Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons
for you are crunchy, and good with ketchup
1. Safari can now save ‘Web Archive’ files. A single file that captures a page with all its images, links etc intact. Useful for anything that you suspect may become premium content in a little while! IE on Windows has had this for a while, of course, but on the Mac, as you save it on disk, it gets indexed by Spotlight…
2. The Mail app can now resize images. This is a great timesaver for me; I’m always creating small versions of my pictures using PhotoShop or ImageWell before dropping them on a mail message. Now, if your message has images in, a menu appears at the bottom of the window allowing you to select the size and telling you how big the resulting message will be. Very handy.
Extract from a nice NYT story by Jennifer Lee:
Powerball lottery officials suspected fraud: how could 110 players in the March 30 drawing get five of the six numbers right? That made them all second-prize winners, and considering the number of tickets sold in the 29 states where the game is played, there should have been only four or five.
But from state after state they kept coming in, the one-in-three-million combination of 22, 28, 32, 33, 39.
It took some time before they had their answer: the players got their numbers inside fortune cookies, and all the cookies came from the same factory in Long Island City, Queens.
Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball, said on Monday that the panic began at 11:30 p.m. March 30 when he got a call from a worried staff member.
The second-place winners were due $100,000 to $500,000 each, depending on how much they had bet, so paying all 110 meant almost $19 million in unexpected payouts, Mr. Strutt said. (The lottery keeps a $25 million reserve for odd situations.)
Of course, it could have been worse. The 110 had picked the wrong sixth number – 40, not 42 – and would have been first-place winners if they did.
In the early 80s, a new device suddenly became an indispensable part of office life and revolutionised corporate communications. And no, I don’t mean the PC.
A wonderful article on the history of the Post-It Note.
Many thanks to David Orange for the link
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:
It took me some time to work out how to connect to my T-Mobile (UK) GPRS network using my Mac and my Motorola V3 RAZR phone, so I’ve posted this in case somebody out there is Googling for similar things!
The Organic Trade Association has come up with some fabulous marketing… well worth watching if you know anything about Star Wars.
Rose bought some broccoli from our local supermarket. It came in a plastic bag.
On the bag, it says, “To preserve freshness, this product has been packed in a bag”.
A very cool new utility included in Tiger is Grapher, which draws lovely graphs of equations in 2d or 3d, and does a whole lot more too.
This is z = 1-sin(x)+sin(2y), but there are some much more complicated and beautiful examples in the ‘Examples’ menu:
What you can’t see here is the fact that it’s rotating gently, and you can turn it in any direction you want using the mouse…
Worth investigating.
Found this wonderful story on Tony Price’s blog:
A Nazi SS trooper accosts an old rabbi, points a gun at his head, and demands, “Tell me, who’s to blame for all the world’s troubles?”
The old rabbi knows the right answer, and trembling he admits, “The Jews.”
The SS man smiles and nods.
“And the pretzel bakers,” adds the rabbi.
“Why the pretzel bakers?” demands the Nazi.
“Why the Jews?”
It struck me today that any opposition trying to get into power has a real problem if the populace as a whole is not too dissatisfied with the status quo. Yes, well, of course, that’s obvious, but my point is a little more subtle. Not very – I’m a Bear of Very Little Brain.
The party in government just has to keep enthusing about how good everything is. They have, essentially, a positive message. The other parties have to persuade people that everything is very bad at the moment and so they must start with a negative spin which makes them less appealing. I mean, who wants to hear from people who are complaining all the time?
Mind you, this is probably balanced very neatly by the phonomenon of people wanting a change because the grass is always greener…
Not very deep really. It must be bedtime.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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