You can't do this in windows...

I'm now using the latest version of the mac operating system, 10.3.4.

The previous version was already brilliant, but this is a little bit faster (yep, new OS doesn't require new computer!) and what's more it caters directly for my habit of having dozens of windows open at once. This is done through the expose function keys, all very minority report ish.



For those of you who are interested, you can see a little animation here. It's really very good.

Cat herding...

A very nice man I met at a conference last week sent me a CD with some funny ads on it. The best one, particularly chucklesome for cat owners, can be viewed here.

Off on holiday tomorrow, so don't expect much more for a week or so.

How to turn your iPod into a Universal Infrared Remote Control

Sorry to the geek haters, but I'm going to carry on logging anything cool I find about ipods. I have to do this - I'm an ipod evangelist: I think those who don't have one should buy one, and those who may recently have bought one should feel even better about it than they already do. This is absolutely brilliant.

Preparing for emergencies, domains and the law...

Our friendly Government have posted some information about how to prepare for emergencies. It's a .gov.uk web site.

They didn't think about also registering .co.uk, hence this site. Doh...

Here's a forum talking about the legality of it all.

Edinburgh news, circa 1828...

'Sale of a Wife'

Hulk for Bond...?

The rumours are that Pierce has finally had enough of being a brilliant Bond in a load of fairly ropey movies, and is throwing in the towel. Had MGM risked it with a lo-fi movie (a faithful Casino Royale) rather than a megabucks meglomaniac made-by-numbers film (which might still be called Casino Royale now they have the rights) he might have stuck it out for one more, but was never going to happen.

Chancer Clive Owen (soon to be seen in Jerry Bruckheimer's King Arthur with stick girl Keira) has been long mooted as the replacement, but sources are now saying Eric Bana, who was the Hulk and was in Troy. He's got dark hair, which is probably all that is needed now.

Staithes...

(I wonder which idiot suggested parking the boats on dry land...)

The Hollingworth Family Holiday looms. After last year's rather wonderful trip to Cornwall, this year we're off to Staithes in North Yorkshire. It looks fab. Reminds me a little of Portmeirion in North Wales where the prisoner was filmed.

Staithes is "a North Yorkshire fishing village with a special character and atmosphere all of its own".

I think this is where we are staying. Scroll down on this page to read about fishing, smuggling, and things to do...

Look, there's an old viaduct!

Right, back to installing mac os 10.3.4 - OOPS GEEK ALERT!!

Star Wars Episode III...

Is going to be called Revenge of the Sith, according to the official source. I can hear trailer voice man saying it now... I can also anticipate the disappointment I'll feel after it comes out, as with the last two.

I wonder if this will be classed as geeky again by the ever watchful Ms. Hxxxxxxxxxxth?

geeks, cats, golf...

Some criticism from a nameless redhead: the weblog is getting too geeky. Apparently I'm talking about ipods, apples and technology too much. I'll try to be more interesting, and I certainly won't talk about Tim's rather marvellous xbox setup.

Cats then... had reunions with all three of the ex-mogs this weekend. Tibbles, age 16, is not the cat she once was. Chris suspects stroke, vet suspects ear infection. Either way, she was struggling to remain upright, which was really quite heartbreaking to see. She now has her son Jimmy back from the Irena madhouse. He didn't really enjoy the trip from Scunthorpe to Sheffiled, and was unable to remain continent for more than 5 minutes. I think he'll be very happy in his new home though, he seemed to settle in fairly quickly - the familiar smells of Chris, Tibbles and me helped. And Maggie is as fat a lump as ever.

Golf! Tim and I went to the driving range and 9 hole pitch and putt. He was a very good teacher, and my 25% success rate of hitting the ball straight was quite satisfying - especially the one which landed on the green. Hopefully I can find plenty of playing in Edinburgh, it is golfing country after all.

OK OK one more thing...

Doom 3, soon to be released for PC, is also being released on a superior computing plaform...

rubbish at updating...

Quick apology, as I realise I'm getting as bad as Tim updating the blog. I'm afraid it's simply that I either am too busy, and when I'm not busy I can't face looking at a computer screen any more.

I'm currently finishing 2 freelance projects while trying to settle in at my new job. Hopefully after the North Yorkshire Hollingworth Holiday week after next things will settle down as I'm only doing the one job, and will therefore not be bogging off to Bradford, Nuneaton, Coventry or other such salubrious locations.

- Aside - Coventry is officially a dump!

Tonight I'm going to Sheffield to stop with Tim for the weekend, which will be very nice indeed. He's going to take me for a spin (in his new car) to Scunthorpe, where we're picking up Jimmy for his 3rd re-homing in 4 months. He's going home to Chris and Tibbles which I hope all parties will enjoy.

OK. Nothing else to say. Bye!

Snooker loopy indeed...

Crazy boys - some snooker players settled old score ("you're short and bald") by having a boxing match . Which descended into a good old fashioned scrap.

How to get a free ipod...

Freshman students at Duke University will all be given an ipod to use for classroom schedules. Now, bearing in mind that the calendar on the ipod isn't really that useful as you can only enter information on a computer, it would have made much more sense for them to all be given a cheap palm or something like that. But no, no, no! Apparently "Duke students, being brainy and all, will use the iPods mostly for academics.". Yeah right. Looks to me like some IT geek has come up with a very neat kickback scam. Well done that man.

At least it's better than this method for getting a cheap ipods (Ask Jack in the Guardian advises to avoid this one, chums). Everyone wants one, so just buy one! They are so cheap now - the new ipod introduced on Monday are only �220 for 20gb!

A very rare error by Nick...

In my pro Apple ipod rant last week, I incorrectly said that AAC was Apple's own format, in the same way that ATRAC is sony's and WMA is Microsoft's. This fairly common error was pointed out by best Scandinavian friend and fellow mac lover, Stig.

