Status-Q

Ever find yourself without a ruler? Thanks to Mitchell Charity, you can print your own!

Now, here's a thought: Would a small ruler be called a roulette?

If you need to dismantle your Powerbook, as I have recently for a hard disk replacement, you need the excellent PB FixIt Guide Series.

Fraser Speirs' Flickr Export Plugin for iPhoto. Lovely!

Ruby is a language that's getting a lot of attention as a slightly cleaner and nicer alternative to Python and Perl. If you have some basic programming experience and want to learn Ruby, there's a very good tutorial here.

It's mostly used, it seems, in the Ruby on Rails framework for writing web apps.

This little chap fluttered down for the first time today from his nest above our kitchen window. He landed on the garden table.

He sat there squeaking for a little while, then stretched his legs.

And then he hopped up onto the chair:

before flying away down the garden to a rather inaccurate landing in a bush at the far end.

Given how much energy his parents have been devoting to feeding him over the last couple of weeks, I think he'll be off to a good start in life.

Well, not quite, but the American CVS pharmacy is apparently introducing a Digital One-Time-Use Video Camcorder.

So the rumours were right, and Apple are going to start producing machines based on Intel chips. Steve Jobs demonstrated Mac OS X running on a 3.6GHz Pentium 4; developer kits are available and consumer machines will be out next year. A translation system lets PowerPC binaries run on the new system until native versions are available. There's an Intel press release here and an Apple one here.

This really makes the Intel architecture pretty dominant. But at least there are other suppliers, so in future Apple can shift to AMD, for example, if needed.

But it makes you wonder what the existing Apple hardware sales will be like for the next year...

I love my new Motorola RAZR V3. It's the first phone I've really been able to slip in my jeans pocket and not notice. It doesn't spoil the outline of my otherwise svelte figure(!) and it also has noticeably better sound quality than any mobile I've used recently.

Of course, when moving away from Nokia, you sacrifice ease of use, and Motorola's user interface is even worse than most. This has bothered me less in recent years because much of what I used to do on phone keypads I now do on my Powerbook, which integrates with most of them very nicely. Sadly, however, the RAZR doesn't integrate with the Mac Address Book as well as my previous phones. In particular, unlike the Nokia, it doesn't let me send SMS messages directly from the Address Book.

This is why I was particularly pleased to discover BluePhoneElite, a $20 utility which not only gives you lots of control over SMSes, incoming and outgoing calls etc, but also does some cute things with Bluetooth, like pausing your music and changing your IM status when you (& your phone) go out of range of the computer. It also does genuinely useful things like pausing iTunes when you make or receive a call.

Very nice. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Look at the stars!

I wrote yesterday about Paul Graham's talk on 'Great Hackers'. There's an essay based on the talk on Paul's site.

But one phrase in particular caught my attention, to the extent that I'm going to add it to my Favourite Quotes page. I'm not sure if it's his originally, but it's rather good:

"I'd always supposed ... that curiosity was simply the first derivative of knowledge."

About two weeks ago, I was staying with Rose's aunt in Los Angeles, and she was having some problems with her wireless network, so I offered to take a look. Well, I'll spare you the details of the problem, but I fooled around with her Linksys router basestation and the range-extender box she'd bought, but without much success. I'm too embarrassed to admit how long it took me to realise what was up.

Her network was using the network name 'linksys', which is the default configuration for their boxes. It was only when I started running proper snooping tools on my laptop that I realised that there were three routers using that name which were visible from the study where her PC was located. Two of her neighbours had the same boxes and had also not reconfigured them. I come from a land of brick buildings where the problem is usually one of not even getting a strong signal from your own network, rather than seeing too many. Anyway, for some months she had unwittingly been using her neighbours' broadband connection while her own lay idle. And for some hours I had been reconfiguring their routers by accident, because they still had the default login and password as well.

I switched the wireless off on my laptop and plugged in directly to her router using ethernet to make sure I knew which one I was talking to, gave the wireless network a new name and suddenly things started to make sense. My normal practice, by the way, is to name the network with something which makes its location obvious (mine's "20MarloweRd") so that if anybody else has problems with my signal, they know where it's coming from.