I really don’t like the rest of the decor, but these bookshelves between the roof arches (or whatever you’re suppose to call them) are so pretty:

Via double takes

I need more geeky necklaces! Even though I often blog about these amazing geeky jewelry, I don’t splurge enough and buy them for myself. This week I stumbled on some awesome necklaces for book geeks!

Etsy store Bookish Charms makes jewelry and accessories for the bookish, with necklaces featuring quotes from books (although she has now also expanded to TV show quotes). Here are my favourites:

Awesome, right? My favourites are the “Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey” one and the “Winter is Coming” one. Depending on the quote, the necklaces range from $14.50 to $18.50. Take a look at the Bookish Charms Etsy page for more items.

This is quite an old video (well, “old”. It’s from January this year. It’s only “old” in internet time), but I hadn’t come across it before now.

Regular readers of Miss Geeky will know how much I love a good puzzle, and this site is definitely an interesting puzzle. Go to canyoucrackit.co.uk and take a look. Intrigued? I am.

This could take me a while. I always love code-cracking type games, like MacHeist and some of the more interesting movie virals. Most of those though have been quite easy, using simple substitution cyphers. Having been to Bletchley Park last month (which you all should do, cause the place is awesome) made me realize how intricate and crafty some codes can be.

And this one looks like it could be quite intricate and crafty. Just look at the last line: "9d ff ff ff 41 41 41 41". With those repeats, I don't think it's going to be a simple substitution. Plus the combination of letters and numbers is throwing me off.

So: can you crack it? Do you have any ideas on how to solve this?

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Viral video by ebuzzing

Hot and Steamy is such an awesome name for a steampunk romance anthology! I haven’t read much steampunk yet (but I want to) and this looks like the perfect place to start.

There are 16 stories in total, but I can’t find descriptions online for any of them. Here are the titles though:

Chance Corrigan and the Queen of Hearts – Michael A. Stackpole
Absinthe-Minded Archaeologist – Vicki Johnson-Steger
The Problem of Trystan – Maurice Broaddus
Clockworks – Jody Lynn Nye
In the Belly of the Behemoth – Matt Forbeck
Automata Futura – Stephen D. Sullivan
Love Comes to Abyssal City – Tobias S. Buckell
For the Love of Byron – Mickey Zucker Reichert
For Queen and Country – Elizabeth A. Vaughan
Grasping at Shadows – C. J. Henderson
Go Forward with Courage – Dean Leggett
Her Faith is Fixt – Robert E. Vardeman.
Kinetic Dreams – C. A. Verstraete
For the Love of Copper – Marc Tassin
Cassandra’s Kiss – Mary Louise Eklund
Dashed Hopes – Donald J. Bingle

Hot and Steamy is available on Amazon.co.uk for £4.90.

This is so subtly geeky, and looks pretty! I wonder how many people would figure it out. COATT designs necklaces, each spelling out a word in morse code.

This one is “lucky“:

And this one is the obvious “sos“:

My favourites are the above two necklaces (I would so love to have the sos one in silver), but they also do more designs like “love”, “friend” and “peace”. Most of the necklaces cost $36, but it depends on the amount of bits used (the above ones all cost $36). You can also get a custom name one for $56.

Most of you based here in the UK will have seen an Orange commercial before a movie in the cinema (not sure about other countries; I’m guessing UK can’t be the only place where they’re shown); some of them work, and some of them don’t. This latest one is part of the first group, featuring the loveable Muppets:

Via Bleeding Cool

I didn’t understand all the hype when it first was announced that this book series would be turned into a movie, and then I picked up the first book… I devoured it within a day. It’s one of those books that you can not put down. The premise is pretty much Battle Royale meets Big Brother.

I’m still not sure if a movie adaption is going to work though. What I loved about the book was that you get to see Katniss’ thoughts about every decision she makes. She knows she’s being constantly watched and it’s the internal conflict about whether or not to manipulate people that was the most interesting to me. I have no idea how and even if that is going to come across on the screen.

So now that a first trailer has come out, what do we think of it?

Some of the actors I think they’ve cast spot on (Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson). Others I’m not too sure about. Lenny Kravitz as Cinna looks great, even though I always pictured Cinna as Cillian Murphy. And Josh Hutcherson as Peeta… I’m still not convinced.

They’re staying very true to the book, but I’m not too sure that’s a good thing. The characters from the Capital are a bit over-the-top (pink hair, curled moustaches, etc) and seem a bit too comical for me. I was hoping they would tone that part a bit down, but it looks like they’re sticking to exactly what is in the book.

I’m curious to see how the movie goes; it’s definitely something I’ll be watching in the cinema. I still have that nagging feeling though that this shouldn’t have be turned into a movie. What do you think? Have you read the books? Do you like the trailer?

Ooh, now this a cool way to show off your favourite books:

This would look great in my living room! Bonus: my cats wouldn’t be able to clamber all over it (I hope).

You can get it from this etsy store for $89.

I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of blogging, but it’s so tricky. I’m not sure how I used to manage to write 3 posts a day; I’m now struggling with only writing one post a day! We’re already 9 days into November, but I thought I should write up a post on the events I’ve been to the past months.

Charity Hack 2011

Back in September I attended Charity Hack, another two day 24 hour hack competition, where developers have to “hack” something together for charities. I had been the past two years and both times had been a lot of fun. Last year me, Cristiano, Dom and Caius even won the first prize  (an awesome trip to San Francisco, I can’t believe that that all happened a year ago). So of course I had to attend this year’s one as well!

Again I teamed up with Cristiano, Dom and Caius to work on a hack: CharitySite. The idea was to create a simple CMS for charities, with which charities could setup their own simple site without having to tweak too much. They could create and manage pages, posts and events, show photos, manage their own mailing list and more. The judges liked what we created and we ended up coming 3rd place, each winning an Xbox and a Kinect!

Great British Chef’s Truffle Making Workshop

Who knew it was so easy to make truffles? I didn’t. Great British Chefs organized a lovely truffle making workshop at Homemade London with one of their chef’s recipes. I made an awesome batch of Earl Grey (bergamot) flavoured truffles. It’s super easy to make truffles and I am definitely going to use that recipe again!

Ladies Who Code

Ladies Who Code is a new meetup group for, well, ladies who code. I went to their second meetup, and it was great meeting other female developers and sharing our experiences. Girls do tend to be outnumbered by the guys at hackdays and other tech events, and events such as Ladies Who Code is a great way to get more girls along. I spoke a bit about organizing events, going to hackdays and some of the hacks I had done in the past year.

Unruly Media Tech Night

I’ve been using Unruly Media for a while now (occasionally you might see a post with one of their videos) and a couple of weeks ago they organized a tech night for bloggers. Everyone got to make a cute little “robot” out of toothbrushes, batteries and other random stuff. Mine looked adorable (if I say so myself), but I glued some of the parts wrong, so it couldn’t move that much.

TweetCamp II

TweetCamp is one of those events that I’m not sure I completely get. It’s an unconference about Twitter. Right. Okay. So we’ll sit around and talk about Twitter the entire day… It’s the type of event that does attract social media douchebags and if you go to the wrong sessions, you’ll end up with a really bad experience. I managed to go to the right type of sessions for me though; I went to discussions about using Twitter for events, and how journalism has changed because of Twitter.