For any major event, The Boston Globe seem to gather the best photos, and present them well - here's their photoset for the huge dust storm that hit Sydney:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/dust_storm_in_australia.html

When we sold our house, one of the first places we had a shopping spree was Cotswold, the outdoors shop. Even with out new-found wealth, I shied away from the price of the coats I liked the look of, but I did buy a hat (North Face) and gloves. I loved those gloves. They were from Lowe Alpine, the non-photography side of Lowe Pro, maker of my favourite bags. They were fingerless gloves, with a fold-down section that turned them into mittens, and matching foldaway tips for the thumbs. I could use my camera without having to take them off, but still be kept nice and warm when I wasn't taking pics.

 I lost one glove.

 I figured I liked them enough to replace them, but when I managed to find somewhere to buy replacements (a cold spell had sold a lot of gloves), I realised I'd forgotten how expensive they were. A little further from the glow of a house-sale, with a couple of iMacs sitting at home, they looked a bit *too* expensive, so I didn't replace them. I found alternatives, but nowhere near as good.

 I also lost my buffs (what? Scarf/Hat/Thing - see link below). I decided to go rummaging in boxes to find where they were hiding before winter arrives. I found them - standard *and* cyclone. *And* the missing glove.

 Yay!

 Only one problem now - I had no idea what I'd done with the other glove! Fortunately, Sam remembered where it was, so I was reunited with my very nice, very expensive gloves, and both of my buffs. I'm now well prepared for winter.

 * Lowe Alpine Convert Mitten Glove - http://www.lowealpine.com/eng/prod_app_det.php?catid=7&itemid=501
* Buff - http://www.buffwear.co.uk/
* Cotswold - http://www.cotswoldoutdoor.com

After my recent success with getting Evernote to read my handwriting, I was wondering why it was doing so badly on some scanned Moleskines.

 It looks like it can't read things on squared paper. Lined is ok, as long as you write neatly between the lines, and it's fine with plain paper. The best thing seems to be either plain paper or a ruled book with wide lines.

 In any case, success is quite variable with my handwriting, but it tests better when I'm writing something with the *intention* of having Evernote read it. Stuff I scrawled barely expecting I'd even try to read it again myself, never mind have a computer do it, is a bit of a challenge.

Instapaper is a pretty simple idea - click their bookmark, and the page you're looking at is grabbed by their server, and fed to your iPhone (or iPod Touch) when you next sync the app. The app on the iPhone fetches the content of the pages (optionally including graphics and layout), and lets you read the articles offline later.

 Because grabbing a page to read later takes a second or two, you do it.

 Because reading the articles on the iPhone is quick and easy, you do it.

 I'd figured that it was important to me to keep an archive of all the articles I read in Evernote, so I sent pages there to read later. I had to tag them, and put them in a 'reading' notebook. If I wanted to be able to read them offline, I had to open each one on the iPod (I have an iPod Touch, not an iPhone), wait for it to download, and mark it as a favourite so it would be stored locally. After reading, I had to move them to the 'archive' notebook, and remember at some point to turn off the favourite tag so they wouldn't take up space on the iPod any more. In the midst of doing any of those steps, Evernote would quite often exit without warning.

 I didn't do it.

 I realised at one point that I hadn't read any of my 'to read' articles for weeks. I installed Instapaper Free, let go of the idea of automatically storing everything permanently, and got back to reading lots of articles. Then I paid for the full version of Instapaper Pro, supported the development and use of the server, and enjoyed using the extra features even more.

 * http://www.instapaper.com

 I do still use Evernote, but not for stuff to read. I'd love for Instapaper to be able to send anything you archive to Evernote automatically, as nothing I've found yet beats Evernote as a general dumping place for any old bits of information.

Fish. More entertaining as pets than we expected.

 We have a small to medium-sized tank, and two fish that are becoming quite large. Our shubunkin is over 15cm long now. They have an airstone, a plant, and a tube cut from a drink bottle. The tube is shorter than the shubunkin, and just about wide enough for either of them to swim through.

 Tonight, we arrived home to an empty tank.

 They really couldn't have escaped, but there were no visible fish. It turned out that they had both squeezed into the tube, somehow pulled the plant across the tube to block the end that was towards the front, and the shubunkin had curled his tail around to avoid it being seen sticking out of the tube. Pretty good going. They then stayed completely still until I reached in and moved the plant, blowing their cover.

 It's not just kittins - fish can be nawty too.

Posterous lets you post stuff by emailing their service - it passes it on to Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Flickr, YouTube, and lots of others. I'm just testing it at the moment, so you probably want to ignore this post.
 
Testing [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) - *test*. Not sure if that will work - may work on PigPog, if Posterous just passes on text, but unlikely on Posterous itself. I think it's more likely Posterous will format the text, which will probably break Markdown.

Testing HTML embedded in the text (not HTML format email).
 
If this works, this post should show up on PigPog, and should get picked up by Facebook from there.
 
 Update: Looks like it fails on Markdown, but does understand the starred *italic*.  Image appeared in the right place, and the HTML worked ok.

Testing, testing.