Wanted
Dear Lazyweb. I want a new keyboard.
I'm after a new keyboard: it needs to have very good action (there is a reason my current keyboard is about 7 years old), be black or grey (to match my new Logitech Cordless Click! Plus mouse), and ideally have an integrated USB hub (into which I can plug the dongle for the mouse) or be wireless (and share the dongle that came with my mouse). It must not be a "natural" keyboard, although the Microsoft Comfort range is interesting. The only keyboard I've found so far which has all of these is an IBM USB keyboard, which costs £60...
Any ideas? Mail me!
Update: so I'm probably going to order the Apple USB keyboard (even though it's white). Does anyone know how the keyboard layout differs from the "standard" PC British layout?
Update: Apple USB keyboard ordered. Thanks for the suggestions!
GObject Generator
It's cheap, it's nasty, but it works: take the pain out of writing the same strings a hundred times by only writing them six with the super k-rad GObject Generator!
NP: Blue Album, Orbital
Sound Juicer "Trigger Hippie" 2.12.3
Sound Juicer "Trigger Hippie" 2.12.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. This release fixes a few important bugs:
- Wait before attempting to read a new CD to let the disc spin up
- Protect against invalid iterators when playing
- Handle the file chooser returning NULL
- Fix MusicBrainz results with multiple albums (David Mandelberg)
- Handle G_FILENAME_ENCODING (Colin Leroy)
Woof!
In a month's time we'll have a new member of the Burton clan, an incredibly cute cream Labrador Retriever. We've had to pick a first and second choice, and this is our first (currently to be named either Henry or Louie):
The trip to see him was... a challenge. In theory a train to Norwich only takes 2:20, but it ended up taking us over 3:40... and Ely station (Station Of The Year 1987, don't you know) is surprisingly cold when waiting there for half an hour.
We can't wait for him/her to arrive (current favourite names for the second choice, a girl, are Ella or Bess), and really hope the house move hurries along, we're getting the dog on the 17th December and were planning on completing on the 1st, but that is looking more and more unlikely.
Eat And Two Veg
Last night Vicky and myself went to Eat And Two Veg, a vegetarian restaurant on Marylebone High Street, with Eva and Saadia. It's an excellent restaurant with a 100% vege menu, and along with the "pure" vegeterian dishes they also had some mock-meat dishes, such as Crispy Fried Luck for starters, burgers, and sausage and mash.
The restaurant is in the style of a 60's diner, and we even got a booth which was great, as we had a bit more privacy.
It was great to see Eva and Saadia again, it's been months since we've seen Saadia and the last time we saw Eva was in February...
NP: Respect, Aretha Franklin
Express Tosh
If I had known that the Daily Express front page yesterday was just so damn good I'd have bought a copy myself. With a paper bag on my head, obviously. Instead I have to make do with a small image.
I'm still not sure that this isn't some great spoof or prank. Maybe someone broke in and changed the front page just as it went to press? What do we have here:
- Diana
- Gypsies
- Asylum Seekers
- Banned Sacred Items Of Our Wonderful Culture (in this instance, Santa and Christmas lights). Hard to believe as it's probably not true.
- Girls in Short Skirts. For once this isn't a token shot of some B-list celebrity, but a genuine story about how Clare Bernal's murderer had taken cocaine.
Marvellous stuff. I can only imagine the Express has taken to being a parody of itself...
NP: Individuality, Rachelle Ferrell
Foreigners
I'm not a racist but I'm moving out of London, there are too many
foreigners around.
Why do I seem to attract this sort of person?
Update: Note that there should be quotation marks around first line, some renderers are ignoring the <q> element and not rendering the quotes. Those quotes change the meaning of this post quite a bit!
NP: Best Of, Stevie Wonder
Loving Open Source
This article on debugging and fixing a bug in Windows without the source is engrossing, in the way that an accident is engrossing. Sometimes you forget that 99% of the source code for the programs you use daily is available for free, and things like this can be changed easily. God I love Open Source...
Speaking of which, do you love Open Source? Opened Hand are on the look out for interesting developers; skills in embedded Linux, GTK+, and DBus are an advantage. If you think you are up to it, email us.
NP: August and Everything After, Counting Crows
Google Juice!
Poor Guido Boehm is suffering a lack of Google Juice, as searching for him results in the Devil's Pie home page. Hopefully this will help Guido out!
MasqMail
My laptops all run MasqMail so that they can always send mail, no matter where I am. This is good, and works very well. However, masqmail is suffering from non-maintenance. So, do I change my MTA, or do I adopt MasqMail?
Ideally I'd switch to another MTA, as long as it's simple and will automatically change the delivery method depending on some external data (generally the name of the current network interface). Any suggestions? Or should I start reviewing the bugs and hijack the package?
Update: Oliver Kurth, previously absent maintainer of MasqMail, just did a new upstream release and uploaded to Debian. Dilemma over!
NP: In Between Dreams, Jack Johnson.
TV Shorties
Broken News is absolutely fantastic, and I just discovered that there is a third series of Peep Show "coming soon". Cashback!
Update: just found out that the new series will start on the 11th November. Back of the net!
End Of Love Soup
So Love Soup ended last night, in the traditional British 6-part style. Vicky, as ever, had a positive happy-ending outlook and expected Alice and Gil to finally meet. I'm obviously far more jaded and expected the final scene to, well, be what it was. An excellent show, more of the same please BBC!
Alternatively a third series of Green Wing would be great, if you are listening Channel 4.
NP: The Ultimate Best Ibiza Summer Chill-out Album Ever (Disc 1), or something similar.
One Year
Wow, a year ago today I woke up and started my first day working for Opened Hand. It's been an absolute riot, when I started it was just Matthew and myself and the Nokia work was a mystery project, now the Nokia 770 is being shipped to developers and there are five programmers.
In other news, we finally got the mortgage agreed so hopefully will be moving house in December.
NP: Bitches Brew, Miles Davis
