Keys Corner

I’ve always had problems putting my Mac to sleep. Sometimes, especially if I have been playing iTunes, it wakes up again immediately. This can happen 2-3 times before it accepts it should go to sleep. I just spotted some advice on MacFixIt for people having this problem with the new aluminium keyboards – connect the keyboard to a USB hub, rather than directly to the Mac.

It works for the older white keyboard in my case – the Mac mini now goes to sleep immediately, every time more often.

Update (2007-09-12): After I posted this, the situation did improve, but I’ve since had occasional problems getting the mini to go to sleep. An improvement, but the problem is still present.

This is very neat stuff – Shai Avidan and Dr Ariel Shamir have developed a method to shrink or stretch an image so that it fits in the space available. Particularly interesting is shrinking the image, which involves selectively removing parts of the image completely.

If you are despairing of ever eating at El Bulli (the waiting list for this year would take them 125 years to work through), there is hope for you yet. Their chef, Ferran Adria, has made a deal with a British company to market some of the famous products from their kitchen to the catering trade.

Behaviour, which elsewhere would hardly raise an eyebrow, can get you arrested in the USA.

IKEA in New Haven (USA) was closed on Thursday last week after a customer reported seeing a woman scattering a white powder outside the store. City and state police, firefighters, the FBI, and the city Health Department were all called in to investigate. The powder turned out later to be flour, which was being used to mark the route of a paper chase.

Police arrested a brother and his sister who had marked the trail for an international running club and charged them with first-degree breach of peace. A police spokesman, asked if a breach of peace, which is a felony, was too severe a charge for someone marking their running trail said, “I think the question we should be asking is: ‘What did their act cost the city of New Haven?’”.

Not quite in the same category as the Boston Mooninites, but almost.

The Economist has a short article with the graphic above showing the additional costs and fees associated with buying property in different countries. Britain and Denmark are cheap, costing under 5% of the purchase price; Korea, Italy, France, Greece, Spain and Germany are expensive at 12% – 22%.

I happened to click on our “contact us” page today, which includes a Google Map showing where we live. I was surprised to see that the resolution of the satellite image has been noticeably reduced since I set up the page some months ago. I don’t have a before / after comparison, as I didn’t make a screen shot at the time, but the resolution is definitely lower. Now, I have heard of hi-res pictures being swapped out when GW Bush is visiting or when military installations are pictured, but as far as I’m aware GWB isn’t planning on visiting us, neither are there any military installations nearby – strange…

The latest research suggests that one cause of obesity is a virus infection:

Obesity can be caught like a cold, according to a laboratory study showing that a common infectious virus can turn human cells into fatty tissue, scientists said.

It is well established that the human adenovirus-36 causes respiratory and eye infections but now scientists found it can also transform adult stem cells found under the skin into the fat cells of adipose tissue…

No, not mine. But judging from the comments on this photo in Flickr a not so unusual occurrence. We have a glass-top table in the lounge which at times has had quite a stack of things on it, but fortunately we’ve not had this happen to it.

(via digg)

There’s a short article by Ken Fisher on Ars Technica about how AACS DRM (the way film studios protect high definition video recordings, e.g Blu-ray and HD DVD) involves adding a hugh amount of complexity to computer operating systems. Microsoft is already suffering from the problems involved, having released Vista; Apple will have similar problems when they upgrade OS X to add the ability to play Blu-ray and HD DVD films. It makes an excellent argument for keeping HD video in a separate box – an HD video player, connected to the TV. Note that the perpetrators of this DRM issue are neither Apple, nor Microsoft, but the film industry.

What I’d like to see, if the operating system manufacturers insist on implementing integration of HD video in their products, is the possibility of buying a reduced feature-set version of the OS without the HD pollution. Unfortunately this is only likely to happen if enough other people share my idea, which I fear they don’t at the moment. Still, I can always change to Linux – there’s no chance that AACS DRM will be ever implemented there, as Linux is an open source system, and AACS relies on keeping the encryption keys secret.