Kookosity

A whole bunch of dumb

2011-11-24T22:57:00.001Z

Too long ago in this very galaxy I attended a junior school where it was deemed acceptable practice to torture the kids. The teachers were the worst; one technique was to force us to memorise dozens of the most common collective nouns for no greater purpose than being able to regurgitate them under test conditions. There are literally hundreds of weird and wonderful (and often counter intuitive) combinations so this was no mean feat for a ten year old.

The upshot? I still know to this day that when locusts call an AGM they gather in a 'plague', lepers communally crumble and disintegrate en masse in a 'colony' and kittens were playing with 'kindles' long before Amazon adopted the term. Joking aside, it did teach us that there is poetry and art to be found in the quirky nuances of the English language. If it sparked a passion for literature in just a handful of us it was time well spent.

Fast-forward to 2011 and even the most mundane collective nouns have been eradicated from the language. Why trouble yourself with all that tiresome thinking when you can just lump everything together in bunches? A bunch of friends, a bunch of fun, a bunch of information. Even a bunch of water! Another US-driven nail in the coffin for the English language. And you - like - thought things couldn't get any - you know - worse, or whatever.

Saying that, it does dovetail very nicely with the recent, politically correct trend to steer clear of labelling pupils as failures by banning grades, or even testing. Dumb down the language to mindless 'duckspeak' and you take away the opportunity to get something wrong. In cahoots with the 'bunch of' is the technique of rebranding ignorance and laziness as colloquialism, thus making, for example, "I could care less", 'Legos' or using 'England' to refer to any location in the UK, perfectly acceptable. How cute. The trickle-down effect is to reduce all pupils to imbeciles, who no longer feel inadequate, yet remain imbeciles. I think they call it equality.

A monkey in sheep's clothing

2011-07-15T22:32:00.002+01:00

Have you ever wondered how Monkey Island II might have looked if Bill Tiller - Curse of Monkey Island's lead background artist - had been let loose with a paintbrush six years earlier?

A heck of a lot like this imagines 21 year old web developer, Jennifer Gleu from Hanover, Germany.

In cahoots with a handful of volunteer programmers and story-writers, Jennifer, or BlackBat as she's known on the Point & Click Dev Kit forums, aspired to create a kind of up-styled Monkey Island II renaissance, for no loftier a reason than her own amusement. Regrettably, however, the project has been shelved to free her to collaborate with a small team of developers from the Telltale Games forum who are currently working on their own Monkey Island inspired fan game. 'Carnival of Monkey Island' will be released as an episodic 'what if?' scenario sandwiched between the events of 'Curse' and 'Revenge'.

Nevertheless, you can feast your eyes on more breathtaking stills of the envisioned Monkey Island II/III mash-up here and once again ponder how much wood a woodchuck could potentially chuck, assuming a woodchuck could, should and would chuck wood.

Twitterers' tweets are twaddle

2011-07-15T20:34:00.000+01:00

The winners of the 161m EuroMillions jackpot were today identified as Colin and Chris Weir of Largs in Ayrshire, proving that paying attention to anything said on Twitter is strictly for the birds.

Largs is actually 500 miles from Clacton so I wouldn't even advise - dubiously anonymous Tweeters - to hold their breath waiting for a close guess rosette. As wild a suggestion as this is, next time, maybe Metro could try asking someone from, oh I don't know, Camelot?

Today's 'random Twitter nuggets featured in Metro' include, "rip-off Britain" in response to a story entitled, 'Apple users are un-appy as prices rise', strangely enough also penned by Fred Attewill. Somehow I suspect he's been studying the Metro's regular 'From the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious' column without entirely grasping the concept. Did he truly expect "disgruntled app users" to do anything other than "vent their dismay"?

Why dead-tree newspapers need an unfollow button

2011-07-14T20:34:00.005+01:00

Far more predictable than death and taxes is the likelihood of a story alluding to the opinion of some random, uninformed Tweeter featuring in commuter's choice (because it's free), the Metro newspaper.

Below is a prime example...

Does EuroMillions winner come from Clacton?
Twitter abuzz with rumours

Twitter users have been speculating that the mystery British EuroMillions winner comes from Clacton, Essex, as the £161million jackpot remains unclaimed.

The new multi-millionaire – if he or she is a single ticketholder – has been catapulted to 430th place on The Sunday Times rich list, just behind the Beckhams on £165million.

Rumours were rife on Twitter yesterday about where the winner or winners were from.

Some tweeters claimed they lived in Clacton or Jaywick in Essex, while others named the north-east as their home.

Others took to the social networking site to express their disappointment.

