Status-Q

A few months back I wrote about the importance of Google's new support for CalDav, which allows you to edit and share your Google calendars in apps such as Apple's iCal. At Camvine, since then, we've been managing our company calendars that way, and it's worked very nicely, though it took a couple of minutes to set up iCal on each new machine because you had to enter complex URLs.

Now, I discover, there's a utility called Calaboration to do it for you; much more convenient.

If you're an iPhone/iTouch user... you can sync the calendars to the iPhone but it's one-way only - you can' t update them from there using the standard iPhone calendar app. However, you can of course use the web browser on the phone, which works quite nicely, or a third-party calendar utility like SaiSuke.

I keep most of my email, except for spam and obviously temporary stuff. And I'm fairly careful about removing myself from mailing lists whenever possible.

But I notice that my IMAP server is currently storing just under 57,000 of my past messages. That's over 9 years, so the average is only 17 per day that I've kept. It still seems like a big number, though!

I've been thinking about and experimenting with various backup options recently, seeking the One True Backup Solution. In my search for enlightenment I came across a rather nice site called The Tao of Backup.

Many of my readers, I know, have been good enough to read Rose's novel, The Blackstone Key, and I suppose it would be terribly churlish to suggest that it might make a good Christmas present for somebody, so I shall avoid doing so.

I have had fun revamping Rose's web site over the last few weekends, though, and those of you who enjoyed the story might be interested in the first batch of historical facts that we've added to the site, which give a little more background to the novel - you can find them on the left hand side of the book's page under 'The world of The Blackstone Key'. More to come...

You might also be interested to know that the sequel, The Counterfeit Guest, will hit UK shelves three months from today (at about the same time as the paperback of the first book). Both are available to pre-order from Amazon.

Here's a simple keystroke that I find I'm using more and more:

As I get older, I find it harder to remember long strings of modifier keys, so I think of this as 'V with everything except control'!

This does a paste from the clipboard without any formatting. In days of yore, most cut-and-paste operations were just plain text anyway but, increasingly, I'm finding that when I copy text from a webpage to an email, from a document to a blog post, and so forth, it brings across too much of the formatting with it and I end up with chunks in the wrong font size, or with funny line spacing etc. Occasionally this is useful, but more often than not I just want the plain text, or I want to control the formatting carefully.

That's when you need today's mantra: Cmd-C to copy, V with all but Control to paste!

Many years in the making, this is a masterpiece: beautifully produced, thoroughly researched, and intelligently presented. I suspect it will become required reading for anyone really interested in the topic of sustainable energy: how to generate it, and how to use less of it. And yet it lives up to its name, being delightfully un-stuffy.

David is more interested in spreading sense than in making money, and you can download the book for free if wanted from withouthotair.com. Almost all of the materials are under a Creative Commons licence and he's made high-resolution versions of most of the figures available on the web site.

But I recommend buying it: the book itself is very aesthetically pleasing, and could make a good Christmas present.

Rose and I are off to Paris for a short break in a few weeks' time, an easier trip these days since the Eurostar train now departs from St Pancras station.

And this led me to wonder who this Pancras chap actually was? Well, the story goes that he was beheaded by the Romans at the age of 14 for refusing to make a sacrifice to the Roman gods. Pictures like this one show a rather mature 14-year-old, I think, and the story has been embellished over the centuries, with later versions having him thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. But none the less, he lost his head, and various other bits of him are supposed, eventually, to have made their way to England, which is why we have various things named after him, like a railway... errm... terminal.

I was amused by the line in the Wikipedia article that said:

Pancras is normally invoked against cramp, false witness, headache, and perjury.

Why cramp, I wonder?

That he found a cure for headaches, though, that I can believe.

Our dear chancellor has decided to reduce VAT from 17.5% to 15%. This means that every business in the land has to reconfigure their billing systems, check the dates of their invoices rather carefully, and (in many cases) reprint lots of documentation to change their advertised prices.

In exchange, they'll will benefit from the wild shopping spree that can be expected when things costing £99 drop to a bargain £97! The queues of people in sleeping bags outside the department stores, waiting for opening time on Monday morning, will make all the changes worthwhile, and no doubt we will still be rejoicing in a year's time, when we have to change everything back again.

Actually, that's probably when the shopping crowds will turn out: the day before the prices go back up again, 13 months from now, in the post-Christmas sales at the end of 2009. I'm not convinced that's when it'll be most needed! In the meantime, the lost taxes will supposedly come to something like £12.5bn. Just the thing for a country plunging into debt. I rather suspect this is all really just a ploy to find useful consulting work for all those newly-redundant bank staff.

Still, I'm certainly no expert, and perhaps it'll all work out in ways I don't quite grasp. It does seem like a lot of bother to me, though.

We just need to make sure we don't come up with any other schemes for throwing money away, like, say, hosting the Olympics. Now that would be really silly.

Fred von Lohmann of the EFF:

Once again, thanks to DRM, a new product ends up less useful than the one it replaces. This time, it's the new family of Apple Macbook laptop computers that gets the downgrade. When it launched the new Macbooks, Apple announced that they would sport a new digital video output connector, known as Mini DisplayPort. What Apple failed to mention, however, is that those connectors allow movies studios to force the computer to authenticate any external monitor before allowing playback of programs purchased or rented from the iTunes Store (Microsoft's Windows Vista does something similar). In other words, the HDTV monitor or projector that worked for you yesterday, won't work with your new computer tomorrow if Hollywood has embedded a flag in the iTunes content you paid for. This is a remarkably short-sighted move for both Apple and Hollywood. This punishes existing iTunes customers: several have reported that iTunes purchases that played on external monitors on their old Macbooks no longer will play on their new Macbooks. In other words, thanks to the Macbook "upgrade," Apple just "downgraded" everyone's previous investment in iTunes content (if we've told you once, we've told you a dozen times -- when you buy DRMd content, the vendor can snatch your investment from you at any time).

Regular walking or running not really your thing? Or have you spent so much time at the gym that you've forgotten what it's like to run or cycle and actually move around at the same time?

You need SpeedFit!

Yes, they're serious...