Posted by Ceri Davies
Sun, 13 Mar 2005 18:50:00 GMT
What with the Liberal Democrats planning to sneak in an extra %3.75 income tax (and note that it says “on average”, which means I will probably pay more) and the fact that I still haven’t forgiven Michael Howard for removing my rights to silence and to protest, if Gordon Brown manages to save me £1500 on Wednesday by raising stamp duty limits high enough, then I might even vote for the bastards.
Jon Owen Jones manages to vote against most of the stupid stuff, is responsive to mail and seems to agree with me on most issues (though making me think that is his job, it’s trivial to check), despite being part of Tony Blair’s party. If these two ever get back to me then I may actually have a winner here.
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Sun, 13 Mar 2005 11:19:00 GMT
I had a vision of the future of shopping and, with strange synchronicity, saw that Zoe Williams has been thinking about it too. In yesterday’s Guardian, Zoe guesses that the only reason that banks are forcing shops over to Chip & PIN ”is that, when a signature is faked, they’re liable, whereas when a pin is duped, the customer is”.
Zoe does have somewhat of a reputation for making uninformed guesses about economics, but in this instance Zoe does state that she doesn’t know if the incentive stated above is correct. Although it may be part of the reason, I see a good reason for the merchants to be moving: RFID, plus Chip & PIN (or payment by fingerprint), means that checkout assistants can be dispensed with.
It’s not hard to imagine a system that will only let you leave you the store with the items that you have paid for - oh wait, apparently the ”Shopping Buddy” already does this. If you work in a shop, start thinking about what you want to do next.
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Mon, 21 Feb 2005 22:10:00 GMT
I heard the blender running in the kitchen, and went in to see what Stef was cooking up.
Hummus; only she accidentally used peas instead of chick peas.
Tasted good with sardines though, and at least this woman is no longer alone.
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 18 Feb 2005 21:54:00 GMT
I lost the battle with my email. With over 8000 mails in my primary inbox, and over 20000 unread mails in various other mailboxes, it’s been a hard battle for the last 9 months anyway - one which I’ve always been losing. Over the last month or so I just gave up, and haven’t really been reading any mail at all.
However, in the last two weeks I’ve not only found a graphical mail client that I find usable (Mail.app, of course), but the mutt config that was supposed to work (but mysteriously didn’t) has (just as mysteriously) started working. This means that I can finally actually use IMAP with a little confidence.
With that in mind, and spurred on by item 5 in Merlin’s “deal with mail” tips I’ve decided to delete the lot and reorganise the whole way that I deal with mail so that it’s more in line with what normal people do (one folder per mailing list, blah) and see how I get on with that. This means that if you sent me mail recently then not only have I not read it, but I probably never will, and it feels good.
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 09 Feb 2005 23:57:00 GMT
While Ken, Jun and I were still working on the text of the announcement for the logo contest, someone found the draft and spilt their guts.
It’s actually shocked me to find this all over the Intarweb within the hour, even to the point where there is a petition against getting rid of the Beastie (which is not planned) which has received over 450 signatures while I’ve been collecting URIs for this post. The current count is 590 signatures.
Obviously, Slashdot have posted an ”article” on the subject, and the denizens thereof are being their usual witty selves with links to a picture of Ceren, etc.. I’ll be voting for adamw’s original, I think:
Posted in FreeBSD | no comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Tue, 08 Feb 2005 22:12:00 GMT
When I mentioned that people would get over-excited at the Welsh victory over the English, I really didn’t anticipate this level of excitement. It’s not as if we Welsh don’t get made to look stupid enough already, what with all the idiots.
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Mon, 07 Feb 2005 21:22:00 GMT
Mostly for my own benefit, here is a list of the (non-base) applications I’ve found most useful on the Mac this week, along with where to get them.
Virtue: Virtual Desktop manager for MacOS X (which I’m a little disappointed isn’t standard, but then it may be confusing for Gran). I’ve made a little .mov format film of it working (QuickTime is not the POS that it is on Windows either)
GPGMail: A dirty hack to get GPG integrated into Apple’s Mail.app
Believe it or not, iTunes. I don’t even have an iPod, and this still outshines everything similar
Firefox. Whatever.
Not a long list, but it hasn’t been a week yet.
I’ve been through a huge amount of shit too; it’s good to know that the spirit of Open Source is not dead. The nice thing about MacOS X seems to be that you can put a GUI round anything (let’s say chown(8), for example) and release it as ShareWare. This time next year, we’ll all be millionaires!
Posted in Apple, Software | no comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Sat, 05 Feb 2005 19:18:00 GMT
It was messy and scrappy, but we stuffed the Saes for the first time in twelve years. Whilst this is obviously great news, it will inevitably lead to everyone (on the TV at least) suggesting that Welsh rugby is at the crest of a new wave of greatness, only to be proven wrong when we lose against Italy or Ireland. Mark my words.
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Mon, 31 Jan 2005 21:02:00 GMT
Have been listening to the new Lemon Jelly album pretty much non-stop for the last two days. It’s doing wonders for my general mood and I’m enjoying it, but I can’t help thinking that it does sound a bit like just another Ministry of Sound compilation. My final word will probably come when I see them on tour next month.
My Mac mini arrived today as well, and it’s enough to say that I’m pretty much sold. I’ve finally found a mailer that isn’t Mutt that looks vaguely useful, and it’s got a GUI too (so no more questions from brian and paul about whether I’ve ever heard of X Window). Xcode looks decent enough, and the other applications are eminently usable. There should be an X server on here somewhere, so I can continue to do everything from this one machine. Oh, and DVD playback works.
Bring on the accusations of homosexuality.
Posted in Apple | no comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Mon, 31 Jan 2005 21:01:00 GMT
Having finally agreed with Bill Palmer on something - not buying a G4 powerbook - Apple have pulled out the big guns.
I’m still not getting one, but I’m sorely tempted; with the 7% discount I get from work, the prices are almost too tempting. Luckily for me, I still can’t afford them - sorry Apple.
Posted in Apple | no comments
