If you’re entering a URL in the iPhone/iPod Touch’s web browser, there’s a handy ‘.com’ key to save typing. It can be used to enter other domains too.
But when you’re entering email addresses, there’s no such shortcut. Except that there is. It’s hidden away. Just press and hold the ‘.’ key.
(If you like this hint, you might also like this one)
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 Mac Book Pro has a new baby brother. It’s a Dell Mini 9 on which, thanks to the instructions here, I was able to install Mac OS X.
I already had a properly-licensed copy of the OS, in so far as any operation like this could be properly-licensed. I ordered the Dell with 2G RAM, an improved webcam, a larger (16GB) SSD and a bluetooth module. Total cost: £277. Including VAT. And shipping. Oh, and a nice carrying case.
As soon as you pick the device up, you can tell from the construction that it’s not an Apple. But my first solid-state ‘Mac’ runs the OS really quite nicely. I had a vague idea that Apple software was only licensed to run on Apple-badged products, so I fixed that too:
However, there was one downside to the bargain special price I got from Dell. After ordering, I discovered that some varieties of this machine, such as those purchased from PCWorld or from Vodafone, have a 3G modem and a slot for a SIM. This doesn’t have it, and it would have been really quite nice. But then I might not have got some of the other upgrades, and since everything else, including a 3G connection via Bluetooth to my phone, seems to work fine, I’m really very happy.
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.
On the Mac, I’ve always liked Apple’s standard Mail app. On the rare occasions when I need an email program on another platform, I use Thunderbird, from the nice people who brought you Firefox.
Thunderbird, I gather from those who have looked carefully into these things, is a very well-behaved email program. Its underlying code is sound, especially when it comes to IMAP. It lacks the polish of Mail, and has limited searching capabilities, but it’s otherwise a good choice.
So I was interested today when my friend Ray told me about Postbox, a Windows and Mac mail client that’s built on top of Thunderbird but adds a variety of new features, including more sophisticated filtering and searching, and looks a bit prettier. I’ve been trying it and it looks quite nice.
The great thing about keeping your mail on an IMAP server, of course, is that you can move between programs without worrying that your valuable messages will get swallowed up in a variety of different mail folder formats. So I’ll try this for a while and see how it goes…
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.
From our trip last weekend.
These are on the canal between Bruges and Damme.
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:
I love it here. Good to be back, even if only for a day.
A tiny part of the amazing frontage of Amiens cathedral.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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