Charlie Brooker on the pseudoscience behind Brain Gym:
Confuse fantasy with reality and you might find yourself doing crazy things, like trying to wave hello
to Ian Beale each time you see him on the telly, or buying homeopathic remedies - both of which are
equally boneheaded pursuits.
Equally:
Look at the accredited practitioners of the art: top of their list of qualified Brain Gym
“instructor/consultants” is a woman who is apparently also a “chiropractor for humans and animals”.
That’s nothing: I read tarot cards for fish.
CERN are being sued to stop using their new $8 billion Large Hadron Collider.
Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear
Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other
horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called
a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called
“strange matter.”
Dominic Szablewski has created an interest new blogging software called Asaph Microblog that’s even more minimal than Tumblr. Watch his screencast to see how it works.
Of most interest to Nikon D3 owners, Sigma announces a fast standard prime lens with a HSM motor, filling a gap that Nikon has left wide open for years.
If it’s as good as Sigma’s 30mm f/1.4 lens for DX crop cameras, then this should be a big winner. I know I’d get one if I was buying a D3.
Make your own stylish pinhole cameras that work with 35mm film. My favourite is the Peyote.
Adam Shepard reduced his life to a small bag, $25, and the clothes on his back to see if he could get a car, a furnished apartment, and $2500 in savings in a year.
To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or
mention his education.
(Via Kottke.)
Could this be the first true iPhone killer? Although I’ve had bad experiences with Windows Mobile devices in the past, if Microsoft pulls it’s finger out on this one and creates a competitive operating system to OS X on the iPhone, this could be the one.
eBay plans to ban sellers giving buyers negative or neutral feedback from May. While I appreciate it’s reasoning that “many buyers would not leave negative comments for fear that sellers would retaliate”, sellers now have no public response to a buyer giving them unfair negative feedback, unless they get eBay involved.
The current system is flawed, but there isn’t going to be a perfect solution and this isn’t getting us anywhere closer.
The proposition of a 16GB iPhone is very tempting indeed, but unfortunately it carries a price premium over the already expensive 8GB iPhone model of $100.
Microsoft proposed a hostile take-over of Yahoo! today. At $31 a share, that’s 62% over the closing price of Yahoo! shares on Thursday. It just seems like a very bad way to compete against Google, and they’re paying over the odds for what is a struggling company.
To stay inline with the rest of their price-plans, O2 is increasing the allowance of the cheapest £35 per-month tariff to 600 minutes and 500 text messages (up from 200 of each), and cutting the cost of the £55 down to £45 per-month.
They seem very good value now, especially as you get unlimited internet access and free WiFi at The Cloud hotspots. Might even be enough to tempt me away from T-Mobile.
I’m back from a bit of a hiatus on Ejecutive, and from all writing and work in general after a particularly busy exam season. I’ll have a lot of posts planned, including a review of the Toshiba Qosmio G40 laptop with a (now defunct) HD-DVD writer, and a round-up on the new cameras and lenses announced at PMA.
I think Sun knows that Java needs tighter integration with a specific database, like Microsoft’s .NET does with SQL Server, and bought MySQL. Perhaps even Java stored procedures in the future.
BAA is lifting its one-bag restriction to carry-on luggage tomorrow for UK airports.
You still can’t carry on more than 100ml of liquids in a single bottle though, but Muji sell very handy and squeezable 100ml bottles.
New version of Adium X, which has quite a few improvements. As I only use MSN, the biggest one for me is that they’ve fixed the bug that showed MSN display pictures in a very low resolution.
Last year, I wrote about software I used regularly for work or for fun, my Essentials. Since then I’ve moved over from half-Mac-half-PC user to a full fledged member of the Mac society, but I still use a virtual Windows install for some of my work.
