Developments in alternative energy sources are accomplishing some wonderful things. Yes, yes, so they could reduce greenhouse gases and our dependency on polluting fossil fuels. But that’s old news.
More exciting things are in store. Take, for example, these illuminated garden birds.
Admit it, you’ve been wanting these for years! Well, now you can have them without the wiring hassles which have plagued installers of illuminated garden birds in the past.
Had forgotten about this until a friend’s mention of Weird Al Yankovic brought it back from the murky depths of my memory. About 20 years since I last heard this… which means, now that I think of it, that I had never heard of the web, and certainly had no idea that YouTube would come along…
Since Michael has been brave and put some of his GarageBand creations up for public appreciation, here’s one of my sillier ones from a couple of years back.
I’ve just been comparing the web pages of a few airlines. See if you can tell, even without looking closely, which are the budget ones.
Broadsheets?
Quality magazines?
Tabloid?
The last one – RyanAir – is, I’m sure you’ll agree, quite ghastly. It’s the only major site that makes the early days of MySpace look good. So my question is:
Your thoughts welcomed….
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…
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
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:
…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!)
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:
Clearing 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…
A confession. I’ve gone over to the dark side.
No, I’m not using Windows again – it’s not that bad. But I have started doing something which, until fairly recently, I considered far from commendable.
Yes, you’ve guessed it. I’ve started sending HTML-formatted email.
I used to be a purist. Email was for textual communication, and didn’t need frivolous formatting, so all my email programs were told in no uncertain terms that outgoing email should be plain text only. There were all those nasty privacy and security issues, especially in early versions of Outlook and Outlook Express. Javascript and ActiveX could be embedded in messages, exploiting security holes in the receiving mail program. Senders could include an image in an email which would be loaded when the message was viewed, meaning they could detect whether you’ve looked at it or not! Shocking, eh?
Well, maybe, but the security holes have largely been fixed, spam filters take out most of the stuff I would have worried about, notification systems are decidedly fallible and most email clients let you switch all these features off if you’re still concerned.
I really have no desire to change my background colours or embed YouTube videos in my messages. But in the end I decided that in the 21st century it was just plain silly not to be able to write sub-headings in bold or emphasise things with italics.
I was being a luddite. I was effectively insisting that all letters should be word-processed in a monospaced font because that had been good enough for typewriters. That wasn’t the way to make progress. I was using more sophisticated formatting in my instant messaging than in my carefully-composed emails! Yes, there are some potential issues, but denying myself from using italics was not the way to get those issues fixed. Anyway, the rest of the world was ignoring people like me. I’ve been getting an awful lot of formatted emails for an awfully long time, and never had any problems.
Actually, I would have made the switch earlier, but it’s only with the latest (Leopard) version that Apple’s Mail app – which I rather like – has really adopted HTML as its standard formatting – before that it could happily display incoming HTML but used richtext for outgoing compositions; something that not all other programs could read very well. Fortunately, any well-behaved email program will send a plain-text version of any message alongside a formatted one, so the important text should still get through.
Which means that if you wish to read my emails as if they came off a typewriter, you can still do so. I’m afraid neither the presence nor the absence of formatting is likely to improve the content!
Sorry things have been fairly quiet here of late. I’ve reached a sort of email event horizon where messages that require action or response are arriving faster than I can act or respond to them. After that you go into a kind of tailspin…
The quotation, by the way, is from C.S.Lewis. For your contemplation.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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