‘Really regretting my optimism yesterday – hope I can find the receipt for that Bentley,’ said one tweet.

The huge win dwarfed the previous record in Britain, held by an anonymous winner who scooped £113million on EuroMillions in October.

A National Lottery spokesman said: ‘This is amazing news. We are absolutely delighted that a UK ticketholder has scooped the entire jackpot.

‘This is the biggest winner this country and Europe has ever seen.

‘In addition, three UK ticketholders in the next prize level down won £1.7million for matching five main numbers and one Lucky Star.’

The lucky winner - who has scooped as much money as the previous 76 UK Lotto jackpots put together - is already losing interest on their winnings at an alarming rate.

According to Coventry Building Society's Poppy Online Saver, the winner is losing interest at a rate of £9.49 an hour - that's £13,673.97 a day, £95,717.79 a week and a staggering £4,991,000 a year.

The winning numbers in the draw, held on Tuesday, were 17, 19, 38, 42 and 45, with Lucky Stars 9 and 10.

If the big winner so chooses, he or she could splash out on six £24.25million Bombardier Global Express XRS executive jets.

They could secure the services of £80million Real Madrid star Cristiano Ronaldo and still have enough for Picasso’s record-breaking work Nude, Green Leaves and Bust.

Fred Attewill - 14th July, 2011

I passed three tramps on my way to work this morning. One of them said, "ssshpur c-c-change mate?", punctuated with a foul-smelling, booze-saturated belch. Why didn't this hit the headlines? Maybe if he'd Tweeted it from his iPhone it would have. Nothing like pushing 'an unnamed source revealed...' to new heights!

All I can suggest is that this is what happens when the chief executive of a newspaper doesn't pay their journalists to 'hack' into the phones of celebs, grieving families and murdered kids.

It's almost as redundant as some grouchy nobody whining on his blog about arbitrary text-speak posted on a gimmicky web site being hailed as newsworthy.

Don't phone, it's just for fun

2011-07-14T19:42:00.000+01:00

Is it just me or are the 'blink and you'll miss it' disclaimers you find sandwiching TV shows often more entertaining than the actual shows? This one is taken from the seminal episode of the Irish version of Dragons' Den.

That the producers have gone to the trouble of pointing out that "no offer is being made to or solicited from the viewing audience" suggests to me that in previous shows, someone, somewhere in the world has been sitting at home in their spag-bol stained string vest, can of Stella in one hand, novelty banana phone in the other with a wad of Monopoly money poised on a TV dinner tray waiting for the host to turn to them for their verdict.

Do they actually phone in when they can't get the Sky remote's interactive buttons to register their investment or decision to opt out? Consider my mind well and truly boggled.

The Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmare small-print is prime fodder too; "what you are about to see is entirely fictional, cobbled together by an out of work, two-bit scriptwriter for the purpose of salvaging Gordo's floundering restaurants". I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist.

Gesundheit

2011-07-09T15:11:00.001+01:00

A lot like throwing up when you're exposed to the music of Justin Bieber, sneezing is inextricably acknowledged with a knee-jerk 'bless you'. The sneezer - for reasons which escape me - is expected to be so grateful they feel obliged to say thank you. If someone sneezes and you let it go without reacting like a puppet, oh I don't know, maybe because it's an absurd and irksome archaic leftover from the dark ages, people take um-bridge at your rudeness. Likewise if you don't thank the vacuous blesser for their gesture they shoot you a black look that should really be reserved for someone who has just run over your pet cat.

What if I don't want to be blessed? Why don't I get to opt out? Why should I be made to feel awkward for gritting my teeth and pretending I haven't heard? They haven't redeemed my soul, exorcised the devil or warded off the bubonic plague. What they have achieved is to draw attention to the fact that an autonomic reflex has occurred in my nasal passage in response to the presence of an environmental foreign body in an attempt to expel it from said area. Well done, have a gold star.

Migraine aura

2011-03-10T12:10:00.001Z

I'm so grateful to ABC News for screening Grammy Award reporter Serene Branson's on-air 'stroke' episode because now the condition I've been suffering from for the last 13 years has spontaneousy become real. Before now I must have been delusional.

As news correspondent David Wright says in the clip, that's the "medical mystery solved and a happy ending for this news reporter". That's that done and dusted then. It was 'just' a migraine and she can get on with leading a normal life. No doubt she'll have to pop a magic pill from time to time to make the woozy hurties go away, but since knowledge of the condition is so advanced it will be just a minor inconvenience.

If anyone knows on which planet this fairytale idyll can be found I'll be waiting with my bags packed.

