Status-Q

Cambridge is blossoming. And I can’t stop taking photos…

Any readers in the Cambridge area will appreciate this useful page put together by Samuel Lipoff.

Thanks, Samuel - your efforts much appreciated!

This is from John's blog, but it's well worth requoting. Note the date.

“It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith.”

U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Atlantic Works vs. Brady, 1882.

Beautiful!

I keep some of my notes in electronic form, and some on paper. This is a pain. I'd prefer to have everything electronic, but there are three situations where paper wins out:

• When I'm on a phone call, at least without a headset. I need one hand to hold the phone, and writing is much more effective than typing single-handed!
• When I'm in a meeting, if it's a small group or a one-on-one chat. I think it's most uncivilised to be typing and looking at a screen while someone's talking to you.
• When I want to draw anything. Keyboards are good for text. Mice are awful for sketching.

So I think I'm going to be using my Moleskine notebook for a while, but I'd love to be able to keep an archive of it on my laptop, even if only as a sequence of images. However, I really don't want to have to scan one page at a time. I could use an Anoto digital pen, but I'd be bound to lose the pen, and anyway it doesn't work with a Mac. It does now work with a Blackberry but only via a paid subscription service. Not for me. "Aha!", I thought recently, "I could go back to my old Filofax." It's loose-leaf and so I could take the pages out every couple of weeks and put them through the sheet feeder on my scanner. But it turns out that they're too small, and the feeder doesn't really like them. Surely there's a market here? There's no shortage of Filoxfaxes and similar 'personal organiser' systems in the world. Does anybody make a scanner that can cope with them? Or, come to that, with index cards? That would be invaluable for many academics, as well as for devotees of the Hipster PDA. If nobody else makes one, watch this space, and I'll let you know when mine goes into production.... :-)

Screencasts are very popular at present, and for obvious reasons; there's no better way to demonstrate the features of some software you've written, or to learn more about software you own.

Here's a new one by Allan Odgaard, the creator of the TextMate editor, which regular readers will know is one of my favourite pieces of Mac software. This one shows you some of the handy facilities for editing HTML in TextMate.

The best way to keep up with new hints is through the TextMate blog.

John quotes a nice extract from Dave Barry's column about boring topics.

For those of you who, like me, find yourselves running out of disk space too quickly, here's a statistic to help keep your problems in perspective:

Yahoo Mail's storage requirements are measured in terabytes per hour. from Jeff Bonforte's talk at e-Tel, when he was talking about the 'SMTP fiasco' - the spam problem

The time has come. My old and beautiful DVD player - a Pioneer DV-717 for which I paid £600 a long time ago - is starting to fade. It lost the ability to play CDs some years back, and it's now regularly having problems with the scratches on rental DVDs as well, while other drives play them just fine. It was time to replace it. I could, of course, have bought a replacement at the supermarket for half the price I once paid for a region-free mod for my Pioneer. But they don't make them like they used to - anything looks like a piece of junk when placed next to the 717. And, anyway, DVD's are so last-decade....

So yesterday I went off to the Apple store to get a Mac Mini for use as a DVD/PVR/jukebox/digibox.

I already had one of Elgato's splendid firewire TV tuners, but I needed to buy a DVI-to-S-video adapter to connect the Mini to my TV, and I also got an external DVD writer. Why bother, you may ask, when the Mini has its own superdrive? Because I have a lot of DVDs from the US as well as the UK. When I started collecting, the choice was much greater on the other side of the pond. Now, sadly, getting firmware patches to remove the region lock on DVD drives ain't as easy as it used to be. But if you have two drives, you can use one for each region. The LaCie is also a more capable drive, and the package is a reasonably cost-effective way of purchasing Roxio Toast, which integrates nicely with the Elgato software. But I do hope those nice people who came up with the region-coding system will burn in hell for all eternity, or come to some other suitably sticky end...

In general, my first impressions are good. This is a 1.66GHz Core Duo machine, and it's very speedy. Apple's Front Row software is very slick, and Equinux's MediaCentral is a good clone with some extra features for those of you who don't have Front Row. It now also works with the Apple remote control if you have one.

It's a pity that Elgato's EyeTV software isn't integrated in some way with Front Row. This is Apple's fault, not theirs, I'm sure. But at present it means that I need two remotes for the one machine.

The other thing I'm finding is that packages which, unlike Front Row and MediaCentral, aren't really intended for viewing from the other side of the room, can be quite challenging on a TV. I don't have any reason to get rid of my perfectly functional old TV at present, and it may last for several more years. Which means that for a while I'll be using a conventional GUI at a resolution just below 800x600 on a screen which was never designed to display crisp text. This won't be an issue for those with new flat panel TVs connected via DVI or VGA, but it's a bit of a challenge for me.

There are starting to be some alternative programs which interface with EyeTV, and I can always VNC in and control it from another machine, but in the meantime I'm finding the keyboard-controlled zoom feature quite useful!

Otherwise, things are looking good so far. I'll keep you informed...