Years ago I used to read lots of comics online, especially one of the earliest - Doctor Fun, which sadly stopped publishing in 2006.  You’ll need to be a bit of a science buff to get most of the jokes, but Records Your Neighbours Listen To or When Cats Try To Cook (which I used as my desktop wallpaper for a couple of years) bear comparison with The Far Side.<!–more–>

More recently, I’ve discovered Zach Weiner’s excellently surreal- and more than occasionally cruel - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which follows the unusual format of one or two frames with speech bubbles, and then a caption underneath that provides a contrasting (or sometimes a second) punchline.  I say unusual, because although you’ll have seen people do the same thing before once or twice, Weiner manages it day in day out.

Thanks to Digg, I also discovered AmazingSuperPowers, which does something slightly similar, although more hidden.  Does your browser show you the alt attribute when you hover over an image?  Good.  Then you won’t miss the little hidden jokes embedded there as well.  Oh and hover over the strips carefully - hidden strips sometimes pop up when you click on areas of the comic.

Reading through the SMBC archives led to references to two other comics I can highly recommend - they’ve cheered me up a bit while I’ve been ill - Subnormality (one of the Virus Comix stable) is great (the Sphynx is hilarious and my own personal favourite, although the explanation of Nickelback’s popularity is excellent too); and Cyanide and Happiness, which frequently breaks with convention in terms of jokes (even having guest cartoonists write them from time to time).

Of course I can’t finish without mentioning User Friendly.  Set in the technical support department of a fictional Internet Service Provider, UF manages to combine both one-off jokes with a continuing narrative, based around well-defined and drawn characters.

There’s an open-source spinoff from Chrome already: it’s called Iron (the website is in German, but Incomplete News translated it). (more…)

After yesterday’s fairly glowing review - 35 out of 50, if I recall correctly - I’ve found a problem with Chrome. (more…)

I just added a search plugin to my site. Unless you use Firefox 3 and noticed the small blue highlight on the arrow, it’s fairly difficult to notice, but for those who - like me - make good use of that box, it’s a nice thing to have.

Let’s start with the easy bit: the addition to the header. (more…)

Well, I’ve been using Google Chrome for about 2 weeks or so now, and here’s what I think of it so far: (more…)