Hands up for the Lord

2010-10-14T11:39:00.003+01:00

It seems I may have misjudged the gravitas of this curious ritual. Ever since my breaking revelation others have been harnessing its power for all manner of purposes.

Here we see last night's The Apprentice ejectee, Joy, summoning the strength to have her voice heard over the melee of squabbling toddlers at the 'design a beach accessory' conference.

Was she communicating with god, or a more potent deity? Lord Sugar perhaps? We may never know. If only she'd had a spare 12 years to dedicate to the gesture she may not have been fired.

Being buried underground in a Chilean mine for 69 days wasn't going to stop Yonni Barrios following our surface-dwelling zeitgeists either.

He was finally rescued yesterday, but may well wish he hadn't been seeing as the affair he'd been having with his mistress for several years came to light during his captivity.

If anyone needs some help of the ethereal variety it will be Yonni when his wife gets hold of him.

I said you could go to the bathroom 12 years ago

2010-10-13T19:51:00.004+01:00

This just goes to prove that spiritualism isn't big or clever just because it doesn't make sense to you. Funny how this is becoming a running theme.

The guy to your left was featured on episode 2 of 'An Idiot Abroad', Karl Pilkington's Wonders of the World travelogue of sorts now showing on Sky 1.

That's not a deformed arm he appears to be making some kind of freedom fighter gesture with. I expect it was perfectly normally when he decided to hold it aloft, and KEEP IT THERE FOR TWELVE YEARS!!! TWELVE!!!

I'm sure my arm would begin to look a bit withered and frail too if the blood had failed to circulate around it properly for so long.

What's the point???

Oh yes, nearly forgot. When Karl asked the translator, "Can you explain the reason why he's decided to do this?", he replied on Deranged Loon's behalf, "He has chosen this as a part of his way of communicating, and his way of reaching to the god".

Never has the old metaphor of religion as mental illness been more apt.

I'm sure Ganesha, Shiva, Vishnu - or whoever floats this guy's boat - will be delighted with his achievements.

On reflection, it's not exactly the Sistine Chapel though is it?

Something for all the family

2010-10-12T21:26:00.001+01:00

If you've ever been sitting at home at a loose end wishing there was still one last bastion of animal cruelty sport left to enjoy in America, and cursing the foundation of PETA and all those pesky laws relating to humanitarian standards of basic decency, this one's for you.

There's no need to traipse all the way over to Spain to witness a camp clown in a silly hat winding up a bull; it turns out you can get your fix in Yellville, Arkansas. The town's entertainment pièce de résistance is its annual 'Turkey Trot' which involves flying live turkeys 1000 feet into the sky and ejecting them over a throng of baying festival goers.

Seeing as turkeys aren't the most aerially adept birds to begin with - and having had their wings clipped won't help - unsurprisingly many of them splatter on the ground, dying instantly. The unlucky ones survive to endure a fate worse than death; being harangued by a bunch of slaw-jawed hillbillies who get their jollies from stamping the living daylights out of their broken bodies.

According to the wholesome, clinically sanitised web site Arkansas Kids nothing remotely like this goes on any more *nudge, nudge, wink, wink* and the official Yellville community page fails to mention it at all. Such a relief to know the authorities clamped down on that barbaric, third-world practice.

Amiga remakes database turns 1000!

2010-09-30T23:39:00.004+01:00

Yes, because that's how it works in database years; one entry for every anniversary. I'm not sure if this is a testament to the dedication of all the die-hard Amigans out there who wouldn't let it lie, or how disturbed I must be to have obsessively recorded their progeny to this extent.

In any case, the proud (I'm sure) winner of the frenzied scramble to secure this coveted footing in Amiga remake history goes to ClockworkBytes for his remake of Gloom, XGloom.

Gloom - developed by Mark Sibly and released in 1995 - was the first commercial Amiga clone of the first person shooter Doom. According to the author, the revamp will be a cross-platform reimplementation of Gloom's engine, initially using the original Amiga data files, though will in time be fully moddable in 3D.

You can follow the game's development over on the Amiga World forum.

I Can't Believe It's Not Custard

2010-09-29T22:29:00.003+01:00

In case you missed the pick of the day, the latest series of Harry and Paul started last night on BBC 2. While most of it merely plundered and rehashed their back catalogue of old ideas and characters, I thought the Dragons' Den sketch alone was worth tuning in for.

