Ruth and I like listening to Ben and Marina’s Spanish podcasts in Notes from Spain, so I decided to buy the book he published last year about how he came to live in Spain. It seems to have become a collecter’s item – we looked on Amazon.co.uk: It’s listed on the German site at . . . → Read More: Invest in “Errant in Iberia”
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(Spotted on Lenguas Entrelazadas, Carlos Ferrero Martín’s dual-language blog from Salamanca) The BBC plans to launch an on-demand TV service which uses software that will only be available to Windows users. If you’re a British resident or a British citizen, you might consider adding your name to the online petition to Tony Blair. I noticed a link to this article in Handelsblatt (I think, today I can’t find it again) the day before yesterday. The article is very detailed with lots of photos and I’m sure that if you are good with a very small screwdriver, you can indeed save the 260 Euro that you pay . . . → Read More: How to repair your Canon Ixus Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America’s version of the colony is the military base; and by following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever more all-encompassing imperial “footprint” and the militarism that grows with it… …Interestingly enough, the . . . → Read More: The American Empire I do not like buying music with DRM (digital rights management, also known as copy protection). It is a real pain removing it from, for example, anything I buy from iTunes. There used to be a utility called JHymn, but it broke when Apple brought out iTunes version 6. Since then, on the Mac, there hasn’t been any way to remove DRM from iTunes songs without manually burning a CD and re-importing the tracks. Until recently… Continue reading Removing DRM from iTunes songs on the Mac Op Art opened in the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main yesterday. It contains optical illusions from the 1950′s and 1960′s by artists such as Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, François Morellet, Julio Le Parc, and Gianni Colombo. We’re definitely planning to visit it in the next couple of weeks. It’s on until 20th . . . → Read More: Op Art The White House / Pentagon spin machine has shifted up a gear with their attempts to convince us that Iran is really, really evil. How long until they or Israel attacks them? The Guardian thinks we probably have about a year. Our address book has been on our home computers since since the early-1990′s. First in Lotus Organiser, for a long time in an MS Access database, then in Act! and finally in Palm’s Desktop application, which we switched to when we changed to using Macs a few years ago. Looking back, I think the software I was most satisfied with was Act!, which is very flexible and powerful. It should be, as it’s aimed at business users, rather than home users. However, when we switched to the Macs, Act! only ran under Windows, and the Windows emulation software for Power PC Macs was slow, which is why we migrated the address book to the Palm Desktop. We started using Palm PDAs in mid-1990s and since then, have always had the challenge of keeping contact data on a number of Palms and two or three computers in sync with each other. It’s not easy as the sync conduits which Palm supplies doesn’t handle multiple PDAs being synced with one PC well – they get confused and you can easily end up having several copies of the same contact in your database. It’s not a problem if you spot it quickly – you can check the date when each version was modified and manually delete the older copy, but it used to generate a lot of work until we got Palms which don’t forget their contents when the battery is empty, as when that happened, the conduit would usually allocate different internal keys when the contents of the database were recovered to the Palm after re-charging it and then sync them as new records to the other PDAs. I have manually removed 500-odd duplicate contacts more times than I care to remember because of that. Of course, life gets even more complicated when you also want to keep the Palm Desktop synced across multiple Macs. We also print address labels for addresses in various international formats (the UK address format is by the worst to cater for as the British have almost completely unstructured multi-line addresses) and do a Christmas letter in OpenOffice (OOo), which gets printed out using the mass-mailing function in OOo. Both the labels and the mass-mailing documents rely heavily on OOo macros to format the addresses and other personal data correctly before it’s printed. Where is all of this leading, you may be asking yourself? Continue reading SyncTogether It’s not surprising that the US army let looters clear out museums and hospitals after the fall of Baghdad – just look at these quotes from those responsible for losing track of up to $20bn in $100 bills that was shipped to Iraq to finance the reconstruction of the country (my emphasis in the . . . → Read More: Nice not to worry about what’s not your’s |
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