Make some space on your lap

Hard disk space can be a problem for those of us who depend on laptops for our day-to-day life. It’s now easy and relatively cheap to install a terabyte in a desktop machine, but my Macbook Pro has a 100G disk and I seldom have more than about 2G free. I only achieve that by shuffling stuff onto a portable Firewire drive. And now I have a camera that shoots RAW images I’ll need to reorganise things again!

Slowly, however, the capacities of laptop drives are increasing. Hitachi now have a 200GB drive and people have successfully installed it in a MBP.

But I can’t help feeling that I’m going to have to start basing my life on desktop machines soon and use my laptop as a cache of the bits I need to be portable…

The Canon’s Mouth

A new toy. Photographed using an old toy. It’s been great having the little Ixus 750 on my belt all the time, but I love having a ‘real’ camera again.

Canon 30D

Mind you, don’t you think 30D sounds a bit like the size of a lady’s undergarment?

A timely reminder

Most of North America switches to Daylight Savings Time today. They’re extending the period this year, so it starts earlier than usual. (You can search Status-Q for ‘EDST’ for more info.)

British Summer Time doesn’t begin for another two weeks, so for the next fortnight London & San Francisco are 7 hours apart instead of 8, for example.

Burrowing through Status-Q

Back in June I mentioned that I’d installed my variation on the ‘Related Entries‘ plugin for WordPress. Newer readers may have missed this, so I thought I’d mention it again – it’s really quite good.

As well as being on the front page, each Status-Q post has a page of its own in the archive. You can get to it by clicking on the post’s title. After the text, you’ll see a list of possibly-related previous posts. It’s remarkably good at finding relevant ones, so you can browse through the archives by following a chain of topics, should you be so inclined…

Have a look at the bottom of this recent post if you’d like an example.

Travelwear

If you find yourself in an airport departure lounge and want to confirm that you’re in the right place for your intended destination, sometimes you can just check out the other passengers.

Hippy

Good. Yup. San Francisco.

Anyone tried those shoes, by the way? I see more and more people wearing them, at least on the other side of the Atlantic. But even I, notoriously oblivious to my appearance, would have to be convinced they were very comfortable before turning myself into a kind of high-tech hobbit…

Segway-lite?

Ben Smither has created what must be the minimal Segway-type vehicle:

More info here.

Trevor Blackwell has also made some cool devices – I’ve ridden his home-made Segway variant and it’s very good, in some ways rather better than a standard Segway. The steering is more intuitive, for example.

He did admit that a fair amount of the cost and complexity of a commercial Segway comes from the numerous safety features they build in, which he didn’t have to the same degree. He told me this after I’d tried it, of course…

Oh, and you should see what he’s been up to at Anybots. Have a look at this and this.

Getting Things Done on the Mac

Those who have joined the cult of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, of which I am but a humble and inexpert practitioner, might be interested in ThinkingRock. This is perhaps the best implementation of the concepts that I’ve come across so far. It’s Java, so will work on Mac, Windows or Linux, and is free, though they welcome donations.

If you don’t know GTD, it will be somewhat mysterious, until you’ve read the book or listened to the audiobook.

Sausalito sunset

The last batch of images from the weekend. Views of Sausalito and San Francisco.

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Bottles

Sausalito shoreline

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Spring in San Francisco

It’s been a glorious day here – the kind of weather where it’s just warm enough to drive around with the windows wide open. California at its best.

Rose's Cafe, Union St, San Francisco

I took lots of photos in the city, the Marin Headlands, and Sausalito. I’ll post some of them over the next few days.

Marin Headlands

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© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser