Category: Uncategorized

Did I already link to this? It’s a video of radio-control aerobatics, indoors. The aircraft featured clearly has a thrust:weight >1 and can handle flicks, but what really impresses is the pilot skill. Stunningly sharp hesitations, precise spins, and… what the heck do you call a rudder loop? Is that even possible?

Apologies for all the linkbloggery. Normal service will be resumed etc etc.

That Adam Scott is eating only dry monkey food for a week is all over the net. And with good reason – as experiments go, it’s gross, bizarre, and extremely funny. What’s surprising is the range of places which have picked up the story. Take, for example, the initial response of the American Council on Science and Health. Their verdict: they can’t recommend it, but they’re interested to see what happens. And, by implication, rather amused.

The lawyers’ verdict, meanwhile, is more direct: ‘Monkey Chow’ is made by Purina Mills, and the trademark is owned by Societe des Produits Nestle S.A.

[sigh]

Meanwhile – this is exactly the sort of thing we should have done on the Christmas Lectures, isn’t it? Dang.

There’s something utterly cartoon-like and huggable about birds with oversize blue feet.

Somehow I missed Amnesty’s Irrepressible campaign. No more: I signed, and I’ll be adding the sidebar shortly.

So tell me, faithful citizens of the net – Microsoft’s Office 12 beta, and its new interface: does it make it any easier/more obvious to apply consistent paragraph styles, or will the average user continue to do everything with the bold, italics, underline and bigger/smaller buttons? As a trivial example, is the Modify Style command set still modal?

I’m guessing that it’s been so long now, we’re kinda stuck with nobody knowing how to use a word processor properly. Which annoys me intensely. Much to my disgust, all the new-fangled AJAXy online word processors I’ve seen borrow the buttons-for-character-styles approach, to the exclusion of paragraph styles entirely.

This is, I believe, a débâcle. We’re twenty years into the WYSIWYG world, and still an overwhelming majority of users don’t know how to do basic formatting. This drives me up the wall.

Looking for a ‘personalized Artisanal Cheese Tasting Adventure’ in our own home or workplace? Look no further than The Cheese Impresario, the Cheese Columnist for the Beverly Hills Times, as featured in Oscars gift baskets. Don’t miss the page of Cheese Poems, now including haiku.

…but capable of Mach 2. Beautiful, beautiful Draken going, with flexible finance options too.

Flash animation. Yeah, yeah, we’ve seen too much already. Trust me, this is funny.

I’ve previously blogged to the effect that the government could save an estimated £3.5bn by hanging the national ID card off the back of Blockbuster’s membership scheme. The proof of ID and residency required for the latter is rather more onerous than the Government could get away with themselves anyway.

So that’s the financial problem solved: what about the hearts & minds?

I just mentioned to a colleague that whenever email arrives from her, my email system makes a specific, personal chime. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ she mused, ‘if that happened whenever you walked into a room?’

She might be on to something. We already have personalised ringtones on mobile phones, business cards, and email signatures – it’s not a large step to having a personal announcement chime. It could be the next evolution of the calling card, and offering it on the government’s ID cards could be a big win.

Suppose they played a chime every time they wafted past an RFID scanner – how cool would that be? You could enter your favourite nightclub to the James Bond theme, play ‘our song’ as you walked over the threshold of your beloved’s apartment, and be all Match of the Day as you joined mates in the pub for the footie.

I think people would be all over this, and we’d finally have a practical reason not just for registering for an ID card, but for carrying it with us – which is obviously the government’s intention, whatever they say.

Problem solved. Again. I should hire myself out as a policy wonk.

Yikes! How2 stalwart Andy writes to alert me to something I really didn’t know – it’s possible to blow up FireWire ports with a Sony Z1 camera. He writes:

I have just killed my four (apple) computers and my three cameras in ten minutes by pulling out the firewire cable when camera and computer were both on. I thought that was the point of firewire- that it was hot pluggable.

Yow. There’s a discussion thread here, including Andy’s full story. And there’s more at the Apple discussion board.

Like Andy, I thought FireWire was hot-pluggable by design. What really confuses me here is that the port on the Z1 is Sony’s i.Link 4-pin miniature socket, rather than a full 6-pin FireWire design. The extra two pins are what carry power, so on the face of it, I can’t see where the juice is coming from to blow the controller board. I have had some slightly alarming discharges from standard 6-pin sockets on my drive chain, but this is clearly something else again.

Yikes.