The scene opens with a couple of quivering entrepreneurs attempting to pitch their brainchild; a pudding supplement called 'I Can't Believe It's Not Custard'. The idea is trounced and they're unceremoniously ejected from the Den, only to return dressed as Rastafarians to hawk the same idea (clearly a thinly veiled reference to Levi Roots and his Reggae Reggae Sauce). This time the Dragons can't wait to throw money at 'Me Kwan Believe It Nat Custard', their motivation being to 'out PC' each other by backing a pair of ethnic minority candidates. The deal goes pear-shaped when they're exposed as blacked-up impostors, but that's not the point.

I did think at the time that Levi's sauce wouldn't have got off the starting blocks if he'd been a dull, middle class, white, corporate type with a neat hair cut. Let's face it, the product is no more special than any run-of-the-mill jerk/barbecue sauce; it's essentially Asda's own brand variety delivered by a Bob Marley clone with a large dollop of Caribbean 'soul' ...and a few creepy crawlies if the production line workers all wear dreads!

What's more, it doesn't "put some music in your food" at all. I've seen it slopped onto a pile of chicken and veg and it didn't make so much as a peep. So that's a fib. The claim that the 'secret' recipe for Reggae Reggae Sauce was passed down by Levi's late grandmother has also been disputed... and anyway, it's hardly an enigma when the ingredients are listed in black and white on the jar (as stipulated by Food Standards Agency labeling regulations).

It just goes to show how easily public perception can be swayed by presenting an everyday item as exotic; as a corollary it becomes more alluring, mystical, and ultimately superior to an equivalent home-grown product.

This is apparent in adverts we see in British newspapers for supposedly revolutionary new medical treatments. Emblazoned in bold letters they'll often vociferate, 'developed in the US!!!', as if that somehow lends the technique unmitigated credibility. For balance they should point out that 'My Therapy Buddy (TM)' and George Bush were also 'developed in the US!!!'.

Eastern philosophies are another example. By movies in particular we are led to believe that the more steeped in vague mysticism and spirituality a culture is, the wiser its protagonists must be. Strangely enough if a local nutter cross-leggedly gazes skyward, arms outstretched reciting gobbledygook mantras to summon inner strength and chi equilibrium, he's considered just that.

Kiss From a Doze

2010-09-28T20:59:00.001+01:00

I don't know what you'd call the lyrical equivalent of an actor 'phoning in' a performance, but Seal's latest *cough* 'hit' *cough* 'Secret' has got to be the definition of it. Did he get a buy into the next round because he's already won a number of music awards?

I go to sleep listening to the radio. This morning I woke up singing 'Secret' and in my semi-comatosed stupor assumed I must have made up the lyrics myself during the night and dismissed them as gibberish that couldn't possibly constitute a real, commercial song because it's essentially one line repeated over and over again really, really slowly (I heard you the first time!), interspersed with a few "oooh whooa ooh"s and "oh yes you are"s. I swear my dog's nocturnal posterior emissions possess more creative integrity and credibility. Maybe I should get him an agent. "Yes I should, oh yeah" *burp, gurgle*.

Anyhow, this got me wondering, which (non-instrumental obviously) piece of music has the fewest lyrics? I came up with several ideas, but am open to more suggestions.

The instructions to repeat either the first or second chorus within the lyrics to R.E.M.'s 'The One I Love' are composed of almost as many characters as the choruses themselves! The Beatles' 'Why Don't We Do It In The Road' goes one step further by only featuring the words in the title (fifteen times!) plus the line "No one will be watching us" (twice). 'Mouldy Old Dough' by Lieutenant Pigeon really takes the biscuit though; it contains only the words "Mouldy Old Dough" and "Dirty Old Man".

Curse of Monkey Island demake demo-ed

2010-09-28T18:15:00.001+01:00

'Jackpumpkinhead' has announced over on the International House of Mojo forums his intention to reassemble the third Secret of Monkey Island game in the series in glorious, old-school pixel art. Much like the first two games, this collaborative demake - or 'Old School Edition' - will be text-based, and feature a reimplementation of the original verb menu, albeit with an option to use keyboard shortcuts.

It's thought that dispensing with the imagination-trampling voice-overs will offer a more authentic, pre-CD-ROM days experience, while updating the sprites by way of a non-cartoony MI1-MI2 'mashup' will tie in nicely with the character tweaks introduced in Monkey Island 3 nevertheless keeping the graphics distinctly retro.

The reworked homage is to be constructed using the Adventure Game Studio, the graphics brought to life with a medley of tools including Deluxe Paint, GraphicsGale and Paint.NET, while the sound is likely to be ~~swiped~~ borrowed from the 'Curse of' original CD soundtrack, or re-imagined as MIDI tunes.

