I was going to write a bit of a rant about the depressingly familiar DRM discussions that have blown up (again!) on the BBC Backstage mailing list over the last couple of days. But I find that Martin has already done it. So I don’t have to. Which is nice.
On the Scales
Our bathroom scales gave up the ghost recently. Well, so would you if you had me standing on you every couple of days for ten years. But replacing them gave us a wonderful opportunity for consumer overkill. Not for us a simple set of mechanical scales. No, we bought the Tanita BC-543 Body Composition Monitor.… Continue reading On the Scales
Love & Monsters Revisited
The success of this weekend’s Doctor Who story, “Blink“, has led to a number of comparisons with last season’s “doctor-light”[1] story, “Love and Monsters“. And I really don’t know why “Love and Monsters” comes off so badly in the comparison. It’s true that “Blink” is right up there as one of the best Doctor Who… Continue reading Love & Monsters Revisited
Getting Web Sites Wrong
It’s a constant refrain round these parts, I know, but here’s another example of a web site that has a couple of nasty errors that could have been avoided with a little thought. The site in question is Knight Frank the estate agents. I was drawn to their site as they are selling a house… Continue reading Getting Web Sites Wrong
Dali and Film
Yesterday we went to the Dali and Film exhibition that is currently running at the Tate modern. Alongside many of his paintings they were showing a number of Dali’s experiments with film. Most people will know about Dali’s work with Buñuel[1] and the dream sequence from Hitchcock’s Spellbound but there’s plenty of his lesser-known work… Continue reading Dali and Film
Blink
I haven’t been very impressed with this season of Doctor Who so far. Gridlock was ok and the recent two-parter (“Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood”) had some very interesting ideas which were spoilt by a horribly mawkish ending – but other than that it’s all been rather disappointing. But last night’s episode, “Blink”,… Continue reading Blink
Another Country
A week ago I was really rather excited about Fedora 7. I’m less excited now. There seems to be a problem with the DVD drive in my laptop. Or, at least, an incompatitbility between it and the ISO images of the new version of Fedora. Over the last week, I’ve burnt several disks to us… Continue reading Another Country
Turning S5 into PDF
For the last couple of years I’ve been using Eric Meyer’s S5 for creating and presenting slides. It uses a combination of CSS and Javascript to create nice-looking slides which can be viewed in any decent web browser (see, for example, the slides from last Saturday’s Perl Teach-In). As an extra bonus, there is BooK’s… Continue reading Turning S5 into PDF
Religious Stupidity
I despair: Tony Blair says he wants more Muslim imams trained in UK universities, to reduce reliance on imams from overseas. No. It is not the job of the education system to encourage people to believe in fairy stories. The job of the education system should be to educate people (not difficult to work out… Continue reading Religious Stupidity
The Day The World Turned Day-Glo
The new London 2012 Olympics logo looks like a car-crash. Which is, I suppose, somewhat appropriate. I can only assume that this was done deliberately to make the 2012 Olympics a laughing stock. Hopefully someone from the IOC will see the logo, realise that we’re not taking this at all seriously and let some other… Continue reading The Day The World Turned Day-Glo