Keys Corner

One hassle with using a digital camera is that you have to transfer the photos to your computer to process them. There are two ways, usually, that this is done:

• use a memory-card reader (often attached by a propriety USB cable which the camera manufacturer sells at a high price, if you ever need to replace it)
or
• by connecting the camera by cable directly to your Mac or PC

Both methods involve fiddling around: with either a cable or with the memory card from the camera.

So its nice to see that manufacturers are starting to offer SD memory cards which can communicate from within the camera to the computer using Wireless LAN. For example, Lexar, who have just announced a 2GB WLAN SD card for exactly that purpose. I haven’t seen a WLAN SD card for sale in Germany yet, but I hope it won’t be long before they are available here.

On a similar note, its nice to see that a similar approach of making life more convenient is starting to appear in other areas. For example, Mark/Space have just announced that their latest software can automatically synchronize data between your PDA and computer wirelessly each time they are within 10 meters of each other.

Andrew Wheeler posted the following list on his blog Very Good Taste a couple of days ago, with these instructions (I don’t usually do these questionnaires, but this one took my fancy. If you think the list of what I’ve eaten and what I wouldn’t eat looks strange, I stopped eating meat about 15 years ago, in particular beef and other factory-farmed meat. Despite that slight handicap, I have eaten 36 of the foods below):

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

How long is a piece of string? ... or are Macs more expensive than Windows PCs?`

The answer is: it depends.

• About the same price for a similar specification
• About double for a basic machine

So it depends what your priorities are. But if you are considering buying a new Mac, remember that the rumour mill says that new models (scroll to near the end of the article) are probably going to be announced within the next two months.

Inditex, based in A Coruña (N. Spain), has overtaken Gap to become the world’s number one fashion retailer. You probably know at least one of their brand names, although I admit I hadn’t realised that all the following stores are part of the Inditex Group:

• Zara
• Bershka
• Pull and Bear
• Massimo Dutti
• Stradivarius

Not that that is all the brands- there’s also Zara Home, and a couple of brands I have never heard of before: Oysho and Uterqüe. Inditex’ success factor is the incredibly fast manufacturing and logistics chain, which allows them to get new fashions into their stores faster than the competition, and which has been the subject of intense analysis of management consultants and even the Harvard Business Review.

GMO, a successful American investment fund management group with a good track-record for long-term forecasts has been looking at the property markets in the USA and UK. Their conclusions are not going to cheer up house-owners in those countries, the Economist reports:

...By using the ratio of the median house price to the median family income, GMO reckons that prices in America need to fall by 17% instantly or stay flat for four years to return value. In Britain, prices need to fall by 38% or stay flat for seven years. And of course, there is no guarantee they will stay at fair value; in the mid-1990s, they dropped well below it…

A couple of days ago del.icio.us reinvented itself and became delicious.com. At the same time, the user interface was reworked and a bug was introduced which prevents the tag suggestions appearing when you add a new site to your delicious bookmarks.

The problem is very annoying (not only for me, many users have complained) but there is a solution. You need to use a different link to save your bookmarks.

You can use the link Save to delicious (full save) at the very bottom of this page. Save the link as a bookmark in your browser. When you use it, you’ll see a little triangle marked All my tags near the bottom of the window, which opens when you click on it, displaying your list of previously used tags.

While Germany’s government is still firmly under the control of the automobile lobby, and refuses to implement a general speed limit at all on the Autobahn, the Spanish government is introducing a speed limit of 80 km/hr on its dual carriageways and open roads (and 40 km/hr in towns). I understand that motorways, which have a speed limit of 120 would not affected.

The reductions were announced as part of a package of measures to cut Spain’s energy bill. Also included in the package is the removal of restrictions on commercial flight in military airspace, which will reduce flight times and save fuel.

I think 80 is a bit low, but we noticed that we got much better fuel consumption on our recent holiday run from Frankfurt down to Valencia and back when we kept to a maximum speed of 130 km/hr at all times, and I wouldn’t have any problem with a general limit in Germany of 120 or 130 km/hr. Fines for speeding in Spain are fairly heavy, by the way, starting at 100 Euro if you are 11 km/hr over the speed limit, so the speed limits are likely to be effective.

Following up on the last posting I made here, I see that Cory Doctorow has written an article in today’s Guardian, about how the music industry is slowly commiting suicide:

This month’s announcement of a back-room deal between ISPs (internet service providers) and the big record companies to spy on suspected copyright infringers and reduce the quality of their internet connections is just the latest paragraph in the record industry’s long, self-pitying suicide note, and it’s left me wishing they’d just pull the trigger already and stop beating their chests and telling us all how unfair it all is…

I couldn’t agree more with him. That the music industry is in such dire straits is mainly their own fault for ignoring new technologies for so long, and hoping that they’d just go away. There’s plenty of money to be made by offering innovative services at a reasonable price as we can see by looking at services such as:

• iTunes (music downloads – 5 billion songs sold and counting)
• Rhapsody(music streaming on-demand – 5 million songs available)
• Last.FM (music streaming on-demand – 21 million users)
• Shazam (identify snips of music you have heard – 4 million tracks cataloged)

So come on, music companies – stop moaning and start innovating!

Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman have come up with a novel visual dictionary of the English language. Using nearly 8 million images from Google Images, they have created a pictorial dictionary of some 53 thousand nouns:

We present a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning. Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,464 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google’s Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob…

My brain must be addled today, as I can’t figure out how the numbers above lead to a total of 80 million, however it is quite fun to click on the mosaic and see what turns up.

(Photo from English Russia)
When I see photos of machines like these, I am extremely glad that I haven’t ever had to fight in a war:

During the WW2 Russian Army was using a “Fire Hedgehog” – the set of 88 Tommy-gun alike machine guns loaded into a plane.

It was used at low attitude flights to effectively saw off hundreds of enemy soldiers. When the pilot got above some Nazi crowd the pilot of started fire, then the doors in the plane’s bottom were opened and this Fire Hedgehog was coming into play, eighty something non-stop firing machine guns could really look like the Hedgehog from Hell.

(via English Russia)