An early beta demo is available from the forum thread linked above. I'd urge you to grab it quick before LucasArts issue a cease and desist notice, relegating it to the history books as a doomed, collector's curiosity Maniac Mansion Deluxe style.

Don't adjust your sets

2010-09-23T11:05:00.000+01:00

Browsing the web on a Spectrum is a bit of a novelty, but you wouldn't want the wind to change and for it to stick like that. Only by foisting image compression on their mobile broadband customers, that's what T-Mobile expect you to live with.

...and I did until I came across a neat little workaround; a Firefox extension known as Modify Headers and the instructions for hacking the T-Mobile web proxy.

Reminds me of buying Robocop way back in 1988 after being mesmerized by the groundbreaking graphics on the back of the box, and seeing this! when I loaded the game on my Spectrum 128k. At least then they had the decency to admit - albeit in micro-print - that the screenshots were taken from the arcade version.

*nix Amiga emulation reboot

2010-09-15T21:43:00.014+01:00

The Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator, aka WinUAE's neglected big brother, has been stagnant for over three years now, shutting Linux and Mac users out in the cold where new features, stability and compatibility advances are concerned.

Thankfully all that is about to change with the release of PUAE; GnoStiC's attempt to pick up the reigns from E-UAE, itself a UAE resuscitation.

With the original source code gathering dust, PUAE takes its inspiration from the lovingly nurtured Windows incarnation. While it's still in beta mode with plenty of bugs to iron out, it already sports a primitive, integrated GUI and is receiving a warm reception from the Amiga community.

The emulator can be configured manually by editing the default.uaerc file, or by tweaking it via the Hi-Toro frontend, before running the standalone application. Technical support and pre-compiled binaries are available from the English Amiga Board's 'other UAE' forum.

Standing in for Harry

2010-04-20T10:45:00.010+01:00

While Harry Hill's TV Burp is off the air I thought it was only right that someone should pick up the batten.

With that in mind, has anyone else noticed the uncanny resemblance between the psychopathic, possessed, Good Guy doll Chucky from Child's Play and Molly Dobbs from Coronation Street? In fact I think I'd be more scared if I bumped into Molly down a dark alleyway.

...and to think some people use their blogs to promote good causes and discuss critical issues of the day. What's that all about? Pfft.

Derailing the gravy train

2010-04-19T16:49:00.007+01:00

MSG sensitive people such as migraine sufferers are all too aware that gravy is dangerous territory because it nearly always contains E621, otherwise known as monosodium glutamate. Gravy and stock manufacturers know you know this and so have to conjure up new and inventive ways to force feed it to you without your knowledge.

Bisto may well be the "nation's favourite gravy" and I'm sure their dedication to "making your meal a success" is second to none, but this doesn't preclude it from being full of crap. Nevertheless, at least they admit to this on the packet. Other companies aren't so up front. They'll cheerily trumpet that their gravy is "free from artificial flavours and additives" despite containing MSG in one guise or another, and they can get away with it scot-free because, technically it's true. MSG is merely a crystalline salt - a chemical extraction if you like - of glutamic acid; a naturally occurring amino acid found in many untampered-with foods including certain cheeses, peas, tomatoes and corn. Natural or not, overdosing on the stuff isn't going to be a pleasant experience if it's one of your migraine triggers.

So how do you inform people that your product contains MSG without setting off any alarm bells? Call it something else, that's how. In effect you'll see super-wholesome ingredient lists "free of artificial additives" which feature 'natural flavouring', 'yeast extract' or 'hydrolysed/autolysed protein'. Yeast extract is free glutamic acid released from yeast cells through fermentation, while hydrolysed or autolysed protein is created by chemically breaking down cereals or legumes into their constituent amino acids, including free glutamic acid.

Strangely enough all these homely, warm and fuzzy techniques serve to artificially enhance the flavour of bland food by bombarding the brain's receptors with excitotoxins capable of damaging or destroying its neurones. Nothing like MSG then. Bottoms up!

Would you like a gastric band with that?

2010-04-15T18:50:00.010+01:00

I've often wondered why people continue to eat the chemical cocktails that pass for food these days when their contents are brazenly confessed on the packet. Having watched the first few episodes of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, I have my answer.

Jamie's goal is to take the hillbilly backwater that is Huntington, West Virginia - statistically the fattest state in the US - and squeeze it under a microcosmic magnifying glass to highlight the way in which parents and the government are colluding to kill their kids with junk food.

