Status-Q

Regular readers will know that I'm a Mac user, but I do have a copy of Windows on my machine as well, which I can run using Parallels. Generally, the only time I fire it up is to check that web sites I've created using standards-compliant browsers also work under Internet Explorer. Generally, they don't, and I have to start inserting nasty hacks to get around the bugs in IE. Anyone who does web design will know this process only too well.

It struck me tonight just how ironic it is that the only reason I ever need to run Windows is because it's broken!

Some amazing skies this weekend, all kinds of weather, from snow and sleet to bright sunshine.

One of my favourite actors, Paul Schofield, died yesterday. He was always good, but I remember him most fondly as Martin Chuzzlewit Sr. in the BBC production.

A great loss.

One of the most interesting technology developments of the last couple of weeks has, it seems to me, attracted very little attention. The BBC's iPlayer, which lets you watch most of the last week of BBC TV if you're in the UK, and a subset of it if you're elsewhere, received early criticism because it didn't work on anything but Windows.

Now at least some of it works on other platforms, but the latest one is the most interesting. It now works on the iPod Touch and iPhone. I now carry around in my shirt pocket something which gives me an eminently watchable archive of the last week's TV, as long as I'm in range of a wifi network. The iPod Touch is a great video player and now, for free, there's a huge amount of stuff available in a rather high-quality format.

Only a very few years ago, the idea of having any access to an archive like this would have seemed amazing. But having it on a beautiful slab a few millimetres thick is almost sci-fi. I just wish I had the time to watch any of it! But we do live in most interesting times...

For Apple laptop users, Patrick Stein's SmartSleep looks like a useful little gizmo...

In general we watch almost no broadcast TV, and a very large number of movies, thanks to LoveFilm (the UK equivalent of NetFlix). When Rose told me last week that the film she had lined up was about "a guy who gets badly injured in WW1 and undergoes early reconstructive surgery", I can't say I was immediately enthusiastic. There seemed to be other, more fun, ways to spend a Friday evening after a long and tiring week.

But The Officers' Ward was, in fact, absolutely superb, with some really beautiful moments. Yes, there are some slightly gruesome bits, as you would imagine, but remarkably few, and it asks some very important questions. It won several awards and nominations in France when it came out in 2001, and rightly so, but I hadn't heard of it.

I'm glad I have now; highly recommended.

A tree in Grantchester Meadows this afternoon.

Considering buying a low-end Dell machine this evening, I saw that it comes with a very basic version of Vista by default. But of course, even if you have to get Windows, you'd be daft to get that. For only £30 more, you can get a basic version of XP.

Amusing to see that it's a pay-extra upgrade...

The UK is being swept by very strong gales today...

When my parents, many years ago, used to fly around northern Kenya in their work with the Flying Doctors, they would occasionally be able to get radio reports from people on the ground as they came into land at some of the remote desert airstrips. Usually it would just be information about wind speed and direction, how many camels were on the runway, etc.

But I remember my mother telling me about an abbreviation they used under certain wind conditions, and it came back to me today: EBAW.

"Even birds are walking!"

If you use Aperture and you like to organise your keywords hierarchically using the Keywords HUD, then you may find this page at Bagelturf useful, especially the section about moving keywords to the top level. I couldn't work out how to get keywords which were in folders back to the top level - it turned out to be because I had too many keywords visible. This hint gives you a workaround, and it's generally useful to remember that search box at the top.

My list of keywords was getting quite long, and I often had duplicates at various places in the hierarchy - 'Seattle' came under 'USA > Washington State', for example, but it also came under 'iPhoto' because many of my photos were originally tagged there. Typing the first few letters of 'Seattle' into the search box allowed me to see both and merge them easily.

This is the solution to another problem, by the way - that of getting the same keyword twice at the same level with different capitalisation. Drag the one you want to change into a different level of the hierarchy - for example into a temporary folder. Then rename it to the right capitalisation, and drag it back to where you want it, using the search box to make life easier if necessary. Aperture will ask if you want to merge the two keywords.

You don't even need to create a temporary folder, in fact, you can drag the one you want to change inside the correct one - if that doesn't confuse you - rename the inner one to match, and then drag it to the level above to merge with its parent.

Hope that's useful for someone!