Category Archives: General

Here is a video showing a breakdown of a lumix digital camera. (mikeselectricstuff/YouTube) The amazing thing is how small the mechanical parts are, and how many there are in there. This camera probably costs no more than £200, yet there are minuscule parts … Continue reading →

Kodak, perhaps the photography company, appears to have filed for bankruptcy. It seems to be something of a representative for the state of the non-digital photography market, which looks pretty much dead except for a few limited areas. In recent … Continue reading →

Just hours remain to buy the The Web Development Kit Bundle. It’s got a useful mix of tools for Mac web development and its an excellent bargain even if you’re only looking for one or two items in the bundle. … Continue reading →

The trick is that the library install path isn’t right in the gem bundle. The following commands fixed it for me: $ cd /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1/lib $ sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib mysql_api.bundle $ cd /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1/ext $ sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib … Continue reading →

A truly remarkable piece of door step selling occurred to me this afternoon. Three people turned up at my door, claiming to be from Talk Talk, complete with ID badges. (So possibly genuine?) I said I wasn’t interested, but one … Continue reading →

I recently spotted the following line in an online forum by a person associated with the Growl notification system. I’m tired of being yelled at and having my life threatened, but that’s at least better than being insulted like this. … Continue reading →

Chalkboard Paint makes a chalkboard anywhere you can paint. Some ideas on what to actually do with the stuff on the walls. I like the idea of a calendar made of the stuff.

This is a simple template to use SoyLatte in Mac OS X 10.6 and have it appear in the JavaPreferences system. You need to copy all of the contents of the /usr/local/soylatte16-i386-1.0.3/ directory into the directory contents/Home (inside the package), … Continue reading →

A vision of a technology future that is almost magical in its fluidity and the absence of any obvious equipment. This is what the future should be:

Spotted recently in a technical forum (which shall remain nameless): Your answers are useless. Thank you anyway. I found answers on my questions from another source. Although I still don’t know what the final answer was, alas…

Real cocoa buyers, who are probably chocolate manufacturers, are getting tired of excessive speculation in the cocoa market; they’ve threatened to move from London to unspecified US cocoa futures exchanges if something isn’t done to improve things: Telegraph Article (Third … Continue reading →

back in my day, we didn’t pay to win a video game … we simply played them well Marketing crazy

It’s the day of the UK general election. It’s your democratic duty to vote! If you don’t vote, you can’t complain about the government we get. So please vote

Warburtons Bread Advert It made me laugh, anyway. (On their own site too)

I didn’t know this before but it definitely seems to work. SVG is more compatible for web pages, though this could be useful for embedded webkit apps. From High DPI Websites

In the nature of the European cooperation, I propose that the European Union should give out prizes to people who can speak significant numbers of european languages. Perhaps 1 million euros for a person speaking all of the EU significant … Continue reading →

A thought occurs to me (although I don’t do iPhone development). One possible approach to multi-tasking on the iphone might be to allow a background thread that complied with some sandbox requirements to execute with access to certain apis only. … Continue reading →