Notice anything odd at the end of last week?
No, I’m not referring (directly) to the London Car-bombs, but rather something related but much more interesting: Rather than the expected reactions of shock or fear, the general public reaction seems to have been a collective “Meh.”
I was in the local Co-op today, trying to find some fruit juice. There were those which announced on the front of the carton that they were reconstituted from concentrate, and those where you had to read the small-print on the back.
Sometimes, you discover things that realy make you blood boil – especially if apparently motivated by thoughtlessness rather than by design…
Take, for example, the Nintendo DS: an excellent handheld games console (and web browser 😉 ). At first glance, it has an excellent pair of screens, it has lots of innovative an interesting games, and it really has hearts and minds behind it. In addition, the battery life is just incredible. The coup de grâce is that the console is not region-locked, so imported games (which are invariably released months sooner than UK games) can be played without problems… or so it seemed.
An photo-article at The Boston Globe looks at what else the money so far spent on the invasion of Iraq could have been used for…
The AACS LA have resorted to the desperate last-ditch action of issuing Cease & Desist notices to websites publishing the simple sequence of numbers:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
We “upgraded” our Vodafone PCMCIA data cards for USB versions when we bought new laptops with ExpressCard rather than PCMCIA sockets, only to find that the rebranded Huawei E220 was not recognised by Vista at all 🙁
On the Sony laptops I’ve recently been struggling with is a Control Panel extension named “Software Updates”, which is generated by ‘\Windows\System32\ISUSPM.cpl‘. On one system (which I’ve done nothing with) this launches an application called “Software Manager” from, inauspiciously, Macrovision Europe Ltd (boo! hiss!). On the other machine, which I’ve done very little to, clicking this item from the Control Panel for the first time asked me whether the panel worked, or needed elevated privileges. How am I supposed to know? – I’m running it for the first time!
Today, two brand new Sony VAIO N29 business laptops running the Business edition of Vista. Herein is chronicled the sad events which followed…
Happy 25th birthday to the ZX Spectrum – more on slashdot.
Several people had complained in the past that this site is a little slow… well, what did you expect from a passively-cool 300MHz MIPS processor?!
But, I implemented some of the great tips from this blog – notably installing the wp-cache plugin for WordPress, enabling caching in MySQL, and disabling some additional PHP options (although I doubt this last thing has any significant impact).
I dunno – perhaps it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes, but it feels faster to me!