A rear view of Bateman’s.
Excellent news. Starting in May, you’ll be able to buy some higher-quality DRM-free music from iTunes for an extra 30c. This is an EMI intiative – I wonder if the other labels will follow suit.
More info on the BBC and on Apple’s site.
Thanks to Michael for pointing it out.
I quite like this chap, seen this morning at Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s former home.
Rose and I had a very pleasant weekend exploring parts of Kent and Sussex. I’ll post a few more pics here over the next few days.
A temporary one, but I think it’s great… here.
Of course, one should probably take note of the date…
The core of Microsoft Vista is, by most accounts, a pretty solid operating system, though I can’t speak from any personal experience. In fact, I’ve scarcely had any experience of XP, having abandoned Windows for the Mac about 6 years ago; something I’ve never had cause to regret.
I thought Peter Gutman’s excellent report on how the operating system has been crippled to accommodate the whims of Hollywood was a good reason to maintain my distance. Now it appears that it may not be that good even at copying, renaming or deleting files…
It’s nearly a year since I started wondering about this as a way of combining my paper and electronic worlds. Then I came across the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners, but certain recent events made me consider one more seriously, and after reading enthusiastic reviews by several owners I decided it was worth trying.
The default modus operandi is that you put one or more sheets of whatever size in the hopper, press the Scan button, and you get a timestamped PDF file in the directory of your choice. Very handy. See Fujitsu’s little demo video to get the idea.
Now, I realise it’s a bit unsportsmanlike to push my advantage when you’re probably already reeling from the staggering coolness of it all, but, yes, there’s more. This scanner isn’t the only gadget I’ve acquired recently that deals in PDFs. So I can take what comes from the scanner and copy it straight onto my Sony PRS.
I should have chosen a more subtle paper colour for my example, to make it more readable on a monochrome screen, or done some image processing on it. This was just a simple copy of the PDF.
Anyway, I could now carry the contents of many notebooks with me, if I wanted, in something rather smaller than a single one! Of course, I’d have to introduce my old Moleskines to Madame La Guillotine before I could feed them through the scanner, but it’s worth considering…
An interesting article in last week’s Economist talks about ‘flu vaccinations. The majority of individuals who have a jab are elderly, for the obvious reason that they are more likely to die from catching ‘flu than the young.
However, as the parents of any small child know, it is the young who bring pestilence into the home. Thereafter, adults spread coughs and sneezes in their workplaces. Vaccinating the young would reduce the spread of flu, thus saving lives.
…
Indeed, if 77% of young people were given jabs, seasonal flu could be all but eliminated. A utilitarian strategy, however, is a top-down affair because it relies on a community-wide programme, rather than on individuals’ choices about whether to get vaccinated.
In other words, as Spock might put it, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Whether Dr Spock would agree, I could not say!
The only case where it seems likely that people will get themselves vaccinated for the greater good of society is when a pandemic threatens. There, the needs of the one are closely aligned with the needs of the many.
John’s Observer column has a very nice illustration of the problem with current copyright law. As Larry Lessig put it, it’s increasingly formulated to ensure that “…no one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm”.
Well, that didn’t take long. People are already opening up the AppleTV and installing extra stuff on it, like browsers, and Perian, which gives you the ability to play rather more video formats. There’s a wiki with more info here.
Now, I have a Mac Mini under my TV so I don’t need one of these. But I can think of a few nice uses for a box that size if somebody made it run Linux… which I’m guessing might not be too hard…
Yesterday I jokingly asked Michelle, who does the company accounts, whether I had been paid this month, because my bank account seemed rather lower than I thought it should be. She laughed and said that I had. I went away mildly concerned about my profligacy.
This morning I opened my bank statement and discovered that it was substantially lower than it should be, because there were 16 fraudulent cash withdrawals in the last two and a half weeks, starting in Milan and Rome, but then moving to the US. Over £2500 gone altogether. Ouch.
The banks will fix this with relatively little incovenience on my part, I think. But since I carefully avoid having, or using, too many cards it means I now need to dig out another card which I haven’t used for some time and hope I can remember its PIN number. And perhaps such an unexpected burst of activity will look fraud on that card too!
Anyway, the moral of the story is that it pays to check your statements carefully!
Highly recommended: Malcolm Gladwell’s TED2004 talk. In just 15 mins, you’ll find out what every business needs to know about spaghetti sauce. Watch it over breakfast and you’ll have a whole new topic of dinnertime conversation…
Regular readers will know that I’m a huge fan of these TED talks; I’ve posted before about Michael Shermer’s talk, and those from Peter Donnelly and Dan Gilbert. If you’ve got a shiny new AppleTV and you’re looking for some content for it, or you have a video-capable iPod and want something to watch on the train, you owe it to yourself to subscribe to these in your iTunes. Just click here.
Scott Adams has a suggestion based on some psychological research.
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