Sounds impossible, but at Airkix they have a vertical wind-tunnel, and offer an hour of indoor skydiving training which includes 2 “flights” for £40, or once you’ve got some experience you can skydive for £10 per minute. Sounds like it would be fun to try! (You generally have to weigh less than 114 Kg or you won’t get off the ground, however).
Richard Branson started thinking about saving fuel for Virgin Atlantic by having their jets towed to the take-off point at Heathrow and Gatwick without using their own engines.
Now, from April onwards, Quantas and Air New Zealand are going to try gliding Boeing 747 jumbo jets into Auckland airport to save fuel on landing.
The Economist has published an interesting – and if you live in Belgium or Germany, depressing – table showing what percentage of an employer’s labour costs doesn’t arrive in employee’s pay packets. In Belgium and Germany, more than 50% lands in the government’s pocket or pays for compulsary insurance.
What did surprise me, is that Hungary is in position three, I thought the “New European Countries” that used to be behind the iron curtain were the countries which had embraced “lean taxation” – not in this case, it seems.
A couple of weeks ago Ruth decided to buy a scanner with a sheet feeder. In fact, the cheapest way to get a decent scanner like that appears to be buying a multi-function printer/scanner. So she bought a Brother MFC 820CW.
It is Mac compatible and worked very nicely via WLAN from both the G5 iMac and the Intel Mac mini. Until we upgraded to OS X 10.4.9. After that, the scanner stopped working from the Intel Mac, but worked fine from the iMac. We (that is, Ruth’s secretary, me) wrote to the Brother support center and got the reply you see above. For the non-German speakers, here’s rough and ready translation of the relevant – highlighted – bit:
For the CONTROLCENTER software we don’t have an update because the software comes from the software company NUANCE.com. Furthermore, installations on Intel Macs are by nature dubious and somewhat debatable. Finally, it is also advisable to to use the latest drivers with Mac OS X 10.4.9.No word of where one might get the latest drivers, however. The 37,8 KB attachment to the mail was an uninstaller program for OS X 10.3 – no word in the mail about what that was supposed to be for!). Brother are supposed to offer good support. They did get back to us within 2-3 days, but a more arrogant and less helpful answer is hard to imagine. Apparently the good support only applies to Windows systems and not to OS X machines, despite claiming on the packaging “Mac OX 10.2.4 or greater” is supported and, as far as Mac processors are concerned, “All base models meet minimum requirements”.
However, having received the unhelpful reply above, I tried reinstalling the drivers from the CD that came with the printer/scanner (without running the mysterious uninstaller), and now everything is working fine again on the Intel Mac. No thanks to Brother. Apart from the unhelpful support, we are very pleased with the scanner (we haven’t used the printer yet). It produces fast, sharp scans; has great software to manage it via WLAN, LAN and USB connections and is easy to use and set up – recommended!
You may not have a choice about which word processor you use at work, even if you do at home. But over at lifehacker.com, you can find out how to set up Word so that it annoys you less, by switching off the “assistents” and features that irritate you, and which you didn’t know how to control, or even that you can control them.
The Pentagon has announced that an alleged senior al-Qaida member who has been held in Guantanamo has “confessed” to planning the September 11 attacks on the USA:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged number three in al-Qaida, confessed to planning the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001, in front of the secret military tribunals being held for the top detainees in Guantánamo, the Pentagon said last night.
However:
He is understood to have gone through torture, including “waterboarding” when the suspect being interrogated is strapped to a board and placed underwater. According to the New York Times, the use of harsh techniques was approved in his case by the justice department and the CIA.
So that makes the confession as likely to be true as the White House’s statements on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that were made before the invasion in 2003, doesn’t it?
Spotted – this judgement on Toyota stocks in my bank’s online portal today:
Translated:
Our vote – Unattractive
Toyota continues to do almost everything right
If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.
Adobe is planning to release a simpler version of Photoshop, which will be a web-based graphics editor.
If you need a graphic editor today – for example to edit photos in an internet cafe on holiday, then Picnik (still in beta testing at the moment; requires Flash 9.0) offers a similar editor:
You can crop, correct colours, sharpen images, correct the exposure or tilted horizons and resize the image before saving it in several different formats (including JPG, GIF, TIFF and PDF), which gives you the main functions you might need. It integrates with Flickr, which is handy if you already use Flickr for your photo album. The picture above was prepared completely in Picnik, by the way.
Paul Baker has produced an aLPHaBeT 26 font which can be used if you agree with Bradbury Thompson’s idea that children are hindered in learning to read because they have to learn different symbols for capital and lower-case letters.
On the other hand, a recent study in the UK points to support at home being the main factor in how well children do at school. So perhaps it might be better to focus on getting parents to spend more time with their kids and show more interest in their school work, rather than introducing them to an artificial alphabet.