My weekly email from amazon.co.uk said:
We recommend: The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkinshttp://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/055277331X/ref=pe_ar_x5
RRP: £8.99
Price: £3.94
You Save: £5.05 (56%)Recommended because you purchased or rated:
* Kensington Slim Microsaver Cable
A “Kensington Slim Microsaver Cable” is a laptop accessory….
Macworld UK says:
River Thames gets free WiFi: “River Thames to get a free WiFi network, two million go online The river Thames is to get a free WiFi network after two companies, namely free-hotspot.com and MeshHopper partnered up to launch what they claim is Europe’s largest free metropolitian WiFi network.
Despite the liberal use of the word ‘free’ in the article, it’s really “15 mins of WiFi usage for every 15-30 second advert you watch”.
In other news, a new coffee shop offering free WiFi has opened up on Tower Bridge Rd, just south of the Bridge but before you cross underneath the railway lines. The address is something like 173 Tower Bridge Road, London SE 1 2AW but Google baulks at plotting that.
Professor Ross Anderson has called for improved banking regulations in the UK, but I think the really interesting part of the article is the description of how the British government and British banks are working together to reduce protections afforded to bank customers when they are the victim of fraud. Scary stuff.
(Previous to his career in academia, Professor Anderson worked in the commercial banking sector.)
2006 was apparently the year of online video. Not content with just blogging written words, or still images, great masses of Internet users everywhere uploaded themselves in full-motion, with sound, to sites like YouTube and Google video.
For those of us who didn’t have time to browse through the thousands of posts on YouTube to find the gems everyone is talking about, Wired has the highlights of the year. I’m still not sure what the fuss is about…
Unfortunately the server on which this website runs experienced a fatal hardware problem on Christmas Day, and the admins were unable to resuscitate it until today. 
Happy New Year!
I just wanted to wish the world a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
My long absence from posting is explained by the fact that I haven’t felt I have had anything interesting to blog about recently, although I have some exciting holidays planned for next year which will hopefully generate more posts!
It’s nice to know that even when the whole world seems to be going crazy, the Australians manage to retain their sense of humour: Last call for Mr Al Kyder and Mr Terry Wrist. [via Metafilter]
While I was in New York last Autumn, we managed to organise a weekly London v New York football game in Central Park which was a lot of fun, and represented a real cultural exchange as we informed the New Yorkers that a trip to the pub was an obligatory part of an after-work sports outing! It was very disappointing though just how difficult it was to find anywhere to play in the huge Central Park for a 5-a-side kickabout—there are some proper pitches available for 3 months a year (they’re used for baseball the rest of the time!), but you need to apply for a permit 6 months in advance. We did eventually find a spot where a Ranger grudgingly let us play, but it was more dirt than grass.
In contrast, last night we had annual softball (weird form of rounders) game against another team in Greenwich Park. We just rocked up, laid out our cones, and played—the visiting Americans were shocked that not only could we just do this without a permit, but we had beer too (drinking in a park or street is apparently a heinous crime in the US). The New York office may have been rather more skilful at football than we were, but London is clearly the superior city. 
Despite passing my viva a year ago this week, I still hadn’t actually had my PhD conferred by the University and reached the promised land of graduation. So, it was very exciting to return to Cambridge last weekend to take my Doctorate. Sadly, as with every trip it seems impossible to catch up with everyone, especially as I seem to have spent much of Saturday being photographed from every angle, but it was great to see everyone that I did—thank you for coming along to help me celebrate!
When the video recorder failed to record the soundtrack to last week’s Doctor Who it was the excuseomen I needed to splash out on a digital video recorder.
Single tuner models are now under a £100, but I think the ability to watch and record different programmes is pretty much essential for a TV recorder, so I spent the additional £25 on the twin tuner Fusion FVRT145 from Argos.
This model had favourable coverage on various websites, and overall I’m very happy with it. The interface is not going to win any awards, but unlike many no-name Freeview boxes, it’s responsive and does the job. The 80GB hard drive seems to allow for plenty of programmes to be recorded, and picture quality is acceptable using “LP” compression, although it can be a little “blocky” with “EP” compression. Recordings can be recompressed after they have been made, although it is not possible to perform any form of editing such as to trim the start or end of a recording. The first time I tried to view some digital channels, the tuner seemed to take a while to unscramble the picture which was a little odd, but it has worked fine since.
The 14-day TV guide is downloaded every night at 3am so you do have to leave the box on 24/7—and it’s got a fan which might annoy some people wishing to sleep in the same room—but the guide make recording programmes a doddle. The only feature that is really missing is the ability to schedule repeat recordings: a TiVo-owning friend enjoys the ability to issue instructions such as “record all new episodes of Doctor Who” while this box lacks even the ability to record for an hour every Saturday night at 7pm1.
After happily using the box for 2-3 weeks, one morning I awoke to discover that overnight all our stored programmes had been wiped. Half an hour of web-surfing later it seems that this is not uncommon for this model of recorder, but apparently can only occur if signal quality drops below 65% while recording in compressed mode. I’ll be recording in SP-mode only in the future.
Despite the loss of our stored programmes, overall I am really pleased with my new gadget, and I think the main reason for that is Freeview. I don’t think there’s very much on TV worth watching, and when we had a standalone Freeview box, I still couldn’t find anything to watch when I wanted to veg out. But with this box, a quick flick through the programme guide reveals a plethora of delightful repeats of quality programmes such as Jeeves & Wooster and Due South on various digital-only channels. None at convenient times of course, but with a DVR suddenly all are available at a time of my choosing. Even on the traditional channels, recording is so effortless that I find myself recording programmes which sound interesting on the off-chance I may watch them if I just want to switch out my brain for half an hour… With FilmFour becoming free-to-air in July, a Freeview-enabled Digital Video Recorder ought to be an essential item for every living room.
Tim Bray has an insightful article on how a user in charge of their own computing environment should go about ensuring the safety of their data. (“Data” sounds very stuffy, but how would you feel if the friend who fixes your computer turned round and told you all your photos and music were gone forever? What about that CV that took you hours to perfect? Your dissertation?)
Continue reading
Have you ever found a solution to a tricky problem just through talking to someone else about it? The people at 43 Folders suggest you miss out the middle-person and just talk to yourself…
While researching some links for my previous post I came across this Wikipedia entry about an abandoned tube station. I always thought disused Underground stations were a movie “myth”, but it turns out there are quite a few of them! [Wikipedia]
All the travelling I did last year gave me a new determination to explore more of my own country, and especially London as when you live in a place it is very easy to dismiss tourists and completely miss the reasons they have come to visit! Some fun things I have done recently: