…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:
One thing I love about the new iPod/iTouch software is the ability to put links to web pages, and even to bits of web pages, directly on the front screen.
This hint makes it even better, by telling you how to add a webclip icon. I have a link to our CODA system on mine, and it now has a shiny new icon (bottom left):
…when your wishes are granted?
In September I wrote about how I wanted my 3G phone to become a wifi router so it could provide internet access to surrounding devices like my iTouch.
Today I discovered Joikuspot, which, if you have the right phone, is well on the way to being there, though it’s strictly HTTP-only at present. But it does mean that I can use the wonderful browser on my iPod Touch when I’m not near a wifi connection. And I can do so over 3G. Which in some ways makes it better than an iPhone…
Finally! SuperDuper, the single most valuable utility on my Mac, has been updated to be fully Leopard-compatible.
Apple’s TimeMachine is great, and I’ve had to do a full system restore from it in the past which was a somewhat slow but otherwise completely painless experience. Leopard still has many buglets to be ironed out, so it’s good that it has a superb backup system built-in as well!
But there are few things which can compare with having a complete, bootable copy of your system on a separate drive. When something goes badly wrong, you can be up and running again in minutes.
That’s what SuperDuper does, and does better than anything else. I will sleep more soundly henceforth.
Now my only problem is that my hard drive crashed again this afternoon, about 3 hrs before SuperDuper was released. Ah well…
This one is from W.H. Auden:
We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.
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…
Amsterdam Central Station last night.
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!
I met this splendid chap on a walk today. From the look of his hooves he must be at least part Shire (I’m no expert). Very friendly, very gentle, and very tall. He looked down upon me from a great height. I’m about 6ft and I didn’t crouch down at all to take this one.
George Bernard Shaw’s epitaph:
I knew if I waited around long enough something like this would happen.
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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