Status-Q

Quentin’s helpful hint for the day. Remember audio cassettes? You know those cassette-head cleaning kits? They would cost a few quid and come with a little bottle of cleaner which you’d drip onto Q-tips or some special device which would clean your cassette heads so that everything would sound nice and crisp and you could turn Dolby back on again?

Well, that cleaning fluid is basically Isopropyl Alcohol, and it’s jolly useful stuff for cleaning all sort of things. About 14 years ago, I went into Boots, our local big chemist, and asked if they could sell me some because I was fed up with paying three or four pounds for a tiny little plastic bottle of cassette head cleaner. Sure enough, for 85p, they provided me with a cute little 50ml glass bottle.

Well, I only use this stuff in small quantities, but recently, the level in the bottle has been getting a little low, so I went back yesterday and asked for some more. Sadly, they no longer keep the stuff. I presumed this was on the grounds of public health or something, but thought it was worth trying again, so I went to the nasty new Superdrug around the corner. And sure enough, I was able to purchase a pint of isopropyl alcohol, which at my rate of usage should keep me going sometime into the next millennium.

And it still only cost me three or four pounds. But I like the old bottle better.

[Original Link] John Naughton on the subject of Coarse Phishing.

[Original Link] If you’re a Mac OS X user and you do any programming in Python, you should check out the Wiki at PythonMac.org. If, like me, you miss the proper readline editing support when using it interactively, grab Jack Jansen’s add-ons which make it really easy to install readline and various other handy things.

[Original Link]

Following my last entry about the absence of the BBC this morning, Dave pointed me at this site. There was a fire at the Peterborough transmitter last night, apparently, and the mast collapsed, and great, I imagine, was the fall of it.

(Click image for more photos)

It’ll take them a while to get that back up.

That site has some interesting links, actually. I like Frequncy Finder, which will tell any UK readers about their local stations and where they’re coming from, or alternatively, tell you about a particular frequency and how it’s used around the country.

Update: This is what that mast looks like now, apparently:

I woke this morning to find a situation almost unknown in (my) living memory. I turned on the radio, as is my wont, to listen to BBC Radio 4, and it wasn’t there! Nor were any of the other national BBC stations. All our local transmitters are offline, which must have left hundreds of thousands of people, at least, offline. The Beeb don’t seem to be doing a good job telling people about it – it’s not obvious anywhere on the web site, for example.

Fortunately, the BBC website is in all other respects excellent – they have all of their content on line, including the live broadcast streams. And ‘wireless’ is a term we now use more about in-house networking than national networking. So I can simply take my laptop anywhere in the house instead of the radio. (And while listening, I could IM my friend Dave, who lives an hour’s drive away, to find out that his radio was dead too).

This is, to a large extent, the future of radio, though the device won’t always look like a laptop.

Update, 20 mins later: I spoke too soon. The BBC website is now down as well, no doubt swamped by the number of people trying to find out what’s happened! Perhaps there’s something to be said for broadcast technologies after all!

Another update: Actually, I think it was the DNS rather than the website which had a problem – I managed to get the site back almost immediately by finding an IP address for www.bbc.co.uk and putting it in my /etc/hosts, though this wasn’t needed for long. The main thing is that the online BBC came back before the broadcast version.

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A great story on CNN.

Faith, a 4-year-old Rottweiler, phoned 911 when [her owner] fell out of her wheelchair and barked urgently into the receiver until a dispatcher sent help. Then the service dog unlocked the front door for the police officer.

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The Telegraph, of course, revels in the end of the Guardian’s “Write to a Clark County voter” campaign. This follows an earlier article rejoicing in how it had backfired. The Guardian is saying that it was only shut down early because somebody hacked into the site and downloaded 20,000 personal addresses (which is deemed to be worse than 20,000 people downloading one address each).

The original Guardian article turns out to have been rather insightful:

It’s worth considering at the outset how counterproductive this might all be, especially if approached undiplomatically. Anybody might be justifiably angered by the idea of a foreigner trying to interfere in their democratic process.

And while the Guardian’s Albert Scardino is describing the project as “an overwhelming triumph”, I think the original piece may also prove to have been right when describing it as “a unique experiment”.