I've always been fascinated by the way that water 'sticks' to surfaces, causing nuisance phenomena like teapots that always dribble from the spout. But sometimes you can use the stickiness to your advantage...
I regularly fill the water container for our two cats. The design is quite smart in that it provides a constantly replenished supply, at least whilst there is water left. It is little more than an inverted plastic container in a dish, and atmospheric pressure (countering the partial vacuum in the container) stops the water overflowing. Filling the container, clipping on the dish and inverting it over a sink gives a result which is less than perfect - the water from the container fills the dish (and some of it also tends to spill into the sink during the inverting process) and so the water container is about half empty. I've tried filling the sink and trying to fill the container under water, but the sink isn't big enough to do it properly, and this wastes lots of water. Instead, I turn the assembled container and dish through 90 degrees, and dribbles the water into the container by letting the water stick to the dish. The container quickly fills up, and gradually bringing it back to the normal position fills the dish. The end result is a container that is very nearly completely filled with water, and a very neat use for the stickiness of water!
Whilst I buy a lot of CDs, I've also gradually been seduced by the instant gratification of online purchase of individual tracks, even to the extent of buying MP3 format tracks instead of linear WAVs or AIFFs.
Buying CDs online is easy and fast, but has one major downside - the hub in the centre of the CD case. Most CD cases weren't designed to be exposed to the trials of being posted, and so many of my CD purchases arrive with damaged hubs. Two examples from today's batch of deliveries illustrate this very well.
The first is from a black plastic 'Digipak', where the CD hub and finger access areas are moulded as part of a single piece of plastic that is stuck onto a cardboard cover that bends round to surround the CD. This hub had lost all of the top teeth, and only had half remaining. Opening a shrink-wrapped CD to find a shower of teeth falling out is a depressing feeling.
The second is from a conventional clear plastic 'jewel case'. Severe forces during transit have reduced this hub to just two teeth, plus lots of casualties rattling around inside.
Exhibit three is different - a survivor from earlier... The temptation to type: 'and here's one I received earlier' is enormous. Some jewel cases have the teeth connected across the top, and this seems to provide more or less total protection against tooth loss. Or at least, from my own personal experience, I've never encountered any teething problems with these. Now I would love to be able to credit the manufacturer here, but I couldn't find any identification marks at all. But well done, wherever you are!
My son reliably informs me that 'The Orange Box' is a bargain, containing, as it does, several first person-based games for the PS3 at a low price. The connection with oranges or orange boxes escaped me... (other than orange being the main colour on the box!)
I was more intrigued by the concept of it including 'Half-Life 2', which should surely be called just 'Life'? (Although there would be the possibility then of confusion with 'Conway's Game of Life'...)
There again, is the next in the series called 'One Third Life 3'?
Sometimes you have the right tool at the right time, in the right place. But this is a rare event.
So I was rather gratified when I was travelling by train recently, and I tried to listen to a podcast on my iPhone. Headphones in, I turned it on and listened... and strained to hear...and turned it up to max, and still couldn't hear it unless I cupped my hands over my ears.
The problem? Not my hearing, but the train I was travelling in. It was a single carriage train - the 11:16 from Ipswich to Cambridge. And it was loud inside. Very loud. So loud that listening to an iPhone turned up to max volume was not really audible on headphones against the din coming from the diesel motor.
For once, I had the right tool - well, almost the right tool. I had downloaded 'Decibel' from the App Store some days earlier, and had casually seen how noisy it was at work and at home, but nothing more than casual use, and I hadn't calibrated it. But now I had a noise to measure, and the highest average reading I got was 89, although it was consistently above 86 for most of the journey. The conductor was very good at SHOUTING to the travelling customers, or is that victims of ear assault?
Now I'm not an expert in environmental noise, but it was very noisy in that train, and it made the 88 minute journey all the longer to have to put up with a loud companion... Not a pleasant experience.
Just a quick word about one of the latest projects that I've been working on recently at work - the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour Hero Powercards game is now live and available for people to play. Produced for the Women's Tennis Association, 'Hero Powercards' is a video-rich interactive game that uses real-world player statistics and rankings. It has been developed as part of the "Looking For A Hero" campaign for digital agency Analog Folk, with game programming by Bloc, and Real Time Content as the video partner.
