Two and a half years ago, I really wanted podcasting, though of course it didn’t have a name then. Now I’ve got it, but not enough time to listen to the feeds. Such is life…
He who waits…
February 23rd, 2005
Making the most of your pixels
February 23rd, 2005
I’m working on a substantial document at present, which involves lots of cross-referencing between sections. It really helps to be able to refer to more than one section of the document at once. Here’s the setup I like best:
This is Word 2004, showing three windows onto the same document. The top one, where I do most of the work, also has the document map switched on, for quicker navigation. I’ve used two separate windows on the lower display, rather than showing two pages side-by-side in one wide window, so that I can scroll them independently.
The other good thing about this arrangement is that it covers up everything else, which helps to reduce distraction!
Pixels are addictive. The more you have of them, the more you want. I’m just waiting for my pals at Newnham Research to produce something for the Mac…
ice>Link
February 23rd, 2005
This looks cool – the ice>Link allows you to connect your iPod to your car stereo as if it were a CD changer. A limited range of head units supported at the moment, and it’s a bit pricey, but it’s a great idea.
Binary
February 22nd, 2005
A signature seen on a posting today…
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t…
wget for Mac OS X
February 22nd, 2005
Update: I’ve posted a new, updated version of wget for OS X which you may want to try instead.
If you want to grab files from the web using the command line, the wget utility is great.
Recent versions of Mac OS X don’t include it. They come with curl instead, which has some good features, but is also missing a great deal.
Here’s wget.zip, which contains wget built for Mac OS X 10.3.
Hope someone finds it useful!
Update: If you like this, you might also like my mtr for Mac OS X, or be interested in lots of other Apple-related stuff here.
Transmit
February 21st, 2005
Transmit is a fabulous FTP client for the Mac, which also does SFTP & WebDAV. I’ve always liked it, but the new version (3) has a couple of features which are really nice if you keep on your own machine copies of files which are on a remote machine:
- You can ‘Link Folder Navigation’ meaning that as you move through the tree of files on one machine, it automatically changes to the matching directory on the other.
- You can set up ‘DockSend’ for your favourites. If you drag a file from somewhere within your local filesystem onto the Transmit icon in the Dock, and it recognises the local origin as being within a directory that has a copy on the server, it will connect, upload the file to the appropriate place in the remote hierarchy, and disconnect again. Too cute.
It has loads of other features too, but these are the new ones that may not be known to existing Transmit users. Highly recommended.
Avoiding the beachball while surfing…
February 20th, 2005
Mac owners who use the Safari browser sometimes find that they start to get the ‘spinning beachball’ cursor fairly often, while Safari takes a short pause to contemplate life. I found a couple of hints that are supposed to fix this:
- Under Safari Preferences…select Autofill and then turn off “other forms.”
- Quit Safari and delete your ~/Library/Safari/Icons directory. This caches the ‘favicons’ which may be associated with each site and it can, apparently, get a bit clogged up.
I’ve just tried these, and things seem snappier, though it’s a bit early to say for certain…
Follow-up, a day later – yes, it certainly seems to have helped a lot.
Your very own Green Goddess
February 19th, 2005
The ‘Green Goddess’ has been an important part of fire and rescue services in the UK for half a century. They appear on the streets when the regular Fire Services go on strike. Now you too can own one…
Follow-up: Apparently The Times announced that the whole fleet was to be disbanded. That was in January 1978. But they’re still going. Which just goes to show that, arrr, they don’t make ’em like they used to…
Oil protestors meet their match
February 18th, 2005
A group of Greenpeace activists tried to storm the International Petroleum Exchange in London on Wednesday and got more than they bargained for. Times report here. Now, I’m very much in favour of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and I think Kyoto is a Very Good Thing.
Some of the loony left, however, believe that when they can’t win by force of rational argument, they have a moral right to disrupt & damage things and to do so with impunity. I think it’s high time that they got a taste of their own medicine, though I fear that they won’t view their bruises in that way.
Don’t believe anything you read in the papers…
It’s quite educational, too, to read the account from the BBC of the same event and see what a very different an impression it gives you. I don’t think this is primarily because of political bias in either case. The Times, which is in danger of becoming the tabloid for the polysyllabic, paints a fairly unpleasant picture of both the traders and the protestors, gives you more gory details and portrays it as more of a battlefield. The BBC gives the impression that there was some disruption but then everybody went home for tea.
To Catch a Thief
February 18th, 2005
A couple of weeks ago, a burglar broke into the flat belonging to my friend Duncan Grisby.
Sadly, burglaries are all too common in the Cambridge area, and the police are unwilling or incapable of doing anything about it. I have never, ever, heard of a burglar being caught, and certainly never heard of them being sentenced as a result.
Until now. This one hadn’t reckoned on Duncan and his software.
More information from the BBC and from Duncan’s own website.
The prices, they are a-droppin’
February 15th, 2005
Amazon have this Digimate 17″ TFT Monitor for £139.99 now. Add a keyboard and mouse for £9.99 and a basic Mac mini and you can have a flat-screen Mac for under £500.
(Though in fact I’d recommend adding a bit more RAM to the Mac, and going for the slightly more pricey Apple keyboard & mouse – total cost about £580 including VAT, or about £500 without)
Reading backwards
February 14th, 2005
Weblogs are almost always organised in reverse-chronological order; the most recent posts first. This gives a feeling of the most important news headlines being at the top of the page, with older stuff ‘below the fold’, and was important when most people read blogs using their web browser. It’s less vital now that so many are using RSS readers which highlight what’s new for you anyway.
Anyway, it means that there’s an increasing number of web pages that I read backwards, or at least scroll parts of them backwards in order to follow the development of an idea. Is this something we’ll all do naturally in a few years?
I’ve often thought that blogs should show the most recent days first, but should go forward chronologically within a day.
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