This morning's idle thoughts

USA: Good morning, mes petits singes capitulards, may we count on your vast historical experience in South East Asia, and parts of your secure communications infrastructure, to aid us in our little bagarre with North Korea? Is it that it is that you perhaps maintain a secure worldwide communications network link for NATO operations, which in the event of an attaque nucléaire on any NATO member would be required to assist under Section 5 of the NATO treaty? Would it be deranging you to just make certain that it's still there, in full working order, and most particularly that les geeks et les militaires de la Corée du Nord can be utterly unaware of its existence?

France: But yes, my old, nothing of more easy. Its secrecy total is assured... Name of a pipe! We must take of the measures incredibly foolish directly!

That's geeks for you

For that sort of money, they could have bought eight and a quarter of Marilyn Monroe's bras.

Off to a flying start

I'm a great fan of her dad [a Classical historian who likes Alexander the Great and hates garden gnomes], but confessing that she shouldn't have publicly announced her title in advance and saying it was "just tweet to old school friend" does rather imply that she doesn't quite grasp the whole Internet thing.

I can see why Apple and Blue Peter are a good fit

Children have been making things for them for years...

Cider: it just works.

Drink different!

Did OK for a long while, but pants now.

SWMBO is addicted to Sky TV, so when we moved I signed up for their broadband: for six years or so it was cheap and almost perfectly reliable at 12-13Mbps, but since Christmas it dropped to less than 2Mbps. As it happens, BT Extra Wizzo Fibre has recently become available: so in a month or so I'll be able to moan about that instead.

Spawn of Satan because Murdoch. Yes, we're still paying him for the telly. Yes, I am ashamed.

Brilliant!

The animations made it.

[Couldn't help thinking that the B3TA version would have had Stanley dying of hypoxia, though...]

Strictly off topic

I suppose it might infringe somebody's privacy, but I wish yo'd identify where you took the photographs; I /know/ I know where that is, but I just can't bring it to mind. That's a Chesters coach, so it's very likely not too far from Manchester; but that's all I've got.

Reading the article was a relief

I was afraid from the headline that, erm, the Scottish Highlands would be getting blanket 3G coverage. One of the great selfish pleasures of my trips to the remoter parts of the Highlands is that people know there's no way of getting in touch with me.

Another vote for MythTV

Except when the local freeview transmitter decides to renumber its channels. Again. [Not that that's a MythTV problem, exactly...]

Can't believe you didn't just ask

I read the article twice, and there's no mention of you asking Apple for comment.

I mean, you never know: Apple might have told you all about it, if you'd only asked.

Your cut-out'n'keep guide

Shortly after launch a hardware issue with ##### will arise, which Apple will ignore until the swell of protest becomes too great. Some time later Apple will punish customers for %%%%ing with their tablets, sparking a well-worn debate about the walled garden and ownership of their device. This will last almost until the release of the next Apple tablets, which will be &&&&&er than their previous ones.

[In the meantime Android will suffer a @@@@@ lapse and ***** issues. RIM will complete another orbit of the drain.]

Gosh. Well, well, well

"...what iPad 3 owners already knew..."

And, given that iPad 3 owners are the only people likely to care...

Far too cuddly to be Jobs

It's Alan Yentob.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2012/040112yentob.html

So if there's a difference of 10p a litre, and you're buying, say, 50 litres, you're saving a fiver. How far out of your way would you go for a fiver?

Oblig XKCD: http://xkcd.com/951/

At least I learnt something from all this

Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game.

Lag's too slow

I read in another review that the shutter response is average-to-long, so I wouldn't be able to use it for the sort of point-and-shoot photography that those old rangefinders were so perfect for. It's a pity, because it does look desirable otherwise.

Because a stand staffed solely by patent lawyers might send the wrong message.

O tempora o mores

It's "strait-laced", not "straight-laced". Strait means narrow or tight, confined, or strict. Straight means, er, straight.

Oh, and Woz, it's "want to", not "wanna". You'll never get anywhere using language like that.

Three pretty obvious points

One, babies have always pointed at things.

Two, babies have always loved shiny moving things.

Three, what should we conclude? That we should dumb down interfaces to baby standards?

Value for money

It had an Apple logo on it, what more did she want anyway?

Lorem ipsum

And this story turned up in my newsfeed with an ad for Windows Server attached. Excellent targeted advertising!

Power To The People!

Nineteen posts so far, and none of them pays homage to the Tooting Popular Front? They had the right idea:

http://youtu.be/4TxZQClIqQY

Lorem ipsum

""Twitter is a social network platform which is available to most people who have a computer and therefore any content on it is not subject to the same copyright laws as it is already in the public domain"

As it happens, I've found a fantastic platform which is available to most people who have a computer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts - can we assume that its content is in the public domain?

Hope they tried the Help facility first.

It looks like you're transferring cargo from the space shuttle to the ISS.

Would you like help with that?

Happy days

"Portable as a suitcase full of bricks", people said at the time. The luggability wasn't an issue for my father and me (it never moved once from where we first installed it); what sold it for us was the software bundle, which was unique.

The tiny screen gave us pause. The salesman pointed out that text was the same size and legibility as newsprint: all the same, we splashed out on a whopping 9" green monitor. When that died, we never bothered replacing it. It was the easiest computer to maintain I've ever had: if I recall correctly, there were no software updates in nearly ten years use!

Eventually, of course, clients started asking for Windows-compatible files: we decided with some regret to retire the Osborne and buy an IBM PS/1, as I recall, running Windows 3.1.

(And that, gentle readers, was where our troubles began...)

the Dali Llama

Playmobil figure pliz!

Have you tried switching it off and on again?

Can't have independent media, now can we? It's not exactly unheard of for anti-terrorist legislation to be used to keep the proles down.

"...the Internet would need to be shut down to prevent further damage to the country, which apparently can no longer function without the Net..." - "In order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy it."

"...those bills were tabled": I do not think that word means what you think it means. In the UK, to table an issue means to put it on the table for discussion. Where a USAian would say "those bills were tabled", we would say "those bills were shelved".

I'll have a P please, Bob

"Android came equally out of nowhere to capture 2.3 per cent of the market with total shipments of 2.3 units". So, um, not a huge market, then.

Pint because a nice bitter would be about 2.3 units.

A new game to play with any news item

"What dumb knee-jerk response is Sarah Palin going to make to it?"

Of course,

if you spin the platters up to 8800rpm you can retrieve that file you accidentally deleted. Except that your USB connection has to deliver 1.2GW.

That's canny hard like

Next up: Newcastle University sensors dropped into the Arctic Ocean wearing a strappy top and a pair of white stilettos.

Howay man, mine's the t-shirt with the snow on it.

riverrun

past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth, Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war; nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's giorgios while they went doublin their mumper

If you've got a clever phone & a decent signal

http://www.miqlive.com.

Subtractive mixing?

I for one welcome our new brown-hatted overlord. Doesn't sound right, somehow.