Pixel-stained what? It’s a little complex; it all got started when Dr. Howard Hendix, the current vice-president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, posted a rather ill-advised rant about the members of his profession who choose to make their work available for free on the internet; as one of many voices of dissent, Jo Walton declared April 23rd as Pixel-stained Technopeasant Day, and now here we are. What does this mean to those of you who haven’t even heard of the SFWA, let alone care about its internal political wranglings? It means that the internet has been veritably flooded with loads of great genre fiction for you to read for free. Here’s hoping this becomes an annual festival!

As an added bonus, here’s a podcast of a panel from last weekend’s Penguicon, featuring John Scalzi, Charlie Stross and Futurismic’s very own Tobias Buckell talking about the pros and cons of giving fiction away for free.

Yeah, I know – it’s Friday. Friday demands eye-candy. I imagine a fair few of you are subscribed to the NASA Image of the Day feed already, but for those that aren’t – well, if pictures of distant galaxies like this don’t make your heart flutter with the faint clear sound of infinity, nothing ever will.

As if I needed further evidence that the country I live in is collectively losing any semblence of sanity it one possessed, along comes the news that robotic falcons are to be deployed in Liverpool to scare away the flocks of obese junk-food-bloated pigeons that swarm in the city. Talk about curing the symptoms and not the disease – and besides, wouldn’t it have been cheaper to simply issue the adolescent males of the city with air-pistols for a day or two? [Chris Roberson]

Always on top of all security-related shenanigans, Bruce Schneier takes a look at the type of hacking that is most effective, not to mention cheap – social engineering. As our lives become increasingly interwoven with our technologies, our tendancy to trust the systems that surround us seems to inflate in sympathy, and that suggests that social engineering – or confidence tricks – aren’t going to go away any time soon.

This has to be the ultimate in lifestyle products, and I demand to be given a lifetime supply immediately – Shower Shock soap releases caffeine to be absorbed through the skin as you wash, delivering the equivalent of two strong cups of joe with one all-body scrub-down. How can we call ourselves a civilisation when we’ve only just invented this?