Cutbacks

Photograph taken in Bourton-on-the-Water, the Cotswolds.

Mac OS X 10.5 shortcuts

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No, I don’t have a light

No, sorry, I don’t have a light. I don’t smoke. You scowl and turn away, outraged. But have you considered buying your own “lights”, rather than scowling at those inconsiderate non-smokers who do not carry around such paraphernalia for you?

Nor do I carry clean needles, rolled up banknotes, hookahs or portable chemistry sets from Switzerland. That’s very remiss of me, and I should be here to satisfy the cravings and addictions of anyone who accosts me in the street needing a fix.

Speaking of which, do you have a spoon for my coffee? Stir it for me, would you?

No sugar, thanks.

Earth Hour

At 8.30 pm (your local time), you are asked by the World Wildlife Fund to turn off your lights for an hour.

The site (well, one of them – there seems to be some redundancy) also suggests that you “Make a video of your event, upload it to YouTube and add it to our YouTube group” and “Write a live blog post during the event”. Presumably that’s if your video recorder, camera and computer run off pedal power or your own wind turbines in the garden.

Well, it’s only a gesture to those in power, and to each other so you might as well join in.

Big Brother is Poking You

“Facebook could be monitored by the government” says a report in The Telegraph. You might be surprised that that is not already being done, but remember:

The proposal follows plans to retain information about all telephone calls, emails, and internet visits made by everyone in Britain through a multi-billion pound system.

So it’s a budgeting issue. Still, the regime (we can hardly grace it with the term “government” any more) thinks it has money to burn so is probably quite happy to burn more.

Perhaps these schemes should be run on a trial basis first? We could start by monitoring our unelected Prime Minister for a start, bearing in mind the damage he has wreaked during (and before) his time in office, and the deranged excesses of his predecessor.

If you take a prescription for medication to a pharmacy (chemist’s, drug store… whatever you want to call it) in the UK, you might well see a sign telling you that the really dangerous stuff can’t be taken away without extra identity checks – and that this is in response to the “Shipman case”. Harold Shipman was the British G.P. (General Practitioner) who murdered 218 (or more, it is suspected) people. So concluding that increased ID checking of people collecting prescriptions, rather than doctors, is surely missing – or perhaps avoiding – the point.

The former (elected – by people who, it is to be hoped, have learned their lesson) prime minister pushed the UK into a war in Iraq that helped inflame terrorist sentiments and provoke attacks. Without a general election being called, his party’s work is being continued by an anointed successor. It follows that these, and the rest of the creepy New Labour control freaks, should be monitored first. They pose an inestimably larger threat to democracy and freedom than any terrorist and have already done enough damage.

At a time of economic crisis in the UK, it might be considered financially prudent to have a trial run of monitoring schemes. The public might be urged to be less reticent in calling its paid servants, the Members of Parliament, to account and suggest where and how cameras might be applied or inserted to keep an eye on those who do the most damage to liberty, instigate illegal wars and seek to safeguard their position and fortune by spending other people’s money to enslave them and their progeny in perpetuity.

What can they be suggesting?

Left: Oh Gizmo reports today on a “gamer hand exerciser”.

Below: the advertisement appearing beneath the article.

To be fair, the advertisement appears on other pages too, so it’s surely not meant to imply anything… really…

Good riddance to TVs on trains

Rail travellers in Birmingham will soon be free to read, to converse or to gaze out of the windows free from the noise of televisions, thanks to the decision of train operator London Midland to remove all sets from its carriages.

London Midland still has issues to address (their published bar graphs indicating customer satisfaction appear with the top 20% of blank space omitted) but when a train does arrive, travelling on it should soon no longer be as routinely irritating as it has been.

Good. Very good.

Phantom Circuit returns

The internet radio show Phantom Circuit is back:-

Show #15 offers crystal-clear crackling, soothing sounds for grannies, ritual landscapes and rhythms to hack by. All this and Madonna goes Pocket Theremin.

Are you sure?

OmniWeb just threw up an alert. The problem wasn’t OmniWeb’s fault (the ethernet plug had fallen out of its socket). But I wonder if anyone facing this challenge has ever tried this suggested course of action…

OmniWeb V. 6 is still expected

Contrary to what some of us feared, it seems that in fact the OmniWeb Web browser should easily make it to version 6.0 (and hopefully beyond!).

So if you are interested in a browser for Mac OS X that offers site-specific preferences, tabbed browsing with useful previews, convenient saving of sites as PDFs, user-definable shortcuts for sites and versatile handling of cookies and which doesn’t feel alien to the Mac environment (hello Firefox!), you definitely give it a try.

Of course, the browser has some flaws, one of the worst being the shortcut “Cmd-R” in the Download Manager. Is that “R” for “Reveal the downloaded file” as one might think (since that would be in harmony with the use of Cmd-R in other Mac applications)? No, that’s “R” for “Repeat the download right from the start, but first immediately erase the already downloaded file”. Argh! You learn to stumble over Cmd-R, in the same way that, thanks to the abundance of illiterate morons on the internet, you learn to do a double-take every time you see the words “your” and “you’re”.

But despite that and a few other niggles – which are in any case due to be addressed in the forthcoming version 6 – this remains the best Web browser for the Mac.