Category Archives: General

The latest in disk labels

FireLite XpressThe new FireLite Xpress is a portable hard drive with a difference.
It has a cholesteric LCD display on the front.

These displays are generally low-resolution, monochrome and exceedingly slow to update. So what’s their raison d’être? It’s this: once the image is on the display, you don’t need any power to keep it there. This means that they can be used for static information on things which don’t have a battery.

The display can be set to show a variety of useful stuff – the label of the disk, the amount of free space, the date it was last updated, and so forth. Just under 100 quid in the UK. A very nice application of the technology.

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World meeting planner

Here’s a site which does a simple job but does it rather nicely:

World meeting planner
World Meeting Planner

It helps you work out the best time for phone calls or videoconferences which span multiple timezones. You just enter the location of the participants. It’s not too hard to do this in your head for a simple phone call, but when you get more participants and you don’t know the timezone of some of the countries, it can be more challenging!

Thanks to Mike Pearson for the link. He’s in New Zealand.

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The Wisdom of Crowds

Book cover
My holiday reading was James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. A splendid tome.

There’s a standard pattern for a lot of trendy business books these days. You come up with one basic idea. You explain it in the 30-page introductory chapter, which is all that most execs will get around to reading. And then you repeat the idea with different examples for the remaining chapters, until you have enough pages for a publisher to be able to sell the early versions in hardback to people with good expense accounts.

The Wisdom of Crowds doesn’t really fall into this mould. Yes, there’s a single simple idea here, but throughout the book Surowiecki expands it, contradicts it, explores it from other angles and tries to work out when it is and isn’t valid to a greater degree than I’ve seen in most other similar recent works. He also writes rather well, which makes the whole process more enjoyable. Recommended.

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A sense of proportion

Mmm. So the Pope quotes some words from a medieval manuscript and emphasises that they are not his own. In response, a Somalian cleric named Abubukar Malin says that “whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim” and calls for revenge on the Pope. Which seems like a suitably proportionate response, and was no doubt calculated to improve Islam’s image around the world.

As for Mr Kapusuz, the senior Turkish politician who says that the Pope, for quoting somebody else’s words, should now be put in the same category as Hitler and Mussolini, one can only wonder what kind of history lessons he ever had. Still, this is a very serious insult to the leader of one of the world’s great religions, and he wasn’t even quoting somebody else, so I guess he should probably be killed on the spot too. No doubt he’s anticipated that as a likely response from the Vatican.

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Subscribe to RSS in Safari

If you’re a Mac user and you haven’t really worked out how this RSS stuff works in Safari, have a look at Craig Swanson’s quick tutorial.

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Why Johnny can’t code

David Brin laments the fact that modern computers are no good for kids wanting to learn to program, and explains why he bought his son Ben a $25 Commodore 64 from eBay.

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Mists and mellow fruitfulness

St Lucie County, Florida, is hoping to create the ultimate recycling plant by vaporising its land-fill sites and creating lots of electricity in the process. It sounds very appealing, but will it work in practice…?

Thanks to Claes-Frederik for the link.

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Quote for the day

“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”

Brian Sutton-Smith, University of Pennsylvania

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‘Appyture

In a recent post I said that, “at $299, Aperture is a somewhat pricey but very nice piece of software”. Of course, it used to be somewhat more pricey – it was $499 when first released.

I’ve always assumed that there would be a lot of disgruntled early users out there when the price was dropped almost to half of what they had paid, but it turns out that Apple gave a $200 coupon to all registered users of the first, more expensive, version. What a nice company!

Now, I wonder what’s happening to Aperture in ten days’ time…

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Backup your iTunes Library

Ah, now this is a very nice new feature in iTunes 7.

There’s more information here.

I’ve noticed a bit more of a trend in this direction recently: for applications to incorporate backup options for their own data. I think it’s quite a good idea, because they often have a better idea of what needs backing up, how often, and in what way, than a more general “copy the files” backup. A couple of other packages I use which have two very different, but both very good, backup strategies built-in are the excellent accounting package MYOB and Apple’s Aperture.

So my photos, my accounts and my music now all have their own backups in addition to the general disk-cloning that I do from time to time with SuperDuper. Good for one’s peace of mind. I shall now go to bed and sleep soundly.

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Holiday snaps

A couple more pictures from the Pyrenees:

Pyrenean cow
One of the local high-altitude inhabitants.

En so de Laborde
The gites that we rented in the little village of Gaillagos.
The ridge in the background made for a splendid walk one evening:

Rose on a ridge

If you have Google Earth, here’s the location: Gaillagos.

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The cost of convenience

In the UK, every vehicle has to display a tax disc which generally needs to be renewed once a year.
Road tax disc
This year, for the first time, I could pay for the replacement online, and it was posted to me. Very convenient. The details are also printed rather than handwritten, and are rather more legible than last year’s one!

But in the past you had to go to the post office taking both evidence of your insurance and your vehicle’s MOT (road-worthiness) certificate, which would be checked by the cashier before you could get the disc. In theory, then, the police or the traffic wardens could look at a car and tell that it had appropriate insurance and mechanical condition.

With the online process, you just have to tick boxes affirming that you have these. No other human is involved. Somehow this doesn’t make me think that our roads will become safer…

Actually, if I remember correctly, the MOT test database is checked as part of the process, so that bit is covered. But what about the insurance companies? Is there a central service that can be checked for that too? I think uninsured drivers are more of a problem than unreliable cars…

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