Video to watch!
Northern Bytes is Back!
What is Mac?
Who is it from? Post a guess in the comments on Seb's blog. It really sums up the Mac, and it's quite a powerful quote."Appreciating Mac is not about admiring a machine. Making best use of a Mac is not glorifying or vilifying a personal computer. A Mac is not a machine. Mac is the passion inside of you that is waiting to come out - the personal computer is your tool of change. Without Mac, you are just any ordinary person, doing ordinary thing. With Mac, you are special. You can let your passion to take, you, drive you foward to change the world"
In other news, that fantastic piece of kit known as Flickr Export 2 is now available as a final release. Congratulations to Fraser Speirs on the release.
Where you been?
My answer was 'shit'. And then I got on the train (with hindsight, it should have been 'Get Firefox'!). I haven't had a chance to do anything with the CSS since the tip (thanks Seb) but I be soon. What was I doing? Conducting. I travelled to Surrey on Tuesday (from Manchester), conducted Mozart 41 in the evening, and have just arrived back in Manchester. Phew. I did mean to get some photos of me conducting, but conveniently left my camera in my travel bag (and didn't take it to the rehearsal). Anyway, that little photo was taken after having enjoyed the food on Virgin Trains this afternoon. Cheers!
nThemes Teaser
This forthcoming site design is something that has been stirring for ages now, and to be honest, it's going to be a big change in coding for this site. It's going to be a ground-up RapidWeaver theme with some nice touches to it. Look for lots of custom CSS classes and slickness some time around the start of next month. Possibly. I've got a recital to get through first!
Rant of the Week - Episode 1, Complaints of the iPod
Firstly, the iPod
People moan about how the iPod seems to last just a year. Actually, it lasts a lot longer, if you take the trouble to take care of it. HDD-based iPods (as with all other HDD players) are not immunely to damage from movement. The nature of a HDD (namely that there are thin, fragile spindles being read by a reading-head) means that if you drop your lovely 5th Generation iPod, some damage (be it the reading-head scratching the spindles - as they don't touch normaly, or just a clean smash of a spindle) is more than likely. It's tribute to drive manufacturers that we can even use such a technology on the go. If you're wanting to do a lot of running, buy a Flash-based, non-moving parts iPod Nano. I happen to own a 4th Gen iPod (now 19 months old) and it's still working fine, despite having been used more than a few times at the gym on the treadmills - so what's the secret?
TLC and general common sense. The iPod is a fragile piece of precision consumer electronics. They're not promised to be indestructible, and just because they're from Apple doesn't meant they're any less immune to the average consumer being careless with their precious music player. For example, look at this example I found on Flickr (courtesy of Nathan):
What's the betting that the owner of this iPod will be up in arms about the fact that their iPod is so scratched from 'so little use'? Sure it's a 5th Gen Video iPod, so it's not that old, but come on, if you're going to treat your iPod like that, you've got no claim on Apple for not making it up to your rugged standards. Compare it with this picture of my iPod (taken with the iPod resting on an iPod sock so as to protect the screen):
Apple do now bundle a slip-on case for the Nano and 5th Gen iPod, so there's no excuse really.... When are people going to realise that iPods are not going to survive the following?:
- Being sat on
- Being flushed down the toilet
- Being placed in a pocket surrounded by keys and the like without protection
There's only so much 'protection' you can surround a hard-drive in before your MP3 player looks like this. But then, the iPod would be consigned to the bin - and the slick industrial design that's won Apple praise would be undone (not to mention, Apple's profits slumping). People want the iPod to look like it does currently, yet be as bulletproof as this:
Get real people!
Why do you love Mac?
If you want to see Expose in action, Apple have a video on Apple.com that'll show it to you in more detail - check it out. (Requires Quicktime)
Emptying the Trash
Well well well. Nope, this isn't me trashing the entirety of my iTunes folder ;-) that's the number of non-English files I removed from Applications that are sitting on my hard-disk using Monolingual. Because OS X has each language in a special .lproj folder (english.lproj etc etc) it's really easy to remove files that aren't needed yet not affect the software. Just be sure to check that English is never ticked in the list as removing that will mean a fresh install of OS X. Nasty. I run Monolingual perhaps every 6 weeks, just as all the software updates install fresh .lproj files, and today I removed 500MB of stuff. Nice.
Apple cuts UK prices
iPod price points are always contentious (and I'm not interested in iPods) but the move to get a Mac Mini for less than £400 is a good one. As with the cheapest Nano, these prices are probably about marketing points more than actual price drops. However, with the prices now this low, it's hard not to recommend getting a Mac. Students still get their educational discount too (about £25 on the bottom of the range Mac Mini), so get buying!
Buy a Mac mini Online Now!
Something's coming!
Corporate Blogs
An amusing read - another blooper from one of the idiots of technology investments John Enderle:
"Apple is really the only firm that doesn't use nondisclosure agreements and, as a result, they stood alone in this."
Excuse me?! Apple is possibly the most tight lipped company on the planet - they don't comment on future stores, even if on a forthcoming store the Apple logo is visible, turned on, and proclaiming it for all to see. What a ****wit.
