Status-Q

[Original Link] The story of a chap in Australia who wanted his hardware and software to work as advertised, and wanted the store to sign an agreement to that effect.

[Original Link] Splendid (and brave) letter in today's Times from J.F.James.

Every now and then I come across a bit of Mac OS X software which does just what I want and is reasonably priced. Keyboard Maestro was one I wrote about in September. A plug for some recent finds:

• ImageCaster is a $20 bit of software which captures images, typically from a USB or Firewire-connected camera, and saves or uploads them to create a webcam. Many cameras come with such software, but if yours doesn't, or if it doesn't support OS X, or if it isn't any good, this is worth a try.
• Audio Hijack captures audio from apps which may not support saving. I use it for saving RealAudio streams to hard disk or to my iPod. (I do wish the BBC wouldn't try to do such complex stuff on their web pages though. They don't work on the Mac, and I have to view the source of the web pages to find the URL to type into RealPlayer.)
• It took me a while to discover that my Powerbook has a built-in microphone. Almost nothing in the bundled software advertises this fact. But using SoundStudio I've been able to get some reasonable-quality recordings from it. SoundStudio is a general-purpose audio editor which is fully-functional for 14 days, after which it costs $50. Recommended.

There's a story, which may or may not be true, about a caller to a computer helpline saying, "I deleted a file from my PC last week and I have just realised that I need it. If I turn my system clock back two weeks will I have my file back again?".

And why not? That's rather a good idea for a system design...

"...Dr No fails, just as Hugo Draz, Emilio Largo, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and all the other nincompoops fail, largely because of their tendency, when at home in their lairs, to avoid the normal practice known as walking and instead cover extremely short distances by monorail."

"The most worrying aspect of the Brosnan era is that, while GoldenEye took $350m at the box office, the computer game of the same story made even more. How the implications of that success will feed back into future films, one shudders to imagine."

These little movies have been doing the rounds recently. Great fun.

Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side, and it binds the universe together.

"If the disagreement was strong enough, we could end up pretty close to the borderline of incivility."

[Original Link] BBC article on the dramatic steps taken by the Korean government to ensure wholesale broadband deployment.

[Original Link] I'm a bit late reporting this, but it's worth mentioning anyway.

A couple of weeks ago a major new version of VNC was released. This is the first release of any sort for 18 months, the first major update for considerably longer, and it includes many new features and improvements.

Development at the AT&T Cambridge lab had all but ceased while we were working on the Broadband Phone, but when the lab closed in April several of my friends who were on the original VNC team left to set up RealVNC, and have been working hard on improvements since.