What on earth do they think they've done?! When doing the usual lazy 100-tabs-in-one-browser surfing session, the Poorhouse was befuddled to see that there seemed to be no Google-icon-clad tab open in the browser despite the fact that at least 10 different resource-sapping results pages should surely be open.

It turned out that no, it was not some magic anti-Google fairy closing things, but rather that Google have changed their "favicon" – that little image that sits in your Favourites and tab corners. Below, courtesy of Google Operating System, is what the old one looked like compared to the new one. Poorhouse verdict on the change? Lame.

Recently, a strange and magical event (slip of the finger, some would allege) mean that the Poorhouse had cause to attempt to download all of the inane pictures that constitute his Flickr account.

The (or rather 'a') great beauty of Flickr, as opposed to the evils of Facebook et al, is that it does preserve your original photos - but it is a mission and a half if you want to download them all back to your computer en masse. It is significantly less hard however if you use FlickrEdit.

A real smiley-faceGuess what anniversary you probably just missed. Why of course, the (presumed) 25th anniversary of this little fun guy: :-).

Yep, the geekazoid lollerchat textutal smileyface - and the Poorhouse bets you didn't even buy it a token gift and card, let alone something expensive enough to make up for your abuse of him throughout the past quarter century.

Scott Fahlman is claiming first-documented-use of it, in a message he wrote on an online bulletin (children, be afraid: this was before mainstream web access) back on the 19th September 1982. Many happy returns.

Who doesn't need a cut-out-and-stick posable version of David Hasselhoff? Clicky here to download. Poorhouse tip: blow up to A3 paper size for maximum ease of construction. Thanks, anonymous sender.

Update: Turns out it is originally from Cheap Ass Toys Inc, part of Rob Nance's portfolio. It was apparently commissioned for Stuff magazine (NB: Stuff is arguably NSFW, kinda like FHM, Loaded et al.), but the idiots never used it - so you better had. Just think how you can then repeatedly impress your office colleagues with Hoff impressions for hours on end!

The Poorhouse has already heaped piles of well-deserved praise on the revolution that is "Paint", the software supplied free with every copy of Microsoft Windows. It simply can't be loved enough. Anyway, for all you with the same deep affection for cute little Painty-wainty, check this video for an insight into the creation of the wonder-tool. Worth watching just for time-index 1:20 alone.

Well, it's every web 2.0 geek's dream - earn millions via the "art" of blogging or similar.

It turns out it is remarkably easy to earn a six figure income whilst doing such an activity after all. A swift guide is provided to the right, courtesy of internetducttape.com.

It's in comic form, just in case you can't even be bothered to do anything except look at pictures.

Not sure if this is the Poorhouse being rather stoopid-basic in only have just found it out, but a vaguely interesting feature cropped up in Windows XP yesterday. Yep, you can just tell this article is going to be a thrill can't you? The feature is...Photo Printing Wizard. Whoo! Still, it is quite handy for some auto-instant resizing and formatting of your digital photos to something respectably comparable to an albumesque page of "real" photos in appearance.

It probably hasn't come as a surprise to many but the Poorhouse is a little sad - Yahoo Photos is closing down. Yahoo Photos of course was a place provided by Yahoo to store all your wonderful digital photos. Existing for quite some time in the past, it not-too-long-ago came out with a new version which was rather more Web 2.0 geeky-satisfying.

By that time Yahoo had also acquired that most famous of photo-sites Flickr and despite earlier claims of maintaining the two sites, which have rather different target audiences, now is apparently going to concentrate on Flickr.

Conflicting messages emanate from the wonderous web at times. We hear from askmen.com that really it is somewhat less than gentlemanly to spit and should you do so in public you will "look like you were raised in a sewer". But then one presumed sewer-rat named Albert Reyes has turned spitting - nay, let us go so far as to say public spitting - into a literal artform.

Modern art is a curious beast. A nice painted landscape just doesn't cut it any more. No, you need something more like Tracey Emin's famously filthy bed or Hirst's bits of dead animals stuck in formaldehyde to gain kudos in this day and age. Indeed it seems a terrible travesty happened last year when the Turner Prize was actually won by Tomma Abts - an artist who actually does paintings, albeit ones where "the internal logic of each composition unfolds forms are defined, buried and rediscovered until the painting becomes 'congruent with itself'" rather than delightfully represents your pet dog.

Fear not though, the weirdness is still out there. What, in the name of art, do you think the illustration to the left is?