Amusing Images
World Cup Driving Laws
THIS DEPT OF TRANSPORT INITIATIVE HAS BEEN RE-LAUNCHED MAY 2006
Due to the nature of the quality of driving in England the Department of Transport has now devised a new scheme in order to identify poor drivers and give good drivers the opportunity to recognise them whilst driving. For this reason as from the middle of May 2006 those drivers who are found to be driving badly which includes:
-overtaking in dangerous places;
-hovering within one inch of the car in front;
-stopping sharply
-speeding in residential areas;
-pulling out without indication;
-performing U turns inappropriately in busy highstreets
-under taking on motorways
-taking up more than one lane in multi lane roads
These drivers will be issued with flags, white with a red cross, signifying their inability to drive properly. These flags must be clipped to a door of the car and be visible to all other drivers and pedestrians. Those drivers who have shown particularly poor driving skills will have to display a flag on each side of the car to indicate their greater lack of skill and general lower intelligence mindset to the general public. Please circulate this to as many other motorists as you can so that drivers and pedestrians will be aware of the meaning of these flags.
Flixster - surely you don't need it?
Here's why Flixster is going to fail:
1. It doesn't have the e missing from the end of the name. I mean, come on, every 'happenin' web service is spelt without an e. Flickr, Switchr, Strippr*
2. You surely know if your friends have similar tastes in movies, or neither of you care.
So please stop sending me invites. If I'd wanted to join, trust me, I would have done so by now. I'm on Flickr (which incidentally lets you share names of your favourite movies with other users anyway) so if you need me, find me there. Here's what to look for if you've never had the pleasant (and horribly cliched) email from Flixster:
Thankfully, invites only get sent twice, so it looks like they finally get the hints. However, looks like my SPAM mail is gonna get fuller until I add myself to the database of 'Don't Send Me Invites' that 'Team Flixster (Joe and Sarah)' hold. I'm not gonna be adding myself to that - can you smell the sold details from that database already? I can.
*The name strippr is used here for effect. I'm not in the know as to the usage of this name. Sorry.
Live Messenger Screw-up
Allofmp3.com - about to disappear?
That is a grab from the allofMP3.com site. Whether or not it's legal in Russia is dubious enough, but in the rest of the world, it's a certain no. Today, the British Phonographic Industry announced the those masterminds behind allofMP3.com will be sued in a British court. Interesting though is the fact that the people who have bought music from allofMP3.com will not be sued. A generous announcement from the music industry indeed. I've not used allofMP3.com - purely because I don't buy much digital music, however if you are using allofMP3.com, now might be a good time to stock up on downloads - although that is not an endorsement on my part of a highly dubious service. I'm a musiciaan after all, and would prefer that you properly remunerated musicians for their work (even if the labels get the majority of your hard earned cash).
* allofMP3.com charges for downloads based on their file size (and a track comes to about £0.04!)
Google Spreadsheets & Writely
So, onto Spreadsheets. It's a nicely written web app, sure, but does it actually work? I have to say, in my 30 minutes of use, YES! I managed to import, export and save files from Spreadsheets onto Excel 2004 (Mac Office!). In fact, I even tried it with a number of quite advanced spreadsheets, and it still managed to keep all the numbers ticking along nicely.
General Interface:
Here's what it looks like with a few documents on the service - one imported, the other created online:
Importing was easily done - my time sheet for my part-time job imported just fine and was easily editable - the Googlers have clearly done a bucket load of work to get formulas etc to import!
Export wise? I'm impressed. CSV and XLS:
As with Writely, the collaborative air to the product is very clear - in the top right of the main 'window' you'll see a "Share this Spreadsheet". Click it and the following appears. Add some email addresses (I though I'd let Steve, Steve, and Bill have a chance to see Spreadsheets as I can't imagine them being actively invited!) and click "Invite People". Presumably this 'Invite to collaborate' also allows the invitee to use Spreadsheets for themselves (as with Writely), but I can't vouch for this.
Now that I've raved about how much the product rocks, there are some downsides. I'm a huge fan of the Merge and Centre Cells button in Excel, however Spreadsheets (for now) only allows you to merge the cells with a single click (see "Merge Across" in the top right of the screenshot below).
Having said I miss the Merge and Centre button, Google makes it easier out of the box to separate the cells if required:
Overall I'm impressed - it's a slick product from Google that uses some of the key GMail interface elements and puts them to use on a really useful collaborative Spreadsheet app. With Writely and Spreadsheets, those whingers who cannot, or rather would prefer not to, run Office 2004 under Rosetta on Intel Macs have no excuse! If you register for the 2 Google services & buy yourself iWork '06 for Keynote and Pages, you've got a really good alternative to Microsoft Office without any compromises in file formats running natively on Intel Macs. Note that Safari is not supported, but it does in my experience work in Camino (something that isn't mentioned specifically on the Google FAQs)
P.S. I'm not offering collaborative invites, so please don't post asking for one - life's to hectic for me at the moment to be able to do that for everyone! The sign up process is linked to your Google account, and even if you have an invite, will not work unless your account has been activated for Spreadsheets. If you want to try it, go here. Remember it is a Labs beta (so it could be even more erratic than a normal beta)!
If you like this article, digg it!
Read if you're a Windows user
Mmmm Cocoa
Having never done any programming before, it's slow progress, but I'm still making progress. I'm understanding far more than I was previously so it's definitely a start :-)