Keys Corner

The Guardian lists some things you can use your microwave for, other than cooking food. Such as sterilizing the dishcloth or dyeing material.

The weather permitting, we should be in the UK for the next few days. (We should by flying to and from Heathrow, at the moment the flight has not been cancelled). Normal posting will resume when we return, in the mean time we wish you a happy Christmas!

Update (2006.12.23): We got to the airport at about 08:15 to find the 10:05 flight we were booked on had been cancelled, but Lufthansa rebooked us at no charge onto the considerably more expensive 8:25 flight, aimed at business travellers, which still hadn’t left.

It took us about 2 hours to change our tickets, check our luggage in and get through the double security controls (Hand-luggage X-ray and patting down, passport control, hand-luggage X-ray and patting down, and final ticket/passport control before being allowed into the gate area – we asked what the point of it was, and were told by the security staff that Germany has aligned itself to the American standards. I can’t say I view that as progress…).

Anyone hoping to check in the usual !#7_0_UG3” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview (‘/outbound/www.lufthansa.com’);”>40 minutes prior to the flight would have missed it yesterday for sure. After that, we sat in the plane until 11:00 before finally taking off. We felt sorry for the poor business passengers who had booked on to a flight which should have taken off at breakfast time, and finally got away just before it was time for lunch.

If you read the comments to my previous post, you’ll have seen that Volker invited us round to look at the Sonos set-up which he’s testing at the moment. A demo really is the best way to appreciate the kit, the hand controller is a little larger than an iPod and makes it easy to link the units in several rooms to play the same music, or if you prefer and the rooms are not all open plan, you can listen to completely different playlists in each room. Like an iPod, the nice thing is that you can display the album covers on hand unit’s display, which makes the selection process more like browsing your physical albums.

I’m not going to rush out right now to invest around 1000 – 2000 Euro, but if I can arrange to get the kit at US prices or the prices here drop a little, you will almost certainly find that we using a Sonos system here too within 12 months.

You can read much more about Volker’s experience with his installation on his blog. A good place to start is with his last post on Sonos, which links to the earlier ones.

With some reluctance, I have to admit that Volker is almost certainly right to say that the Sonos music system that he’s been testing recently has an excellent WAF (wife acceptance factor):

I pay a lot of attention to the way she adopts technology. There are a number of things that clicked immediately. One of them was digital photography. It was very liberating to practice without incurring additional cost. Hard disk recorder for TV, an automatic transmission in the car, heated seats, all of those were used immediately. Other things just fell to the wayside. Like the video recorder, the MP3 streamer, an iPod (!). But now the Sonos: She “got” it the first minute. Without looking twice she accepted the controller, and unlike me, never looked at the Mac or PC client.

Certainly Ute’s reaction to the technological examples he gives matches Ruth’s almost 100% – Ruth really still prefers a film camera. Not that I disagree with his reasoning, but at 1149 Euro for a starter kit, it is a trifle expensive. I’m pretty sure that Sonos or a system with similar functionality is where we will end up, but for now we’ll wait and see how the price develops and whether the competition in this area comes up with anything even better (we use a considerably cheaper Roku SoundBridge M1000 for now to stream music to the stereo, but the functionality is nowhere as complete as that of the Sonos kit).

US Senator Charles Schumer seems to have become completely paranoid and wants the P&O Ferries deal with Dubai Ports World blocked:

He said the Committee on Foreign Investment, which approved the $6.8 billion agreement allowing Dubai Ports World to oversee operations at six U.S. ports including New York and New Jersey, had “proven itself unreliable” on issues of national security.

(P&O is, by the way, a British company, and not as you might have thought reading the above, an American company. The six US ports have actually been in foreign hands for a number of years.)

The postman delivered this (picture above) today. It gets its music directly from this, without the need to have any computers running:

More at the weekend, when I have more time. My first impression is … impressive device.

Nachdem die Firma Lands’ End 1998 vom Oberlandesgericht Saarbrücken verboten wurde, mit einer zeitlich unbegrenzten Garantie zu werben, trifft die deutsche Gesetzgebung dieses Mal eine Firma die Aluminiumdächer herstellt:

Das Unternehmen sei aus rechtlichen Gründen gar nicht in der Lage, eine derart lange Garantieverpflichtung einzugehen, so das Gericht. Denn laut Bürgerlichem Gesetzbuch darf die Verjährung nicht länger als 30 Jahre ausgeschlossen werden (Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt, Az.: 6 U 198/04).

The law’s an ass, isn’t it?

You just need the right idea to make money.

After reading about the student who made his first million by charging a dollar per pixel to advertise on his 1000×1000 pixel web site, I see that Selfridges are charging £65 for a 40 minute session teaching rich non-techies how to use their iPods.

Brad Pitt, the actor, is working with Frank Gehry on the £250m King Alfred development in Hove (UK).

Pitt, who is not qualified as an architect, is working on the design of a restaurant and a penthouse in the controversial complex, which has undergone a major redesign since winning the competition for the redevelopment of the seafront site in 2003. The development originally consisted of four towers up to 120 metres high, but after local residents protested, two of the towers disappeared and the height of the other two was reduced from 38 stories to 20. Hove Council hopes that the involvement of the celebrity will help win more support for the project, which some in Hove still consider to be an eyesore rather than a exciting signature development for the town.

Those of you who live in the UK don’t need to read any further. You already know what Sudoku is, since all the major newspapers have been publishing it for weeks now and a sizable proportion of the nation seems to be addicted to it. For the rest of us, Sudoku is a grid-based game, originating in Japan, with a simple rule:

Fill in the grid so that
every row,
every column, and
every 3×3 box
contains the digits 1 through 9.

It really is that simple. There is a web site http://sudoku.com/ where you can get more information and play the game, or you can take a look in pretty well any British newspaper, or take a look at some of these sites:

• Lets Play
• The Daily SuDoku
• Sudoku Fun

or you can play it with letters at BBC Newsnight. And if you haven’t wasted enough time yet, download it to play on your Palm Pilot (freeware).

Update (2005-05-17):
Vowe says the Palm application doesn’t work – I haven’t had time to try it out, as just after I posted this, OS X (Filevault?) destroyed part of my operating system and I decided to do a clean re-install of everything, which took all of yesterday. Pretty well everything is now restored – I have just one or two more programs to install this evening after work.