Friday, December 23, 2005

Makezine has an Ancestor

I am very impressed and enthralled by ‘Make’. The quarterly magazine, published by O’Reilly, shows us how to make wonderfully useful things.

Rummaging through my father’s old magazines, I found a big bunch of early issues of ‘Practical Mechanics’. Here is a cover from one dated march 1937. So you see this is not a new idea, just that we have much more technology available to us in this century.

The cover story in this 1937 issue of ‘Practical Mechanics’ was Profitable Printing at Home. The article is, in part, a review of a small printing press invented by Donald Aspinall. I quote:

In 1922 he built his first machine, found it satisfactory, and put it on the market. It was named the "Adana" -an anagram of the initial letters of the inventor’s name ....

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Wednesday, September 28, 2005

No Direction homepage

Back in 1970, I looked a bit like Dylan. It wasn’t that I tried. My hair was long, curly and dark, and my modest diet gave me the gaunt look.

Last night, like many others of my generation, I reflected on those ‘long hair’ days, when I strummed along to ’Girl from the North Country’, ’To Ramona’ and ’My Back Pages’. The Martin Scorsese documentary - ‘No Direction Home’ was enthralling but also disappointing.

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Tuesday, July 26, 2005

The Art of SCART

Who invented SCART? Home Entertainment Nightmare connections!

The answer (often the case these days) is found on WikiPedia. The reason I bring this up though, is that I find it particularly frustrating in that corner of the house where we have TV, DVD player, VCR and cableTV box, it is very difficult to get any sensible solution to connecting all of this together.

We are luckier than many I suspect, becuse our (rather ancient) Sony TV has 2 scart inputs on the back and this removes the need for any adaptor box.

I have recently had to get one of these multi-scart connector boxes for my parents ... 

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Thursday, July 21, 2005

Planning the Future

When starting up new projects, I always find it very challenging to make any predictions about the time it will take to accomplish this or that task.

I am very pleased with BaseCamp, but when faced with the idea of milestones for a project, I can only make the roughest of guesses.

Calendars are great for forward planning and scheduling events, but what are the best ways of representing the future visually?

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Sunday, May 08, 2005

Tiger Hurts

I am now running Tiger. I wish I hadn’t upgraded! I was happy before - now I have some problems I could do without. There are certainly some good new features but I find that iPhoto is crashing frequently and I am getting a very weak wireless signal from my Linksys wireless router. I admit that this is now looking rather outdated, but it worked fine before!

Searching Google, I see that I am not the only one with iPhoto 5.02 crashes, but nothing official about it at Apple. The Discussion forums show that other users have the same problem.

I don’t want to make this posting totally negative, so I should add that the web browser Safari works well and the RSS reader is a particular joy to use.