In one scene, a junior school dinner lady tries to justify the coronary-inducing slop she is preparing for lunch. She flips over a box of chicken patties, glances at the ingredients list and declares it perfectly acceptable because the first item listed is 'chicken'. Never mind the other three dozen unpronounceable fillers, additives, flavour enhancers and preservatives below this in the line up. I'm sure these could include excrement or cyanide and still get the all clear from these clueless poison peddlers.

Clearly wasting his breath on the adults, an exasperated Jamie turns his attention to the kids. In a last ditch attempt to convince them to change their eating habits he whips out the big guns; his what's-in-a-chicken-nugget demo. Apparently this silver bullet induces spontaneous convulsions in British kids so is sure to do the trick. Before their eyes he blends up the picked-clean carcass of a chicken along with its connective tissue and throws in some artificial flavour for good measure, coats the vile, pink sludge in bread crumbs and then dares, "now who wants nuggets for lunch?". To my horror some hands from the audience still shoot up in the air without a moment's pause. It seems you can make anything taste palatable if you deep fry it in enough golden brown grease.

We catch up with the school 'cooks' again following the publishing of a newspaper article accusing Jamie of branding them stupid and ignorant. His comments were twisted for dramatic effect, nevertheless they seem genuinely shocked and baffled by the suggestion. This coming from grown adults who routinely serve the kids in their care pizza for breakfast and nitpick at the nutritional value of Jamie's alternative meals.

In another episode we meet 16 year old Brittany who is so obese, doctors have told her she's likely to be 6 feet under in 5-7 years as a result of the spots on her liver caused through binge eating. The threat of death looming over her like a black cloud apparently hasn't been enough to motivate her to exercise or go on a diet, yet now there's 5 minutes of fame at stake, she's prepared to take her health seriously.

I suppose the take-away (pun intended) lesson is that eating colossal dollops of saturated fat on a bun for breakfast, lunch and tea makes you morbidly obese. See, watching TV can be educational.

GPs; Generally Pointless?

2009-09-10T12:21:00.003+01:00

Whenever I go to see my GP I leave feeling like I've just given a seminar on one ailment or another - and most worryingly - to an utterly inept audience. How is it I'm the expert in this scenario, and did they sleep through all nine or ten years of medical school?

In a typical consultation, after explaining the problem at great length I'll pause to allow them to interject with some sort of advice, only they don't. They sit there in awkward silence looking like vulnerable newborn kittens waiting to be spoon-fed. I've even had one doctor ask, "well what do you expect me to do?". I don't know how to answer that civilly.

I've come to the stage where I'll do my own research online, and then visit the doctor with a particular medication in mind I want to try and just ask him or her to prescribe it. They seem to appreciate the fact that I've totally lost faith in their competence because it means they can still get paid £100k+ a year without having to do anything other than scribble on a pad, which must reassure them no end.

If you're lucky you'll get one that's willing to refer you to a specialist for tests, though if the results come back negative they'll glibly inform you, "the computer says no" and point out the location of their office door.

This leaves me wondering, who still goes to their GP for advice these days. Those not acquainted with The Google? The illiterate perhaps? Would it not be cheaper and more convenient to replace them with drug vending machines?

Feeding the hand that bites you

2009-04-26T11:16:00.004+01:00

Not content with ringing you to talk about the weather and remind you they haven't gone bust (yet), they're now blatantly fishing for new-lead-generating information saving them doing the legwork themselves. Often they'll dispense with the convivial preamble of pretending to be working on your behalf, and cut straight to the chase; "so, which companies have you applied to?", "which agency recommended you, or was it a direct application?". This is purely professional curiosity of course, that and an exercise in keeping their writing wrist supple. "Jane Taylor is in charge of recruitment there isn't she?", they'll say exuding that smug I'm-in-the-loop vibe, then pausing with baited breath for you to interject with a correction. "Oh really? She must have left the company since we last spoke". Yes, that's it I'm sure.

For my own entertainment I've decided I'm going to be as vague as they are when posting their fictitious vacancies. I helpfully informed the last consultant to ask this question that I've "applied for a position with a well established, prestigious, market leading, multinational, blue-chip, progressive, dynamic and fast expanding company in the commercial services industry, who have a venerable history of providing efficient commercial service solutions to clients in many private and public sector organisations", and also that I'd sourced the vacancy with the assistance of "a trailblazing global recruitment specialist dedicated to - who excel at even - placing professional candidates in permanent, temporary and interim positions".

I hope they found the exchange as useful as I did.

Thank you for not garlicing

2009-04-22T20:40:00.010+01:00

It's heartwarming that smokers are now forced to stand outside public places shivering their bits off in the depths of winter if they want to light up, but what about people who insist on engaging in other anti-social behaviour? Eating garlic for instance. Shouldn't they be banished from civilised society too?

