The recent report from Alcohol Concern that alcohol should be prohibited from children at home under 15 feels wrong. Lucy and I had already discussed when Oscar should get some wine and we decided 12 was a good age. Essentially the same age as we both started. The French do seem to have a healthier attitude to alcohol, being disapproving of being drunk in public. Caroline Flint correctly pointed out that this law would be unenforceable.
The rise in drinking in teenage and pre-teenage children is worrying, but as prohibition showed in the USA, bans only increase the attraction. The overall culture towards drink is amiss in the UK. Drinking for the sake of getting drunk is too popular in the UK. I'm quietly hoping that the smoking ban will encourage a less alcohol focused evening culture in the UK.
April 2007 Archives
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Free book on nanotechnology, USA only though, pity.
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Converts winmail.dat files to content usable on a Mac. Also handles contact and calendar info too
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Space settlement stuff from Nasa tracking ideas through the last few decades
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Good coverage of the new earth like extrasolarplanet, exciting stuff, but it is not realistic to think of visiting for a a while. It is 20 light years away and has twice our earth gravity.
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Free book from Canon on how their EF lens system works, how they are designed, specifications etc.
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My cousin Richard put this collection of Brazillian architecture photography showing the modern architecture styles present in the country. Lovely work.
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Lots of free fonts from selected designers, some interesting fonts.
You'll have noticed the patchy content creation on take one onion over the past while. So I've decided to start a tumblelog on the lovely tumblr.com. It is called "save for later".
I hope this will mean the flow of content from me will increase and I can then write on here instead of backing up dozens of posts in drafts. So, this means new feeds, the existing take one onion feed continues, but if you want me in terms of twitter, flickr and del.icio.us then you should subscribe to save for later (rss).
helion:~ gavin$ sudo gem install mofo
WARNING: Improper use of the sudo command could lead to data loss
or the deletion of important system files. Please double-check your
typing when using sudo. Type "man sudo" for more information.
To proceed, enter your password, or type Ctrl-C to abort.
MacOS X 10.4.9 added the prompt ?
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Psychology is an important aspect of how agile works, this is a good short overview of how human behaviour is supported in agile methods.
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Clever metal device from Weber, pile the charcoal in the top of the cylinder and then put crumpled paper in the space in the bottom, light paper and wait 15 minutes or so. Simple and effective chemical free barbeque lighting.
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I'm going, it should be fun
Prompted by reading Everyware
The first is the best, my car key is a flat black card about 4-5mm thick which fits in my wallet. When I'm close to the car it senses the presence of the card and then when I put my hand into the door opening mechanism, I break an infrared or similar circuit and the car opens the doors. So keyless entry, then I sit in the drivers seat and with the card still in my pocket I press the start button whilst pressing down on the clutch. The car starts and the electronic hand brake disengages as I move off. So no ignition key and all I need concern myself with is setting off into traffic. At eurofoo, last summer the size and capability of the card really surprised some of my friends.
The other two devices are light sensing headlights, which turn on and off at dusk and in tunnels, again I don't need to think about the lights. Occasionally I put the sidelights on if the gloom warrants it. The last clever device is rain sensing windscreen wipers, they work well, but there is a setup issue. They rain sense on position 1, but you need to turn the car on with the wipers in position 0 and then turn them to position 1 to turn on rain sensing.
So three everyware devices in our car already. They are mostly seamless in their implementation and make the driving experience more satisfying. I have to think less about the process of driving and can concentrate on the more important issues like the view and road position. They also help in the anthropomorphism of the car, it feels more alive.
When will my potential AppleTV or desktop iMac be able to help out my PowerBook on compute intensive image processing. I own all these computers, so I can install what I like. There are distributed computing environments eg Qmaster for a range of high end rendering applications like Final Cut Pro and Shake etc. So when will this become a reality in the home?
I can imagine a version of Aperture 2.0 which will look for local compute resources and send batches over Wifi to the computer and wait for response. I realise there are bandwidth issues, but say thumbnail processing following import or any batch operation would benefit.
I've been dipping into Monocle over the last month or so and I've been really enjoying it. The writing is good, the coverage of different themes gives me something to read depending on my mood. It does remind me at times of a high class in flight magazine, but I think that is fine. I've found it great for background details for fiction too, part of my long term plan to write some shorts or a novel.
Much of the content is largely voyeuristic, in that I'm not going to buy the items or visit the places, but I read them nonetheless and I feel I could. So maybe it is armchair tourism at times too. I've now bought, but not read, issue two. I can't see myself subscribing, but I will keep buying Monocle from time to time.
