Daily Archives:October 23rd, 2007

The Magic Touch

A very generous friend today gave me an iPod Touch. It is, perhaps, the most beautiful bit of technology I’ve ever owned.

iPod Touch

It’s not the most powerful, or full-featured, or exciting, necessarily. But as an example of design it is amazing. In particular, it doesn’t have many of the features of an iPhone, with which I’ve also played. But it’s also significantly thinner, which is hard to convey in photographs: lying on my kitchen table it was about the same thickness as the coaster on which my wine glass sat. You can just about see how they fit a screen, backlight and touch sensor in that space. So where’s the battery?

Almost every aspect of this seems to be very nicely thought out, and I’m very impressed. Who would have thought, a decade ago, that Unix machines could look like this?

Wraparound

Wraparound is an interesting free utility for those with multiple displays, or very large displays. I sometimes have a 4-screen setup at work and it can take some time to move the mouse from the far left to the far right. With Wraparound, you just keep going left and, well, you guessed it.

Mmm… Now I’m dreaming of a desk which surrounds me completely, with 360 degrees of screens, and I could sit in a hole in the middle, a bit like a model railway enthusiast…. Then I’d really want this! Of course, I’d also really want a wireless mouse…

Oh, for a beaker full of the warm south…

Here’s a handy site for UK wine drinkers: Quaffers’ Offers. It lets you search in a variety of ways for particular wines and tells you which of the UK supermarkets have them on special offer at the moment. Planning a party, for example, and want a few bottles of Oyster Bay?

I don’t generally buy any one wine in large enough quantities to adjust my shopping location in this way, and this site doesn’t of course cover places like our really excellent local wine merchant. But for large purchases it’s very handy.

Thanks to Peter Haworth for the link…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser