Not quite sure why, but I find this rather appealing. An interesting mix of cultural influences.
Category Archives: General
US States by GDP
(Click for more info – thanks to John for the link)
The Blackstone Key
Many readers will know, but many others will not because she’s been keeping it quiet for months, that my wife Rose’s first novel will be published next spring. Since it’s now listed on Amazon.co.uk, though, the cat is probably out of the bag.
The Blackstone Key is a thriller/adventure set in the late eighteenth century. It’s the first of (at least) a trilogy to be published in the UK & Europe by Little, Brown under the Sphere name, and in the U.S. & Canada by Simon & Schuster (Touchstone). It’s also being translated into German by another publisher.
More news as things develop…
Leopard, Leopard, burning bright
Some nice demos of the pretty new features coming in Apple’s next version of the OS can be found here.
Steve Jobs apparently said that Leopard will be available in October, and made a nice comparison with Vista: The Basic version will be $129. The Premium version will be $129. The Business version will be $129 and the Ultimate version will be $129. It’s all the same thing. “Most people”, he quipped, “will just go for the Ultimate version.”
Surfin’ Safari
Mmm. That’s interesting. Steve Jobs has just announced the imminent release of the Safari browser for Windows – there’ll be a beta release later today.
That’s very smart. iTunes is one of the most popular Windows apps. It’ll be interesting to see how Safari does… And anything which ups the market share of minority browsers is a good thing in my book.
Update: Safari 3 Beta is now available, from http://www.apple.com/safari/. This was posted with it. The Mac version, of course! It does seem rather snappier, and has a few nice features – the ability to rearrange tabs and tear them off to form separate pages is cool, and very nicely implemented. One thing I’ve often wanted is to be able to move a tabbed page from one window to another, so that windows are groups of pages on a particular topic. Now it’s easy….
The Paper Renaissance
I’ve now converted the second of my talks from the GOVIS 2007 conference. This one is about Exbiblio – a project to bring paper documents to life by giving them digital capabilities.
You can watch it directly here, if you should be so inclined, or there are links below to versions you can download and play in QuickTime or iTunes if wanted.
These are both H.264-based MP4 files. You can right-click and save them to disk.
IPOD version (71MB) (mirror)
High quality MP4 version (162MB) (mirror)
Windows Media version (100MB)
This work is the property of GOVIS and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Juxtaposition
Since Cisco’s logo represents the Golden Gate Bridge, perhaps Tesco’s represents the London Underground?
Card index
I had some great birthday cards last month. I think this was my favourite, though:
Many thanks to Kim and Robin
Hanging around
Hello… it’s Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells here… I wish to complain about a distressing grammatical error which gets on my nerves, and which is becoming increasingly common even on the BBC.
I’m referring to the verb to hang, as in ‘to hang by the neck until dead’, and in particular to its past, and past participle, form, which is, of course, hanged.
Somebody on the Beeb this morning was talking about a chap who should be hung, drawn and quartered. He meant, of course, hanged.
Meat is hung. People are hanged.
Thank you for your attention.
Gadget limbo
About a month ago, I lost my Nokia E61 on the far side of the world. This wasn’t as distressing as it might have been, because I knew I had my trusty old Blackberry 7100t waiting for me when I got home.
The 7100t is the best phone I’ve owned, in terms of reliability, quality of manufacture, and design of software. I’ve been thinking it would tide me over until an iPhone came along. But, in Europe, that’s likely to mean waiting until at least the New Year, and 6 months is a long time in gadgetland.
The Blackberry is just as good as I remembered, but I’ve been spoiled now by some of the E61’s features… Spoiled by having the TomTom software in my pocket. Spoiled by being able to use my phone as a 3G modem on T-Mobile’s very reasonable data rates. Spoiled by the wifi connection and the quality of the loudspeaker which meant it was a great way to listen to podcasts. Some of these were a real pain to set up, but once working, they were really quite useful. It’s not clear that even the iPhone will offer any of these. And now Nokia have their Media Transfer suite, which looks like good news for Mac owners with N-series phones. I could be tempted…
On the other hand, I’m not sure that I want to forsake Blackberry software for the rather buggy and disjointed interface that Symbian has, sadly, become. Come on, RIM – give us a 3G modem, at least!
Or would you rather be a fish?
A photo from my recent travels.
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