Macbook Meh, &c.
This is my obligatory Apple fanboy Macworld opinion post. Deluded advocates of other, lesser computer and consumer electronics manufacturers should avert their gaze now. (more…)
Cussedness Awards 2007
- Literary event of the year: Kittenwar: The Book. The launch party was brilliant fun, thanks to everyone who turned up.
- Best book about cats not written by me and Fraser: Cat Getting Out of a Bag by Jeffrey Brown. This is a smashing little book, endearing and beautifully observed. Chronicle are clearly the quality cat-book publisher.
- Best book not about cats and not written by me and Fraser: Oystercatchers, by my mate Sue, read it now.
- Album of the year: We Can Create by Maps. Lovely.
- Most overrated album of the year: Neon Bible by Arcade Fire. Am I the only person in the world who thinks this is a load of whiny rubbish? And I liked Funeral, too. Deeply disappointing.
- Best animated feature, and about time too: Futurama - Bender’s Big Score.
- Best computer I have owned to date: 15″ Apple MacBook Pro. Not quite perfect, and Leopard is a bit crashy still, but much nicer than using Windows on some shonky PC.
- Depressing non-event of the year: our house sale. The current state of this almost eight-month long transaction is so fragile that I’m wary of discussing it in public for fear of the remote possibility that our buyers might read what I think of them and take offence, so I’m going to leave it until the sale has fallen through entirely or (unlikely, this) completed before relating the full saga. It’s a cracking story though; the whole experience has led me to believe that English property law needs serious reform, perhaps involving the statutory deployment of stocks and public floggings as deterrent measures for recalcitrant parties.
- Scary number of the year: 30.
That’s about it, see you next year.
I am 30
It’s my birthday! I’m 30 years old. How did that happen? Time to abandon all ambitions of becoming a rock star, I suppose. It would seem that climbing Everest isn’t technically out of the question yet, though. And apparently I’m still a young adult, which is reassuring.
Upon investigation it turns out that 30 is actually a more interesting number than I thought, being the third primorial, a square pyramidal, “the largest number with the property that all smaller numbers relatively prime to it are prime“, the first sphenic number (I’d never even heard of that one), and the first Guiga number (I’m still too hungover from celebrating last night to even start to think about that sort of thing).
Also, no-one I know will get this but I’m posting it anyway because it’s ace: fantastic birthday drawing of Avatar characters as Futurama characters by my brilliant wife (the Deviant Art links might not work first time, that site still runs like it’s hosted on Commodore 64s full of mashed potato).
Bookhunter by Jason Shiga
Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter is one of the best comics I’ve read in ages. You can read it online at that last link, but it’s so good that everyone should go out and buy the lovely print copy, it’s even better in dead-tree format. I picked it up because I loved Fleep, and like Fleep it’s a geeky masterpiece, but Bookhunter is much funnier and, not being set completely inside a phone box, is naturally more expansive. It’s basically a crime-solving procedural, but set in a world where books are accorded a status more normally reserved for works of art and bits of shiny rock, and where librarians hold rank in the police force. It also has 1970s mainframe hacking and high-speed action sequences, and beyond that I’m not going to say any more because I don’t want to spoil the story. Read it now.
HTC Wizard Bluetooth File Transfer
If you want to send a file to an HTC Wizard via Bluetooth, make sure that you enable ‘Accept all incoming beams’ in the ‘Beam’ section of ‘Connections’ in ‘Settings’. Yes, that’s right, in Windows Mobile 5 you have to change a setting for the infra-red port to enable a bit of Bluetooth functionality. I suppose they both basically operate using the EM spectrum, so who cares if they’re eight or nine orders of magnitude apart and completely unrelated in every other respect?
Lovecraft On Cats
I’ve been rereading H. P. Lovecraft’s stories recently, because they’re entertainingly detached from reality, and also because I discovered that he is now freely available in .txt format so I can read him on my phone, in the dark, for added spookiness. Whilst digging for background I found his essay on Cats and Dogs, which is new to me, and made me giggle. He comes down firmly on the side of the peerless and softly gliding cat, which performs its mysterious orbit with the relentless and obtrusive certainty of a planet in infinity,
as you would expect from someone who created a Gothic fantasy centered on avenging the killing of a kitten, and who wrote his own mog into one of his best stories. (more…)
“I love stealing, I love taking things!”
Good news everyone: Futurama is back!
Well, sort of. It’s only back if you’re American, so yet again I have had to resort to (ahem) unofficial distribution channels in order to obtain a copy of a movie that doesn’t even have a UK release date yet. I hasten to add that once Fox remember that there are a load of Futurama fans beyond the borders of the United States, I will gladly, gleefully even, cough up for a legal copy: it’s really good.
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Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
If you want a proper review of Leopard you’re in the wrong place. I’m not qualified enough or enthusiastic enough to bash out thousands of words about the latest version of OS X, so instead I’m just going to list a few of my initial impressions.
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Wordpress Dynamic Site URL Plugin
Behold! I just created my first Wordpress plugin: Dynamic Site URL.
Actually, strictly speaking, I didn’t write it, I just lifted it from this thread on wordpress.org and added one extra line to make it work on all parts of a Wordpress install. Hooray for this mysterious chap, who created the five lines of code that do the real work.
It’s useful if you want to run one blog under two domain names and have your links based on the currently active URL. (more…)
MacBook Pro @ and ” Key Remapping in Parallels
I recently treated myself to a new MacBook Pro, and one of the first things I did (after fitting a ridiculous amount of RAM) was to install Parallels. This splendid piece of software allows OS X to run other operating systems in a virtual machine, which means I can do boring Windows-based day-job work on my shiny new Apple laptop.
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