Status-Q

A very quick tip today...

Everyone uses cut, copy and paste - we've all become so used to the clipboard metaphor that it's pretty automatic. Most clipboard systems have a big limitation, though - they only store one thing at a time.

If you're like me, you're often in the middle of moving chunks of text around in web pages, or copying URLs into email messages, and then get interrupted by an IM message asking for someone's phone number. You copy & paste the number from your address book and then want to go back to where you were before... but you've overwritten the contents of your clipboard.

This is why you need a 'clipboard history' utility. If you use one, this will all be obvious to you, but if not, go and get one now. Tools like Quicksilver and Launchbar (my favourite) have them built-in, or you can use a simpler standalone utility like JumpCut or Clyppan - they can all basically do the same thing in this regard: they give you one more keystroke to learn as an alternative to 'paste', which, rather than simply pasting the last thing you copied, gives you a menu of the last few things and lets you select one. Some will paste it directly for you, others will put it in the clipboard so you can paste it yourself.

You may want to hunt around for a utility that feels right for you. I like speed and simplicity, and with Launchbar I can just pop up the list, cursor-down a couple of times and then hit return to paste in that big chunk of text I was working on before I was so rudely interrupted. It's very slick. Launchbar costs money (but does a great deal more for you as well).

It may take a while for the clipboard history idea to become instinctive, but once it has, you won't want to be without it. Besides, you've been doing cut and paste for a long time now. Isn't it time you graduated to the next level?

Just heard a delightful programme on BBC Radio 4: When Real Women Wore Minis and Real Men Drove Them, about the making of The Italian Job, forty years ago.

Catch it while it's on iPlayer... even hearing the clips from the soundtrack can't fail to make me smile...

My friend Andrew Rauh pointed me at this: a coffee machine on Twitter. It doesn't even look at the coffee - it concentrates instead on the text displayed on the control panel's LEDs.

Quite fun, though.

My friend Phil Endecott has released his latest app for the iPhone, which makes your beverage the envy of all other nearby beverages. How? By making it glow.

You need a rather dark environment, but it's great fun. LagerLamp is available from iTunes for 59p. Which, when you think about it, wouldn't buy you very much beer these days.

Use at your own risk!

...then avian 'flu might become swine 'flu.

Update: And when I made that observation, I hadn't seen a Twitter post by my friend Aaron about 'swine flew'... which is even better.

Blackwell's in London have installed their first Espresso Book Machine. From the Guardian article:

It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Which does make me wonder whether, before long, we won't have coffee shops in bookstores. We'll have bookstores in coffee shops...

Hap sent me a link to a couple of beautifully-staged performance 'scenes'. This is my favourite, in an Antwerp train station:

Closer to home, this is in Picadilly Circus:

These were both corporate-sponsored, but it doesn't stop them from being great.

They're reminiscent of those staged by Improv Everywhere. I think the 'Frozen Grand Central' was my favourite of theirs so far:

From Christopher Hitchens:

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

which is, I suppose, a corollary of Carl Sagan's classic: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

John's musings about his old cars, and Sean and Nicci's post about double-declutching, reminded me of something my father taught me many years ago which few people probably know: that you can change gears without using the clutch, as long as you get the engine speeds right. You shift into neutral, rev the engine (or let it slow down) to the right point for your speed, and then shift into the next gear. It takes some practice, but if you know the car well enough, it is perfectly possible.

Since I've been married I've been driving automatics (which, I remember being horrified to first discover, you can't even bump-start!) But growing up with a sequence of elderly second-hand cars, techniques like these were often of real practical use. I remember driving one of my first cars several miles back home after the clutch cable had broken.

There is a real problem, though, with this technique. Because it's dependent on matching engine speed to road speed, the one thing you can't do is to stop, or you'll never get out of neutral again. Fortunately, I realised what had happened to the cable while I was still moving, and so could plan a route home that involved very few traffic lights and where the majority of other places I might have to stop were on downhill slopes...

There's a post on Sean and Nicci's site about the family Morris Traveller.

Well, the earliest car I can remember was also, I think, half-timbered. When when we first came back from Africa in 1970 my mother had a Mini Traveller. I was three years old at the time, but amazingly, I can remember its registration number: TBB 571G.

The brain works in mysterious ways...