sparkling water, must not mix too vigorously and should add a bit of fizzy water or beer at the very end, because it's the bubbles that make the batter go crisp and puff up when it cooks.
You [...]

Arial is Monotype's version of Helvetica, and although the copy has long surpassed the original in popularity and spread of use, professional designers consider it a poor imitation of a font that is no longer fashionable.
There are three types of human-animal embryos: hybrid embryos (egg fertilised with the sperm of another species), chimeric embryos (cells [...]

April Fool pranks throughout the world are celebrated on 28 December in Spanish speaking countries, on 3 April in Iran, and on 1 May (in addition to 1 April) in Denmark.
Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie was a child star in Kids Incorporated.
The 'Expanded view' feature in Google Reader makes me save an enormous amount of [...]

Last.fm has an Events tab (like a gig-only upcoming, which makes sense) and a Journal tab which is perfect to blog about gigs, like my friend J-Sin here.
Simon Pegg (Spaced, Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz) was in Doctor Who (The Long Game, Series 1, Episode 7, 2005). He is the godfather of Chris Martin [...]

Saint Patrick is the patron of Nigeria, engineers and excluded people, as well as Ireland.
Michel Thomas, language teacher to many stars (he speed-taught Grace Kelly French when she was due to marry Prince Rainier), died in January 2005.
You can play football on artificial turf. In the 80s it caused many injuries, but recent technical developments [...]

The common UK stamps (queeny profile, single colour) are called 'machins'. They were designed by Arnold Machin and first introduced on 5 June 1967.
The soundtrack to the TV series Heroes was composed by mid-eighties Prince proteges Wendy and Lisa.
Windows Media Player automatically disables plugins every time it crashes. So all of last week I really [...]

Actor Mark Gatiss (The League of Gentlemen, Nighty Night, Fear of Fanny) wrote two of my favourite Doctor Who episodes (The Idiot's Lantern and The Unquiet Dead)
The hymn Amazing Grace was written by a reformed slave trader.
All major operating systems ship with the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard in addition to the standard QWERTY layout.
Peter Jackson is [...]

London Underground's Jubilee Line was originally going to be called Fleet Line after the river Fleet (now subterranean). Plans to go east towards Fleet Street were shelved, and the line's battleship grey colour ('fleet') became silver for the Jubilee after which it was eventually named.
Before time zones were invented, most cities relied upon their own [...]

My Nabaztag/tag is not the only one that developed a floppy ear syndrome. It is now more and more likely that my wi-fi bunny will go back to the burrow whence it came, and it is very sad to see an innovative idea that is developed with style but not very much substance to sustain [...]

The TV programme Blue Peter is named after the 'blue peter' maritime flag that means the ship is ready to sail. This is because the programme is a journey of discovery and adventure.
Signed by The Hits is a tv show where music videos are signed for the hearing impaired, in the morning at 6.30 on [...]

Swans mate for life but cheat on partners.
Kissing reduces chances of cavities.
Hybristophiliacs are sexually aroused by people who have committed cruel or outrageous crimes.
The bisexual pride flag has pink and blue bands with an overlapping purple one in the middle.
Divorce was common in ancient Rome but only became legal in Italy in 1970, and was [...]

The average life sentence under Labour is 11 years (The Independent, 27 January 2007)
Captchas (distorted scattered characters on patterned background that users have to type to prove they are not a machine) have become more complex. This week I was asked to identify symbols and write the matching numbers from a correspondence chart provided underneath.
Biscuits [...]

Firefox lets you select an unlinked URL, drag it in the address bar and it will open it for you. Similarly, you can drag and drop an image from Firefox into Photoshop, or into a Windows folder. Also tried these in IE6 and IE7, but they both went 'Huh?'
T9 stands for text [...]