Category Archives: Technology

Leffe On Tap

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Graham (Kathy’s second cousin) popped over to Bath last night. We had ace food at The Globe, then got a taxi into town. We thought we might go to the recently-opened JD Wetherspoon’s in Kingsmead, but we glanced in the window and thought that it looked a little…soulless.

(Side note for trivia fans: it seems that a new record was set last Sunday on the pub’s opening in that it only took two hours for a fight/riot/disturbance to occur and the Police to be called out. I love Bath! Lovely Bath! Alcohol-fuelled violence Bath! The Bath they would rather not talk about! Whoever ‘They’ are!)

So it was with impeccable irony that we went to All Bar One instead. It was nice, though, as they had the wonderful Belgian Trappist Monk beer Leffe Blond on tap. I’ve never seen it on tap outside Belgium – always in bottles – so this was a pleasant surprise. In respect of its 6.6% alcohol content and in deference to European bistro culture, I had a half.

So, Graham, if you’re reading this: cheers! Top night, good to see you, hope the anti-cat-allergy tablets don’t cause any nasty side-effects. Some links from our various conversations:

Bristol to get public WiFi

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Woo-hoo! Looks like Bristol is going to be forging ahead with public WiFi:

In a ground breaking collaboration of public and private sector services, Bristol City Council and Cityspace today announce an agreement to build the UK’s largest urban digital network offering outdoor wireless broadband access to Bristol’s residents, visitors and city workers.

– http://www.cityspace.com/press/level2/releases/040722-PR-Bristol.asp

It’s a shame that it won’t quite reach down to where I work, but I imagine that it might be expanded in the future.

Archos Jukebox: 21st Century Life-Support

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A week last Sunday I turned 29 (less than a year to go ‘til the Big Three-Oh! Poop!). My present from my brother, sister-in-law and nephew was an Archos Jukebox Recorder 20, an MP3 player with, in reality, 18.6 GB of hard disk space. Mind you, this is still larger than the hard disks of our two current computers combined, going to prove that the rise of home computers with disk capacities approaching a quarter of a Terabyte has nothing to do with people writing longer Word documents ;) As an aside – has the RIAA considered the positive impact of P2P on the hard disk and computer industry? I thought not!

When I was in the sixth-form at school, I bought the early-nineties equivalent of the iPod: a slimline, powder-blue Aiwa personal stereo. Yes, I know it sounds a bit QEFTSG, but they were cooler than Sony (at the time) and had better build quality. Oh, and they were barely bigger than a cassette case. And they cost "only" £60: a lot of money for a 16-year-old, but still cheaper than an iPod.

I would wear my Aiwa on the school bus, and still be listening as I walked into the form room at the start of the school day. I would be greeted with comments like "Tim’s got his life-support on again, then!" I would guess that I was being talked about, and remove my headphones just in time to catch the comments.

I sold the Aiwa less than a year later for £50 – not a bad residual, really, making it even more iPod-like.

Anyway – I digress. I’ve ripped several CDs (albeit only the tip of the music collection’s iceberg) to 160Kbps MP3, and transferred over some other MP3s and OGGs from my work machine – and I’ve still only used 2.3GB.

Being a Mac user, I’m finding the Archos to be a little limiting in terms of synchronising with iTunes, which only supports the iPod. The Jukebox mounts just fine as an external hard disk, though, and it’s not as if I have the room to store 20GB 18.6GB of music on either of the main computers; if I did, then synchronising would be a better option. I will one day buy that 120GB hard disk and put it in my 4-year-old Mac. (PC users: Hah! Try doing that in an old x86 box. I know, you probably will be able to, but my own experience of upgrading outdated PC hardware is frustrating, to say the least. Say ‘Hello’ to BIOS incompatibilities!)

Sound quality is good, but is obviously dependant on the bitrate with which you encode your music. As I said, I’m doing all new stuff at 160 Kbps, which for me is a good compromise between file size and quality. I have some older 192 Kbps files, as well as 128s downloaded off the web (Mostly Epitonic.com – ‘tis trés legal). The fact that Nick supplied a pair of Sennheiser in-ear headphones helps, as they are some of the best earbuds available, and they’re reasonably priced, too.

The Epitonic+Not-An-iPod issue brings me to my final point: I don’t doubt that I could fill the Jukebox many times over, even by just ripping our CD collection and not going anywhere near my vinyl and old tapes. So far, though, I have (with one exception – my Coldcut tunes) just transferred entire albums onto the AJBR, because playlist managment is (I’ve found so far) not as good as iTunes and (apparently) the iPod. Thus a folder structure of artist/album works best for me (until I get to grips with the AJBR’s m3u-creation functionality) and artists which only have a single track, many of which I have downloaded from Epitonic, will become frustrating to listen to.

Mac OS X – Woo!

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I’m in the process of installing Panther (OS X 10.3) on the iMac DV+ sat next to my desk, which is used for cross-platform testing. It used to run OS 9.1, and wasn’t actually used that much. Due to its Unix underpinnings, OS X should make it a more useful machine, as my place of work is a pretty-much exclusively Linux shop. I have chosen to install X11, so I’ll be able to open gvim (my editor of choice) from a server, and have it display on the iMac.

All of which makes me even more keen to get hold of a Mac of my own. But, wait! Kathy’s uncle Robert (yeah – “Bob’s your uncle” – she knows) has offered us his iMac 350 MHz slot-loader when he gets his new Anglepoise iMac, the only proviso being that I help him set his new machine up. “Fair enough,” said I.

Back to the install. Note to self: read the frellin’ manual. Actually, read the whole frellin’ manual. I noted the piece about original iMacs (“boot partition must be no larger than 8GB”) but not the bit about running the firmware update before trashing OS 9.1. I had to reinstall OS 9, apply the updater, then install OS X. And it turns out that this iMac doesn’t even need to have its boot partition no larger than 8GB. Harrumph.

Still, the Aqua interface is gorgeously lickable…

Spell Chequer

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Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Microsoft Never Invented A Thing

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Looky see – it’s the Microsoft Hall of "Innovation". The premise is that, basically, every product M$ have ever released has been bought, copied or stolen, never invented solely by themselves. And they have the audacity to call the average home user a pirate, by the erosion of fair-use rights of copyrighted material through technologies like Palladium. What kind of world is it we’re living in?

If Microsoft made cars

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At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating “If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

  1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
  2. Every time they painted new lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
  3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
  4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
  5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought “CarNT,” but then you would have to buy more seats.
  6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive—but it would only run on five percent of the roads.
  7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “general protection fault” warning light.
  8. The airbag system would ask, “Are you sure?” before deploying.
  9. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the antenna.
  10. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally Road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
  11. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
  12. You’d have to press the “start” button to turn the system off!