Category: Uncategorized

Incidentally – and apropos of diddly-squat – the other week I found out what happens when Mac OS X runs out of hard disk space. Not, I hasten to add, on my machine, but on a colleague’s five year-old iBook running 10.3, on a 10Gb drive, bless.

The short answer is: not a lot. It refuses to save anything, obviously, and everything goes veeeery verrrry slooooooowwwwwwlyyyy, but it basically keeps running. Which surprised the hell out of me.

The owner was marginally less surprised, but then, she had been clicking ‘OK’ every morning on polite little dialogue boxes telling her that her startup disk was terribly terribly close to being full. For six months. In the end, we managed to reclaim 3Gb simply by shifting all her music off, backing up her Entourage mail database, then letting the poor iBook crunch away for three hours repairing and compacting said mail database, and finally putting all the music back on.

Yes, 30% of her drive was taken up by fragmentation in Entourage’s monolithic database. Nice as it is, I remember why I stopped using Em@iler all those years ago…

About 1/460th, apparently.

Lovely use here of a digital stills camera, a time-lapse controller, and a very slow-panning automated tripod head: ‘Lapses in Light‘ by Ollie Larkin.

£7,108.50? For an Aston Martin Vanguishtageguard? Driven by a guy who keeps writing them off and getting them machine-gunned, and thus has a positively negative no-claims bonus?

What, he’s getting a huge discount for keeping it garaged every night? He’s assumed to be parking it in the safest areas of town? They’re considering Q’s electrified handles as equivalent to a Thatcham Category LXXVII alarm? Or is ‘secret agent’ a perversely low insurance risk occupation, compared to, say, ‘television producer’?

I can see only two ways this makes sense:

1. Virgin insurance wanted a bit of free press, on reflection realised that a huge premium might not be the best story, and hence spun the figure down until it sounded vaguely plausible to them.
2. I’m getting stiffed for insurance on my 10,000-mile/year Smart parked in G41.

Both thoughts are likely correct.

Woo! This is a good one: ‘syzygy‘.

The last time I was in Glasgow, my combi boiler declined my polite requests to fire up and vent forth hot water, radiators for the supply of, leaving me in a situation of considerable chill. Now, in Dublin, my landlord/housemate and I find ourselves incapable of securing a supply of small wooden pellets.

Said pellets are something of a technological marvel, being formed from compressed waste sawdust, bagged, and (hypothetically) delivered to the likes of us. Thenceforth, they are poured liberally into a hopper which in turn feeds – via a terribly exciting Archimidean-screw arrangement – a surprisingly efficient burner/boiler system. Too liberally, it transpires, for we’ve run out of bags of pellets. Since the technology is (a.) relatively new, and (b.) Austrian, we’ve found ourselves unable to source additional supplies. For a week.

Upshot: it’s fecking cold in the house. We’re not quite at ambient temperature, but thanks to all the not-quite-fixed-yet draughts it’s surprisingly close. On Monday I came home and immediately stuck my hand in the fridge, just to see whether there was any point leaving it switched on. It was hard to tell.

The existential joy of the pellet boiler system is that, since the pellets are formed from waste, burning them is considered carbon-neutral. Hurrah. However, since we can’t track down any pellets to burn, we’re left to celebrate to the sound of one hand clapping.

Dang.

I’m having considerable success filtering off image-based spam, but I’m still seeing way more spam escape Mail’s filter than I did three or four months ago. Which is to say, of the couple of hundred junk messages I see every day, about fifty are now getting through, when it was down to about three or four. This article gives some background on what’s going on, and where this stuff originates. (via, via²)

The winners are up. Congrats to Nigel Pickard for the special achievement award (not listed on BAFTA’s pages, but mentioned by the BBC). He’s one of the Good Guys in all this, and on the exec committee of the Save Kids’ TV campaign.

Audio monitoring via CCTV cameras: when Blunkett thinks a surveillance measure has gone too far… etc etc. I’m sure you can fill in the rest.

Interesting, though, that his criticism appears to be centred around expectations of privacy. That is: when you’re walking down a street, you expect (and, he implies, have previously had) a measure of privacy in terms of what you say. I’m not sure he’s right on this – not because one doesn’t have an expectation of privacy in such circumstances, but because such an impression is already illusionary. Blanket surveillance is, however, a substantial shift.

To repeat my basic argument here: no, I’ve nothing to hide. But I reserve the right to absolutely have something I want to hide, at some unspecified date in the future. It is, I contend, the rôle of the people to watch their government, and not the other way around. ‘If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear’ is a manifestly unsound argument.

I’m staying in a tricked-out eco-house in Dublin (watch this space – it’s recently been nominated for all sorts of awards). While it has hemp insulation, bamboo stairs, LED lighting, and a zero-carbon-footprint wood-pellet burner (of which also more anon), the landlord/architect/housemate only finished the place a few weeks before I rocked up. It’s thus lacking some more-or-less common amenities, such as a television. Ironic, given that there was a crew here last week and the resulting show about the building goes out this Tuesday.

Otherwise, the lack of TV is less of a bind than one might expect. In part because Studio 60 isn’t yet being shown in Europe, and in part because my brother-in-law thoughtfully left behind DVDs of the first series of Deadwood when he was last in Glasgow.

Made in 2004, Deadwood is an uncompromising Western, set in a gold-rush town in the late nineteenth century. It’s entirely, wonderfully, gloriously, brilliantly well carried-off; supremely confident, nicely written, beautifully shot, magnificently paced (which I cannot say of every glossy-and-otherwise-excellent US drama – Galactica, I’m looking at you) and with career-defining performances. Not least from Ian McShane, for whom Lovejoy is now some piffling little thing he did back in his early years; McShane is Al Swearengen. I can’t wait to see the second series.

What I hadn’t appreciated until part-way through the series is that not only did Deadwood genuinely exist, but most of the characters were inspired by historic figures too. Amazing times.