I walked to work for the first time today. Although it’s about a 30 minute walk, it’s actually a lot more pleasant than taking the subway as it wasn’t too hot on the streets, and while subway trains are air-conditioned, the subway stations are not and often suffocatingly hot. There also seemed to be many [...]
Today really reminded me how New York is so fantastic. It started with a group of us having lunch in a classic 50’s style diner featuring singing waiting staff who were very entertaining. To get an idea of how long it was going to take to walk to work, I wandered down Seventh Ave back [...]
Personalised Google looks interesting. I’ve always liked the idea of MyYahoo! but the interface is quite cluttered so it never became my homepage. The interface of the Google portal is actually one of the coolest parts of this page — you can use “drag and drop” to re-order the information! Being a Beta-service, the available [...]
By default, interactive Python[1] is not very easy to use on OS X as it lacks any command history. It turns out that this is easily remedied by installing a (statically-compiled) library, called libreadline in /Library/Python/2.3/.
[1] Have I mentioned how cool, useful, and easy-to-write Python is?
Last week I upgraded this blog to WordPress 1.5. I remain very impressed with this application, not for any particularly “killer” feature, but simply because it just seems to work so well. I recently helped my house-mate set up his own blog and he hardly needed my help at all, it was that easy.
In this [...]
This evening I installed the GPGMail which allows me to use the GNU Privacy Guard (gpg) with Apple’s Mail.app.
I installed gpg using fink. There are a number of projects to bring “standard” UNIX tools to OS X. What’s nice about fink is that offers pre-compiled binary packages (no waiting around for stuff to compile!) [...]
Unfortunately thesis work has kept me from blogging any further experiences with my new toy. Hopefully this post will address this failing!
A few weeks ago my Inspiron 8100 died (again). Having already replaced the hard disk, I decided it was time to replace the whole machine and went shopping for a new laptop. A few days later I had decided that an iBook was the right choice.
Why? Well, on the desktop I am a [...]
Online shopping is great. You can shop around for the cheapest prices from the comfort of your bedroom instead of having to tramp around town (or worse, drive from place from place), you can check out online reviews and product specs that are far more detailed and knowledgeable than any shop assistant and best of [...]
Something else to distract me from my thesis write-up, a new version of WordPress (the software that runs this site) was released today.
The official changelog is rather brief — here’s a more more comprehensive review of improvements, and upgrade instructions for the previous stable version (1.2).
The world needs more anger! Vote Matthew Garrett for Debian Project Leader!
A review of the new Amiga hardware and software: The Micro-AmigaOne and Amiga OS4 Developer Prerelease via [MeFi]
My first computer was an Amiga 500, and what a fantastic machine it was — although snail-like in terms of raw number of MHz by today’s standards, it felt quick and responsive, and while many people remember [...]
Google have added an Amazon-style “wishlist” to their excellent Froogle service, called Froogle Shopping List.
It doesn’t seem to be available for Froogle UK though.
Over the Christmas vacation this blog was spammed repeatedly, particularly annoying since I was on a dial-up connection that made downloading all the comment notification emails annoying if nothing else! It seems this is quite a common problem and as usual Google provided an excellent resource for tackling the problem. Read on for a [...]
A while ago I reported that I had experienced a hard drive failure on my laptop which necessitated purchasing a new one and re-installing the operating system (Debian). I had been hearing some very good things about the new Debian Installer and so gave it a whirl.
The reputation is well deserved as the new installer [...]