Here are my essentials in 2007, in no particular order:
OS X
Mail. I use Google Apps for my e-mail on my own domain, and I had been using it’s own web interface and Mailplane. But ever since Google added IMAP to Gmail, I’ve ditched those and started using Apple Mail again, especially now in it’s version 3.1 guise with much improved search and IMAP support. The little fucker still likes to crash though.
Safari. I sometimes find myself flipping between Camino and Safari, trying to decide which browser I prefer, and very often I just can’t seem to decide. But Camino doesn’t seem to play with the proxy servers at university very well and hangs for a few seconds every time I navigate go a page, which rules it out here. Add to that Safari’s excellent in-line find and its ability to show PDF files, and that wins it over for me.
Adium X. The best IM client for OS X, no doubt about it. Just lacks video support right now, but I use Skype anytime I want to video conference (which is very rarely) so it doesn’t bother me.
iTunes. Still the best music player, nothing else touches it on OS X.
Adobe Lightroom. I tried Aperture, but I find myself preferring Lightroom even though Aperture seems to be a more polished application. Lightroom is just far more powerful at photo editing, and that’s what wins it for me.
Adobe Photoshop CS3. I actually find myself using Photoshop a whole lot less ever since I started using proper RAW image processors such as Aperture and Lightroom, but it’s still useful for some touching-up or restoration, and it’s still the web designers image editor of choice.
VLC. This can be a bit of a bitch on OS X, but the simple fact that it plays all my videos with only the rare complaint means its my preference over Quicktime + Perian.
VMware Fusion. Even though I’ve moved over to OS X full time, I still do a fair amount of work on Windows (see below). I had the choice of either VMware Fusion, or Parallels Desktop, and at the time VMware were offering a half price discount, and I felt it was faster and less resource-hungry than Parallels. It runs my Windows XP Professional without much fault, although it does stretch the limits of my 2GB of RAM.
iCal. Still the best calendaring system for OS X, although it took a little while to get used to the new interface introduced in version 3.0.1 that shipped with Leopard. It’s integration with many other apps and iSync make it my choice over the competition. That and it’s free.
OmniFocus. My workload has increase significantly this year, so I’ve started to follow a GTD philopshy to my work, and I’ve found OmniFocus seemed the best tool to assist me. But I’ve just started testing an alpha version of Things, and my allegiances may change depending on how Things pans out (it’s currently a lot prettier).
Yojimbo. I don’t use it as much as other people, but for collecting bits and pieces of information and finding it afterwards, it’s priceless.
Papers. I’ve been reading a huge amount of scientific papers for my dissertation, and having an iTunes style interface to catalogue them with Papers is a massive time saver. It’s not without its flaws though, but there are some innovative features that means I parted with my hard earned cash.
Transmit. Same as last year, still the best FTP client (and for WebDAV too).
Delicious Library. Still waiting for the ever elusive version 2.0, but 1.6 is hanging in. Saves me buying duplicate DVDs and books (I don’t buy CDs anymore) with a quick and easy search. Scanning in the barcode is also fun.
Pages. I get on with pages, more because I have to and the only real alternative is Microsoft Word (which I’m still waiting for). There needs to be some more competition.
TextMate. I don’t use it as much now as I mainly write C# code in Visual Studio 2008. But one of my goals is to learn Ruby on Rails and this should prove very useful.
Unison. Best newsgroup app for OS X. It costs, but it’s worth it.
Twitterrific. There is no other Mac Twitter client to use, a great little app that does a simple task very well.
Windows
Firefox. Still beats IE out of the water, and the betas of 3.0 are looking very promising.
Visual Studio 2008. Only recently release by Microsoft, I haven’t had enough time to properly delve into it yet, but I’ve stopped creating new projects in VS2005 now, and Twitterlicious has been migrated over to VS2008 (although it’s still a .NET 2.0 application).
SQL Server 2005. The de facto database for Windows programmers. Full integration with Visual Studio as well, which makes it a pleasure to work with.
Photographs of adverts on the street that have been “vandalised” to look like the people in them have been decapitated.