The list was presented by the Guardian as a fancy word cloud, but I thought it would be more useful as a plain text list. Here it is, with the most hated words and phrases at the top.

1. innovative
2. unique
3. East meets West
4. challenging
5. universally
6. quotidian
7. engagement
8. multimedia
9. unmissable
10. brilliant
11. stakeholders
12. best of the best
13. interesting
14. fusion
15. dynamic
16. subversive
17. new language
18. has been described as
19. customers
20. new paradigm
21. how are you
22. sustainable
23. truly
24. triumph
25. false realties
26. urgent
27. theatrical event of the year
28. smash hit
29. very unique
30. ground breaking
31. must see
32. celebrated
33. searing
34. superb
35. deals with issues of
36. vibrant
37. is interested in notions of
38. pioneering
39. participation
40. notions
41. spring into summer with
42. extraordinary
43. pop up
44. direct from the West End
45. exciting
46. gripping
47. pop-up space
48. curated
49. appeals to a wide audience
50. world premiere
51. drama
52. resonance
53. wowed
54. maker
55. relevant
56. personal journey
57. space
58. community
59. unsinkable
60. mind-blowing
61. a new phenomenon
62. identity and place
63. cutting edge
64. recognised
65. award-winning
66. exhilarating
67. dialogue between
68. critically acclaimed
69. juxtaposed
70. one of the greatest X alive today
71. excellent
72. much anticipated
73. made
74. iconic
75. triumphant
76. stunning

You might also like Matthew Austin's list of words he'd like banned from brochure copy.

I've been coding since I was 8 or 9 years old, but it's been a long while since I've built anything that handles graphics - not since the heady days of QBASIC, in fact. Since then, I've been through Visual Basic, then on to PHP and other web-based shenanigans. However, Processing - a language which seems to basically be a simplified front for Java - has got me back into the graphics-based fun that first got me interested in programming.

Processing is aimed at giving people a simpler way to express artistic creativity through code, and I have to admit it's the easiest programming language I've tried for a while. Already having a grounding in the essentials of programming, but certainly no Java expert, I've really got stuck into playing with Processing. It's brought back memories of when I first started coding, and how much fun that was. In fact, I got so engrossed the other night that I forgot to have dinner, which is saying something.

Two days in, I find I'm getting faster at coding with practice, although trying to get my head round more complex programming techniques (ArrayLists, casting) is causing hurdles. But I like a challenge...

Here are my first two attempts at coding something fun in Processing. They might take a few moments to load, depending on your computer, how Java feels, the ambient temperature, and the orbit of the Moon. Needless to say, you'll need Java installed on your system for the applets to work at all:

• DrumZone - a keyboard-based drum machine.
• Drop - a silly mouse-based toy.

At this rate, I'm hoping to be fairly adept in time for the hackday later this month. Can't wait to try my skills on some real-world arts data... and to see what everyone else comes up with.

Today I received the two copies of Paul Screeton's 'Tales of the Hexham Heads' I had ordered a few weeks ago from the printers. These are the only two copies of this edition in existence - it was a private project to convert the original, typewritten manuscript - with the author's permission - into a lovely, properly-typeset hardback book.

The project grew out of my interest in the tale of the Hexham Heads, two odd, carved heads discovered in a back garden in the Northern English town of Hexham. Wherever the heads went, strange phenomena followed - including sightings of a half-wolf, half-human entity.

However, there is very little information out there about the Heads, and - after some searching - I managed to find that Paul Screeton, a journalist working in the area, had written the only in-depth work on the subject. Fortunately, a quick search on Google brought up his email address, and he kindly made me a photocopy of the original work.

Fast-forward a year, and I had finished retyping the book (after a failed attempt at using some rather ineffective optical character recognition software). I then typeset it, and, with Paul's permission, made two copies - one for each of us.

I am very happy with the outcome; it's my first time using Lulu's hardback book printing service, and - although not fast - it does yield impressive results.

Read more about the Hexham Heads over at Mysterious Britain.

You can check it out here.

View of Edinburgh from Calton Hill, 1 January 2012 (click pic to enlarge).

This year, I spent New Year in Edinburgh with friends, which was a marked improvement over last year (sitting in a darkened room, listening to a Sly and the Family Stone LP. Actually, that was pretty good, too, in its own way.)

Hope everyone has a great year, and fingers crossed the 2012 Doomsday prophecy nuts aren't right!

So, in order to back them up to removable media, you're going to have to compress the .app 'files' first. This little bit of code will compress each .app folder to an individual tar.gz file.

1. Make copies of all the apps you want to back up in a folder, for example one on your Desktop called 'apps'.
2. Open a terminal and type the following command (all one line):
   find *.app -maxdepth 0 -type d -print0 | while read -d $'\0' f; do echo "${f}"; tar -czf "${f}.tgz" "${f}"; done
3. Wait (up to ages depending on how many apps you're compressing)
4. Delete the original .app file copies, and burn your .tgz files to a disc!

Then, when you need to recover an app, just extract it from the .tgz file using something like The Unarchiver.

Hardcore version: this one also deletes the .app file/folders as it goes along.
Use at your own risk!:

Thanks to Andy for help in getting this working.

1. Download the latest version of get_iplayer
2. Extract it to ~/get_iplayer/
3. In terminal, run
   ~/get_iplayer/get_iplayer
4. Download this version of flvstreamer and save it as ~/get_iplayer/flvstreamer
5. chmod 755 ~/get_iplayer/flvstreamer
6. ~/get_iplayer/get_iplayer --flvstreamer ~/get_iplayer/flvstreamer --prefs-add

Now just use get_iplayer as normal:

Ta-da!

Unless I'm missing something, though, all these pictures are fundamentally wrong. Take a look at my own 'Facebook eye' photo below. What this picture shows, apart from the fact that I'm never going to be an eye model, is that when you look at something on a screen, the mirror image is reflected in your eye. Duh:

Also, I was sitting about 10cm from a full-screen Facebook logo on a 13" screen to achieve this. So this leads me to think that the people in the stock photos must be sitting with their noses pressed up against a cinema screen, browsing the web in reverse.

I don't think I can trust stock photography ever again.

Disappointed not to be able to attend this year's Fortean Times meeting, Uncon 2011, this weekend. In a strange bit of synchronicity, I found a photo from Uncon '08 (above) today, while looking through folder of otherwise unrelated photos. Good times.