Instead of standing for Apple Audio Codec, it stands for Advanced Audio Codec, part of the MPEG4 protocol (in the same way that MP3 is confusingly part of MPEG2). It was developed by Dolby and derived from their AC3 codec which is used in Dolby Digital. Stig says:

"It is a sad and common misunderstanding that Apple just like Microsoft is limiting customers to their "own format".  That is not the case at all.  They are in fact just moving on to a better format than mp3 that is just as openl available to everyone as mp3 is.  It's just that their competition istrying to monopolize using WMA or Atrac….both inferior formats according to the majority of listening test done."

Suffice to say, Stig and I have conversations which are very interesting to us, but would bore most other people to tears!

Weekend fun...

Phil and Jane were up this weekend, resulting in further Edinburgh exploration and tourism. Really good to see them.

Friday: local beers at the Basement and Baroni.

Saturday: good long explore down George St, Princes St, tea at the Cornerstone, walked up the hill to the castle, wandered around the Royal Mile, had a sandwich by the museum then went home for a little kip. In the evening we went on the excellent City of the Dead walking tour, where we were taken to a haunted graveyard and scared witless by tales of the MacKenzie Poltergeist.

Sunday - eggs benedict at the olive branch, grand prix (one again, zero british success), then sniff sniff they were gone. We ended the weekend with a bottle of wine and Stand By Me, one of the greatest cheesey feelgood movies of all time.

This was my last weekend without a full time job - I start my new position of multimedia account manager on Wednesday, part time for the rest of the month, then full time from August when we get back from the Hollingworth week away.

GNER sets up wi-fi...

As reported by Chris, GNER have put wi-fi internet access on all their trains.

Good news. They need to sort out a few details though, as I found out coming back from Birmingham on GNER last week. The first pain was that there were no power sockets on the train, so my laptop ran out of juice after a few hours. A minor detail, my fault really.

So I was reading the news on my PDA which I'd downloaded in the morning, and it told me a wi-fi access point was available and asked for a password. Hurrah! The conductor came past...

me: how does the wireless internet access work on this train?
him: (dour yorkshire accent) eh?
me: You've got internet access on this train... can I pay for a password or something?
him: Have we? No-one bloody told me...
me: oh. is there anyone you can ask?
him: no.
me: ok.

I'm sure it will be sorted out soon. In the meantime I'll stick with Virgin so at least while we're waiting for an hour for the broken down train in front of us to be moved, my laptop doesn't run out of batteries before I can start watching the new episode of Nip/Tuck.

Movies in 30 seconds, re-enacted by bunnies...

genuis this way lies.

From the Scunthorpe Telegraph...

"Dog fouling continues to anger Isle of Axholm town and parish councillors - and they aim to stamp down hard on it."

Saddam...

v funny

Test Drive a Macintosh...

Apple System 7.0 emulator. Brilliant.

Cat

One of the winning entries in h2g2's hitchhiker photo competition.



I often got this view of Jimmy when I woke up in the morning, with the added bonus of kitty drool.

10-DVD matrix box set...

If I go to hell, satan will make me watch this for eternity.

Scottish Vienna Horns

I am joining the Scottish Vienna Horns tonight, a group founded 11 years ago by my first horn teacher. Bizarrely, I'm going to be playing the Vienna horn I sold one of the other members when I was a student...

No daleks in the new doctor who...

Read all about it in stunning sun-speak here. I have to admit they could look pretty ridiculous in a brand new semi high budget TV show, but on the other hand, crappy low budget rubber villains were what made the original show so good. Well, good at the time, utterly unwatchable now...

Sony's rival to ipod...

Sony plans Walkman to rival iPod. OK, it looks OK, is light and has great battery life, but I still say pah!

Here are some reasons why you should still buy an ipod:

1. It ONLY supports ATRAC, unlike the ipod which supports wav, aif, MP3s as well as Apple's own AAC format. You would have to convert your entire MP3 collection. Furthermore, in a recent listening test, ATRAC came last.

2. It is only going to be PC compatible, unlike ipod and itunes which is cross-platform.

3. Sony say that it will hold 13,000 songs as opposed to ipod's 5,000. Read closely though chums: Apple base their figures on 128 kbps files, while sony base theirs on "songs recorded at 48 kilobits per second" - which I promise will sound rubbish.

4. It costs the same as an ipod. So why on earth not buy an ipod? It is a design and functional masterpiece.

And finally on the subject: sony are making a system which works with computer audio files, like their net MD and memory stick walkmen. All well and good. But hold on - many sony music CDs won't play on a PC, so you probably can't listen to them on your sony walkman anyway. Doh!

At least sony are not as desperate as dell...

We must have been mad...

Chris came to visit for the weekend and we had a brilliant time with him. In a largely malt-flavoured weekend, we visited both venues of the malt whisky society (the vaults at Leith are fantastic), the whisky heritage museum and Royal Mile Whiskies. We also saw Ant's friend James play a fantastic solo acoustic gig and got a little tipsy in various pubs.

Today was the mad bit. Charlie and Mel took us to the skyride, an aerial assault course suspended 25 metres above the ground in a massive climbing centre. Hanging onto a swinging ropeladder that high up was terrifying, the most scared I've ever been. We were tied on and could have let go safely at any time (necessary at some points), but even so... we all made it round, some more gracefuly than others.

Great to see you Chris! Looking forward to seeing Phil and Jane next weekend!

Those clever people at Apple... their boss Steve Jobs previewed their latest OS last week, which looks really cool. He also mentioned these guys, who used their macs to videoconference from a plane.

Grace graduates from Cambridge - congratulations!!

 

Grace and chums.