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More Tiger display hints

I wrote about the ability in the new Mac OS X to drive portrait-mode displays. Normally, on Powerbooks, this only applies to external displays. There is, however, a hidden way to rotate the internal display, which can be nice if you want to view a whole page:

Open System Preferences (it mustn’t already be running) and hold down Alt while clicking the Displays icon. You’ll then get the option to rotate the display.

Warning! This doesn’t rotate the trackpad! It can therefore be a fun challenge to manipulate the cursor after doing this. If you have a mouse, you can turn either it or the laptop through 90 degrees and everything is easy! This works quite well:

Laptop in portrait mode!

qsf

19 Apr 2005

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More pictures from our recent trip

Fountains Abbey – the cellarium

Our noisy neighbours

Storm damage

Shadows

A distant Rose. Not too crowded up here…

Very peaceful. Sheep are good lawnmowers.

qsf

15 Apr 2005

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Roaming with Bluetooth

Well, almost! We’ve been spending the last week in this rather sweet, early-18th-century cottage in the Lake District:

Church Cottage, Far Sawrey

There is, of course, no such thing as broadband here, and almost no phone line. There is cellphone coverage outside in places, but the walls, which are nearly three feet thick, stop it penetrating into the house. I found, however, that I could get a phone signal if I sat on one of the window-sills, which are quite nice spots for telephoning but a little cramped for using a laptop.

Fortunately, of course, with Bluetooth, I don’t have to be right beside the phone. So I’m typing this while sitting on the sofa in front of a blazing fire, and uploading it via a phone which is perched in the window just to the right of the door.

qsf

23 Feb 2005

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Making the most of your pixels

I’m working on a substantial document at present, which involves lots of cross-referencing between sections. It really helps to be able to refer to more than one section of the document at once. Here’s the setup I like best:

This is Word 2004, showing three windows onto the same document. The top one, where I do most of the work, also has the document map switched on, for quicker navigation. I’ve used two separate windows on the lower display, rather than showing two pages side-by-side in one wide window, so that I can scroll them independently.

The other good thing about this arrangement is that it covers up everything else, which helps to reduce distraction!

Pixels are addictive. The more you have of them, the more you want. I’m just waiting for my pals at Newnham Research to produce something for the Mac…

qsf

9 Feb 2005

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More Perestroika

A pronunciation guide for Cyrillic characters:

qsf

8 Feb 2005

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Perestroika

I flew home from Moscow this afternoon.

When I was last in Red Square in 1981, the guards were goose-stepping up and down in front of the Kremlin wall.

Yesterday, not only could I go inside the Kremlin, but a guard inside was feeding the birds.

Inside the Kremlin

Very different memories…

qsf

3 Feb 2005

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Greetings from Russia

Well, I’m in Nizhni Novgorod for a workshop on Proactive Computing. We came through Moscow on the way here, and the airport looks very different from when I last visited it in pre-Perestroika 1981.

Some aspects of Nizhni airport still have the good old Soviet feel, though.

qsf

30 Jan 2005

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Cowering?

My friend Martin & I went for a wonderful walk in the Suffolk countryside this afternoon. We enjoyed seeing the sheep and the deer, but at one point the footpath took us rather closer to this handsome chap than was entirely comfortable:

A bit of a bully?

He’s huge (that’s quite a big fence) and beautiful, and more so when you’re only 20 feet away, but those horns do look as if he’s been sharpening them specially for you. He didn’t make any threatening movements, though, and neither, I can promise you, did we…

A bit of a bully?

qsf

11 Jan 2005

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Nature’s structures…

…and man’s.

Cranes and trees

qsf

8 Jan 2005

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Snug

In Seattle again – snow has been forecast for the last two days but hasn’t arrived.

Meanwhile, at the Happels’, dinner time is very cosy.
Candles

qsf

18 Dec 2004

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Work station?

John has a nice picture of the dead Windows screen at Cambridge station. It’s been like that for ages. Here’s a picture I took more than two months ago using my phone. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen it then, and it still hasn’t been fixed:

My friend Tim Glauert jokes that they need three displays so they can display “Departures”, “Arrivals” and “Please press Ctrl-Alt Del”. This is why Newnham Research is going to do so well…