Geeky

Web of Stories: YouTube for the rest of us?

September 20, 2010

People tell me that they can lose hours on YouTube. I don’t get it. Sure, there are millions of good things there. But they are buried among squillions of not such good things. I seldom find anything of stunning interest just by goofing around. So I was pleased, astonished, surprised and delighted to find myself [...]

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Weird hack, or what?

September 16, 2010

Seth Roberts, he of the Shangri La diet, has a blog. I see it in my RSS reader. I was amazed to see a post that seemed to have been, er, penetrated, thusly: So I went to the blog post itself. And lo! all those nasties were invisible. So I checked the source, and they’re [...]

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Find your ice cream

August 12, 2010

I forgot to mention in the account of my ice cream oddysey that as a public service I had created a Google Map of all the places on the original list. I hope it helps someone find what they are looking for. View Gelaterie in a larger map

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When someone gets it, they get it

August 2, 2010

[T]o put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds. That’s Clay Shirky, explaining to Decca Aikenhead in The Guardian why the print edition of The Guardian (and presumably just about everything else) will be as anachronistic as a telegram in 15 years and gone for good in 50. [...]

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What my phone needs now

August 2, 2010

Someone, please invent an app that I can send an SMS to, which will redirect incoming calls to a number I specify. Yes, I left my phone at home.

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Uh oh

May 18, 2010

iPad with Neo as keyboard. Maybe a folding Matias would work too? It will? Uh oh.

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Keyboard love

April 20, 2010

Clickety clackety click. Yes indeedy, I’m firing on all cylinders here, and the room resounds to the rat-a-tat of my spiffy new keyboard. It’s a Das Keyboard Model S Professional UK and I love it to bits. As a typewriter, it’s the best. Not just the noise but the spacing, pitch and feel of the [...]

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Getting to simple

April 12, 2010

Alan Siegel swam into my consciousness with a Tedtalk on simplicity. I was intrigued enough to seek out his company blog, one of the least corporate blogs I’ve ever seen, which makes sense. There, today, I read a great post about unpacking text to get rid of complexity. Here’s the sequence: “We bring innovative ideas [...]

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It’s so big! And so cheap!

April 7, 2010

I’m still reeling from a purchase last night: a 1Tb hard drive for 109 euros. First, who would ever have thought that I would need a 1Tb hard drive? And secondly, who would ever have thought that I could get one for chump change?

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 long [...]

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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, [...]

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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 except [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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