It's a stinky, vile, disgusting habit, and subjects innocent passersby to olfactory assault, otherwise known as passive garlicing. Why are no laws in effect to protect the vulnerable public? Why are garlic eaters allowed to walk the streets without the aid of some kind of full-body isolation unit, or at least a high-vis toxic breath warning sticker?

What is it about the stuff that makes people shovel it into every single dish by the bucket load as automomically as blinking, and why don't the same people experience similar compulsions to douse themselves with, let's say, horse manure or arm pit sweat?

Employment agencies

2009-04-22T15:06:00.003+01:00

While I realise the world economy is currently corkscrewing the toilet bowl, recruitment consultants have always been slippery characters. 99.99% of vacancies are filled via agencies, but how many of the adverts they swamp the job search sites with are genuine?

Try applying for one and you'll be lucky to get a response within a week. If they do contact you, you can be sure they'll have no idea which job in particular you were interested in, probably because its generic description is nothing more than a hook to reel in your personal details which are then neatly packaged and delivered into the laps of marketing companies with a glittery bow on top. Why else would they be so keen to register you as a candidate when they have no work available?

If anyone has any inside knowledge I'd be curious to know why it is that agencies ring you to ask questions they already know the answers to. Silly me, I thought the arrangement was that recruitment consultants would call when they have a job to run by you, not just to mull over the dire state of the market, and to ask you how your search is going. Hang on a minute, isn't that your job? If that wasn't the basis of the relationship our paths would probably never have crossed. If I find work elsewhere that's your commission up in smoke so please don't pretend you care. My best guess is that they have so little to do they spend most of the day making fruitless phone calls in a desperate attempt to look busy and cling onto their livelihoods.

Not that I'm bitter. I'd hate for you to get the wrong impression. :|

The Unpodcastables

2009-04-21T10:30:00.008+01:00

Update: Cor blimey gov'ner, would you Adam and Eve it? The iPlayer Downloader now works with listen again audio - in other words, it downloads the MP3 file without the conversion headaches or real time capture delays. When did that happen and where was my telegram? Thanks Lawrence, you're a genius!

If you're a Mac user and enjoy listening to radio shows via the BBC's iPlayer you'll know there's still no application available for OS X which allows you to download rather than record the audio streams, and on a flakey wifi connection this makes capturing them in their entirety problematic.

I've come to the conclusion that there never will be so I've taken to experimenting with the WINE-based CrossOver Windows emulation software instead. This works surprisingly well for simple Windows software and games and requires no knowledge of Terminal commands or the WINE emulation layer which forms its backbone.

When you 'install' it (pretty much by double prodding its icon) and run through the unsupported software installation wizard, a new 'bottle' is created. Bottles are simply fresh Windows setups minus the desktop environment; applications integrate with your OS X dock and run alongside your native software. You can get by with a single bottle, or setup a new one for each individual piece of software if you have reason to believe they may conflict.

I had Flashget up and running within a minute, and soon after was able to begin downloading a Real Audio 'listen again' radio show to my pseudo c:\ drive (located at /Users/Username/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/winxp/). You can find the link to RTSP streams by opening an iPlayer playback window and right-clicking in your browser to view the source code. Search for '.ram' and copy the web address into Flashget. The download manager will automatically interpret the file, decipher the actual address of the Real Audio stream contained within and begin to download it.

Once you've transferred a .ra file you'll need to convert it to the mp3 format using something like Audacity or Switch. These are available for either platform so get whichever version you like, install the Real Audio player and LAME encoder so you have the necessary codecs in place and begin converting.

The dark side of light

2008-09-22T14:01:00.003+01:00

The cavalier attitude the food industry takes with regard to our health never ceases to amaze me.

I went shopping for sugar for the first time ever today - I know, rock 'n' roll baby! Until now my aim has been to eliminate as much of it as possible from my diet, but as I've been getting head-rushes recently I thought I'd try boosting my blood sugar level to see if that might settle the dizzy spells.

I spotted something called 'Silver Spoon Light' on the shelf of my local supermarket and wondered how sugar can be any lighter, unless of course you use less of it; the only ingredient in a bag of sugar after all is sugar.

Well not in this bag of special sugar. 'Light' is cut with the artificial sweeteners Aspartame and Acesulfame-K, E numbers customarily linked to a laundry list of minor to extremely severe health complaints. These and Maltodextrin, probably thrown in as a cheap bulking agent.

