From the category archives:

Geeky

Downtime

March 16, 2010

The site will be down for about 30 minutes some time between 08.00 and 13.00 GMT on Wednesday 17 March 2010, for maintenance work on our service. Apologies.

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Food news (new series) 20: Eats

January 19, 2010

Start: 95.4 Last week: 89.5 This week: 89.3
New(ish) year, new approach. No more attempting to number by week, and no more beating myself over the head if I miss a week.
the Art of Eating is my unmissable periodical, the most intelligent, informative, well-written publication on food available anywhere. It looks good too. I’ve been a [...]

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Back with a rant: How is a printer like a DVD player?

January 10, 2010

Answer: If it is one of many HP models, it is “regionalized”. Ink cartridges you buy in one country won’t necessarily work in a printer bought in another country.
That completely blows chunks.
I’ve wasted the better part of a day, not to mention five cartridges (I think), discovering that ink bought in the US will not [...]

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Mobile phones make it work

November 17, 2009

Ok, so this morning’s idle fantasy has all the hallmarks of a sixth-form debating society also-ran. But like many crazy notions, maybe it isn’t completely crazy. One reason why sending US$ 2.50 to one of the hungry billion is so appealing is that it is direct. You have money, you send money, they spend money. [...]

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The software ate my homework, honest

October 14, 2009

That’s it. I’m officially calling it off. My long-standing love affair with ecto is officially over. ecto is what is known as a third-party blogging client. A bit like email software, it lets you write a blog post while offline and then upload it when you’re happy with it. Last night it ate a [...]

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Gummed to death

September 23, 2009

An unsolicited email from The Information Portal for the Public Sector promises amusement:
“We can’t be anti everything!”
The UK Government’s new Energy Adviser, David MacKay, gives a sound bite-free overview of the sustainable energy debate

Love the exclamation point. Love even more the toothlessness of Mr MacKay’s overview. Or should that be overbite? Ah, the perils of [...]

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Gutta percha snaps back

September 18, 2009

I did have my hopes too high, but they weren’t dashed, just satisfied in a different way. I expected pecha kucha (which Dan Pink pronounces p’chatchka, making it sound just a little bit Yiddish) to be about ideas, about putting over a point of view, about stimulating an argument. It can be, clearly, but last [...]

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Gutta percha, pecha kucha, what’s the difference?

September 17, 2009

I’ve read scads about pecha kucha and how the discipline of presenting ideas within the constraint of 20 slides at 20 seconds each can unleash a torrent of creativity. Now I’ve got a chance to see for myself. The University of Washington’s Design in Rome programme is giving it a go this evening, and I [...]

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Google Dribble

June 29, 2009

Nothing says “I’m excited” like a bouncing happy face emoticon.

Wanna bet?

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A problem with angle brackets

April 11, 2009

After migrating I had this really bizarre problem where something seemed to be stripping out the angle brackets < > around HTML. At first I thought it might be ecto. Then I looked around at my host, and it seems that there is a problem with something or other that enabled ecto to post via [...]

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After the migration

April 11, 2009

I know there are readers who don’t care that what they see here is now being served by a delicious new all-singing, all-dancing, super-spiffy server — but they might give silent thanks when they (or so I am promised) receive far fewer error messages in the future. For them, then, which is probably everyone [...]

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Migration test

April 5, 2009

Just a little post to see whether I have made the migration successfully.
Later: Alas not. I thought I had followed the instructions to the letter, but when the time came to check, blank page blues. I did a ton of things short of actually slaughtering a large cock, but to no effect. So, we’re back [...]

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I wouldn’t boast

March 30, 2009

John Gruber, a man whose opinions I value, thinks Stock Names “might be the cleverest promotion campaign I’ve ever seen“. It’s not bad, I agree, as a shill for something called Widgetfinger, a content management system. The claim is that the entire Stock Names page took less than 10 minutes from registering the domain name [...]

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A geeky Skype tip

March 26, 2009

Stupid, I know, to resume blogging with a nerdy Skype tip, but this is handy. I wanted to print a chat, but couldn’t find a way to do so. Then I read at the Skype forum that you just type /htmlhistory where you would normally type text into the chat, and it opens the chat [...]

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A postcard from Copenhagen

March 12, 2009

Boffins are worrying that when Australian farmers can sell carbon sequestration, they might prefer to earn more doing that than growing wheat. That will increase the world price of wheat. So the farmers will grow wheat. So what happens to the carbon?
But we can do both; increase yield by increasing soil carbon
“I don’t believe in [...]

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Look at the teeth on this nag

February 20, 2009

I am deeply grateful to Darwin College Cambridge for organising a wonderful set of Darwin Lectures in this the year of Darwin excess. I’m even more grateful that they recorded them in reasonably high quality and made them available over the intertubes. And not just available, but easily available as a podcast that I can [...]

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Very mild disappointment

February 15, 2009

It has been hectic this past week, hence the lack of activity here. I took the time this weekend to upgrade to the new version of WordPress and for the first time ever felt let down. On another blog the entire process just stopped. I carried on and hand-rolled it, because I was in the [...]

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I hate Duncan Hull

February 6, 2009

Because he pointed me to this video.
And now I’m being sucked into a vortex of appalling “scientific” music videos. Alas, the “making” video to accompany that wonderful effort above doesn’t give any of the details I truly want. are those all employees of the company? How many have PhDs. Is it a loving parody, or [...]

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Micro-blogging

January 18, 2009

An insightful post by Tim Bray — to the effect that “Twitter [is] a venture-funded startup with no business model, and these are tough times. They might make it and they might get rich, but it would be totally unsurprising if, 24 months from now, Twitter were gone, or a zombie site, or its BigCo [...]

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Inspiring

December 21, 2008

RIP Poor Man’s Version, long live The Rosa Parks of Blogs.
I’ll be back.

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It is indeed the digital input device, stupid

December 18, 2008

My friend the vombatovore and I have an ongoing thing about how utterly useless most (all?) netbooks are for people who touch type. Maybe people with long, slender digits are OK with small keyboards, but I’m not, and neither is he. In fact, I don’t really need the screen, except for reviewing. But I do [...]

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Lazy blogging: just one of the things I’ve done

December 4, 2008

I’ve got a bunch of things that I want to write scribbled as notes but haven’t had the luxury of uninterrupted time to do something with them. But I also wanted to get something done, so I took the lazy route of appropriating a meme. I saw this one over at Byzantium’s Shores, where Jaquandor [...]

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Sniff sniff? Ah! Tropical wetness, zesty freshness and bursting floralcy

November 21, 2008

It was, perhaps, the most inauspicious start to a TedTalk I’ve ever known. A shiny guy, wandering back and forth, telling the audience that soon they would be experiencing the top notes of a fragrance, Beyond Paradise, which had been split up by the perfumer who created it for Esteé Lauder into “successive bits”. Watching [...]

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Very stupid spam

October 17, 2008

I’m minded to collect, for a week, say, some of the comments that spammers leave on my web site in the faint hope that I’m feeble-minded enough not to spam them. The mystery abides …

Comment: Not bad at all, but this topic is rather little of interest. Please do not disappoint your readership.
Comment: I have [...]

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