There I was, enjoying a decaf mocha grande at the Starbucks Lakeside Suite at the Elveden Forest Center Parcs resort in Suffolk, UK (possibly one of my favourite locations in the world to have a coffee, with perhaps the Starbucks just around the corner from the Jim Henson Company in Hollywood as a close second), when up strolls a peacock.
Now Elveden Forest is in that large assembly of trees known as Thetford Forest, and so wildlife isn't that unusual, but peacocks have that stately 'look at me' attitude rather more than your run-of-the-mill moorhen, mallard or grey squirrel.
Center Parcs has long been one of my favourite holiday destinations - an amazing way to get away from it all without getting too far away.
As you might expect, people put down their coffees and got out their cameras, and the peacock was suitably fawned over, admired, and talked about in hushed whispers. No sign of his peahen, though - perhaps her preference is for another brand of coffee?
Once all the fuss was over, a squirrel ran around the patio, weaving in and out between the chairs and tables, looking remarkably similar to the one that I'd snapped earlier in the morning from the villa. But this one was moving rather swiftly, and I only managed to catch a shot from behind my mug, and another of a twitching tail zipping away to the left behind a chair...
The squirrel that morning had turned on 'uber-cute' mode as it looked around the patio table...
Digital cameras and blog do enable the most remarkable uses of technology, don't they?
I've set up two MacBooks recently, and I thought it might be a good idea to gather all of my background research into one place. There's no magic or imposition here, just my personal opinion on some of the things to consider when setting up a new Mac.
1. Leopard
Tiger (10.4) is good, but Leopard (10.5) is better in some key areas - the ones that I found significant (and upgrade-worthy) were Time Machine(incremental backups) and the improved Quartz Composer(Which I would definitely recommend for anyone who wants to play with interactive graphics).
2. Security
The basic approach here is to create a 'Working' user account with no administrator privileges and to use that for everyday use, and to have an 'Admininstrator' user account with administrator privileges. Different passwords and some adjustments to the default settings should give you a pretty safe computer. I followed these intructions from MacGeekery:
It is possible to install a bootable (on Intel Macs) version of Leopard onto a 16 Gig USB Flash drive. It can take a while to install on slower drives, but the resulting portability and assurance is great. All I did was follow these instructions from Maciverse:
Once done, you insert the USB drive, hold the alt button and power up, then select the USB drive.
4. Bootable Time Machine Drive
Time Machine makes incremental backup easy, but the default setup means that you have to do a restore when things go wrong. I'm much happier if there's the minimum to do when stressed by one failure, and so here's how to make the Time Machine drive bootable:
The one point of concern here is that when Time machine fills the drive, then there is no space for working files. One solution seems to be to store a sacrificial 1 Gig (or more) of files in a folder that can be deleted when required. Time Machine does not overwrite files, so this should help.
5. Applejack
When Mac OSX falls over, then probably the worst circumstance is when something is wrong during the Unix start-up, or if you don't get as far as the GUI starting up. Applejack provides a simple trouble-shoot or clean-up without requiring any knowledge of the Unix command-line at all.
Note that you access Applejack by holding down Command+S (Command is that 'propeller' symbol) during a reboot, and then typing 'applejack' when the text prompt on the black screen appears. Then type 'a' for auto. I've only used it twice, but it rescued me each time!
6. Cocktail
Cocktail does all of the Unix routine maintenance jobs that should happen when a machine is left on all the time - but if you turn off your Mac then they never happen. It also does a lot more besides!
I'm told that a partial free alternative is Maintenance ( http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16790 ), but I've always used Cocktail and have no experience of Maintenance.
SuperDuper! makes backups easy - and once you've done that first backup, then only changed files are backed up, so it is much faster for the second backup (unless you have changed a lot of files in between the two backups!)
Quicksilver provides a way to control applications on a Mac with the qwerty keyboard instead of the mouse. Once learned (and it isn't difficult) it can really speed up many common activities. Definitely worth trying out, and persisting with, especially on a MacBook.
You will have noticed that there's quite a few links to Mac-oriented blogs in this post - you will find them an invaluable resource for finding out, keeping up to date, and more...
Image via Wikipedia
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