Author Archives: qsf

Achilles’ Insignia

It’s nice to think that if Paris had just taken a few photos of Helen back to Troy, rather than the girl herself, the city might have been spared a great deal of inconvenience.

If, however, he had also chosen to jump into his chariot and pop off to the nearest Best Buy to get a digital photo frame (onto which he could load the photos from his Olympus), things might not have gone so well. Last month, customers started hectoring the store – am I pushing this too far? – when it was reported that the USB-connecting Insignia frames came pre-installed with a nasty ‘trojan horse’ virus.

Now it appears that some of these frames have several other nasties on them… or at least remnants which would indicate that PCs used in their manufacture needed much better quarantining.

The ease with which USB storage can be embedded into almost anything these days allows for some wonderful things to be done. But we shouldn’t forget that something that we don’t even think of as a storage device may look completely harmless, yet may be concealing something rather less so.

I’m just wondering what nasty surprises could be in store if they ever make a USB-configurable My Little Pony…

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Watching your favourite magazine

A great post by Michael Rosenblum about how print journalists are rather good at becoming video journalists.

Thanks to John for the link, both to this and to Sean Smith’s amazing “Inside the Surge” footage from Iraq

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Eject All

Every day I unplug my MacBook Pro from a set of disks and other peripherals at home, take it into the office and plug it into a new set there. In the evening, I do the same going home.

One thing that makes this much less painful than it might otherwise be is a keystroke shortcut I set up a long time ago, based on this hint. Now I just type Cmd-F1, and all my external disks are unmounted. This is exceedingly handy!

To do this, create an AppleScript containing the following:

tell application "Finder"
        activate
	set bootDisk to name of startup disk
	set otherDisks to every disk whose (name is not bootDisk)
	repeat with myDisk in otherDisks
		try
			eject myDisk
		end try
	end repeat
end tell

Save it somewhere and configure your favourite utility to run it. I use QuickSilver and set it up as a trigger.

It won’t work, of course, if you have an application running using one of the disks, so it’s good to check the Finder window before actually unplugging them.

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FPV

On the one occasion, many years ago, when I tried to fly a radio-controlled plane, I found it extremely difficult. It was OK when the plane was flying away from me, but when I wanted to bring it back towards me, the left/right controls were reversed. It was most counter-intuitive and the landing was far from elegant.

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking that it ought to be straightforward to mount a wireless camera on a small plane. A view of the transmitted video signal ought to let you fly the thing as if you were sitting in the cockpit of a real plane, something I know how to do.

I haven’t, alas, had a chance to try it, but it turns out that lots of other people have. It’s called FPV (for ‘First-Person View) and there’s lots more about it on this site. Here’s a nice example:

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Pointillism

Can you guess what this is?

Large pixels

It’s a display. Rather a big one, from Palami, and these are a few of the pixels. If you stand up close to it, I found, your eyes go squiffy.

Here it is from a bit further away, with Michael and Sarah being the squiffy ones:

Palami display with Michael Dales and Sarah McKeon

Quite cool.

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Sad news…

…for me, at least. My friends Pierre and Linda are moving from their beautiful house in the mountains above Martigny. It’s for sale at http://www.swissmountainhouse.com/. Pierre is the only person I know who commuted to work by funicular railway.

Go on, you know you’d like a house like this… why not treat yourself?

(I’m really hoping somebody else I know will buy it, so I can visit it again!)

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The blushful Hippocrene?

One of my favourite local restaurants has come up with a good way to decorate their ceiling. If you put a camera on the table pointing upwards, this is what you get:

Backstreet Bistro wine-bottle ceiling

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iPod/iTouch bling

One thing I love about the new iPod/iTouch software is the ability to put links to web pages, and even to bits of web pages, directly on the front screen.

This hint makes it even better, by telling you how to add a webclip icon. I have a link to our CODA system on mine, and it now has a shiny new icon (bottom left):

iTouch icons

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Isn’t it nice…

…when your wishes are granted?

In September I wrote about how I wanted my 3G phone to become a wifi router so it could provide internet access to surrounding devices like my iTouch.

Today I discovered Joikuspot, which, if you have the right phone, is well on the way to being there, though it’s strictly HTTP-only at present. But it does mean that I can use the wonderful browser on my iPod Touch when I’m not near a wifi connection. And I can do so over 3G. Which in some ways makes it better than an iPhone…

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SuperDuper Tuesday

Finally! SuperDuper, the single most valuable utility on my Mac, has been updated to be fully Leopard-compatible.

Apple’s TimeMachine is great, and I’ve had to do a full system restore from it in the past which was a somewhat slow but otherwise completely painless experience. Leopard still has many buglets to be ironed out, so it’s good that it has a superb backup system built-in as well!

But there are few things which can compare with having a complete, bootable copy of your system on a separate drive. When something goes badly wrong, you can be up and running again in minutes.

That’s what SuperDuper does, and does better than anything else. I will sleep more soundly henceforth.

Now my only problem is that my hard drive crashed again this afternoon, about 3 hrs before SuperDuper was released. Ah well…

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Quote of the day

This one is from W.H. Auden:

We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.

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Small steps for mankind

GatewayClearing out a filing cabinet today, we came across the documentation for an old Gateway machine. (Remember them? They were the Dell of the time.) It was actually rather a good 66 Mhz Pentium, which I bought in 1994, chiefly to write up my PhD thesis.

Amongst the documentation was an index card on which I’d written the IRQ settings and I/O addresses of all the peripheral cards – the sound card, the modem, the SCSI adaptor, the CD-ROM interface card… all of these settings I’d had to tweak by hand, usually by installing little jumper connectors on the cards themselves. You had to make sure no two devices were using the same settings; I’d disabled the joystick interface on the soundblaster card to reduce the likelihood of his happening. It’s all a procedure for which I feel very little nostalgia.

At the time, I really liked this big, clunky, noisy system, with its 15″ CRT monitor, but it cost me £2260.71 – well over £3000 quid in today’s money. Or, to put it another way, for the same price I could now buy three MacBook Airs.

I guess we have made some progress after all…

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