I just don't get it; surely if people want to cut the calories and don't care about the health repercussions (or aren't aware of them) they'll buy an artificial sweetener, and if they like sugar, but would rather not sprinkle poison on their Shreddies, they'll buy pure, uncontaminated sugar. Who is going to buy a hybrid of the two on the basis that it's likely to be only half or a third as toxic as the fake gunk?

Interesting that the packet of Silver Spoon's ordinary granulated sugar proudly exclaims that it is "pure and natural", "containing no additives or preservatives", while their 'Light' spin-off more meekly explains that it is "granulated sugar with sweetener", the "with sweetener" part printed in smaller, less prominent text, almost as an afterthought I should add.

The web site helpfully suggests that because "Silver Spoon Light looks and tastes just like regular sugar but has 30% fewer calories per spoonful" you should "put it in your sugar bowl, your family won’t notice the difference".

What, without pausing to mention that you've switched the contents with something that could potentially make them seriously ill? Maybe while you're at it - if you're that way inclined - you could rig the doors in your house with a precariously balanced bucket of boiling hot tar or lay a bear trap in the garden.

The thought is almost as unsavoury as the product.

VATman Begins

2008-08-05T22:40:00.003+01:00

Doing the tax return at work for the first time led me to begin researching which foodstuffs you can and can't reclaim the VAT on, which in turn led me to this riveting official HM Revenue and Customs document.

Until now I'd assumed the distinction was pretty much luxury items verses staple subsistence, but apparently that would be too straightforward for Her Majesty's esteemed pedants - this tome runs to 24 pages of exceptions, addendums and miscellaneous illogical quibbling!

For instance, biscuits which contain chocolate chips are zero-rated, but if the chocolate forms a partial or complete coating, tax is applicable. Ah, I see. Lots of chocolate = VATable. But wait, cornflake cakes which are drenched in chocolate, chocolate sauce, chocolate spread and even chocolate body paint are VAT free. Chocolate visibility is key too it seems - if the chocolate is wedged between the biscuit layers and hence out of sight as you'd find in a Bourbon, VAT shouldn't be levied. We should also note that you don't need to pay VAT if the chocolate is on the surface, but the manufacturers stick 'cake' on the packaging as in the case of Jaffa Cakes. These definitely aren't biscuits and anyone who dares to make such an absurd claim will be sued out of existence.

Likewise, if you sell sweetened dried fruit and claim it's for snacking and home baking you don't need to charge VAT on it. However, if you sell an identical product and neglect to mention to your befuddled customers - who would never have made the mental leap otherwise - that you could shove the stuff in a cake, you're obliged to charge VAT.

Speaking of cakes, they're tax-free while biscuits and crisps aren't, which explains why Pringles are no longer crisps... up is now down and black is white.

My favourite though is the case of marshmallow teacakes verses Snowballs. Marshmallow teacakes if they have "a crumb, biscuit or cake base topped with a dome of marshmallow coated in either chocolate, sugar strands or coconut" are zero-rated whereas "Snowballs without such a base are classed as confectionary" and so are sold plus VAT. Next time we order anything resembling the above as part of a client entertaining exercise I must remember to interrupt the meeting, clipboard at the ready donned in a lab coat poised to analyse the constituency of the foundations.

The Unsackables

2008-05-04T18:35:00.003+01:00

There's a common belief here in the UK that if you find yourself working for the council, you've got a cushy job for life. Apparently this is also the case in Japan where a 57 year old employee of the council of Kinokawa was rumbled for whiling away his days surfing pornographic web sites, and survived the expose with a mere slap on the wrists.

Claiming that he accidentally stumbled across the odd adult web site while researching urban floral decoration policy wouldn't really have flown considering he managed to clock up 780,000 visits in 9 months! His 'punishment'? Demotion and an £80 per month dock in his wages.

His "desk was set apart from the others" might explain why no-one spotted him enjoying his work far more than any right-minded office worker should, but shouldn't someone have asked why his to-do list never got any shorter? Did he not have to submit the fruits of his labour (no smutty jokes please) to his superiors, or were they too busy ogling internet porn as well to realise that one of their employees was turning up for work each day but not actually doing anything remotely useful?

The cynics amongst you might conclude that this is nothing new; just another example of our hard-earned taxes being frittered away on the inflated wage packets of council employees who talk the talk, but don't get as far as tying their shoe laces. Some might say that, though I'd never make such a scathing remark.

Behold, I've found Jesus!

2007-12-20T20:33:00.001Z

...and appropriately enough he's a sandman; well his preaching always used to put me to sleep. See how I casually threw that folkloric reference in there to demonstrate how culturally aware and quick-witted I am? Golly-gosh-darn-it, I even astound myself sometimes. All the while you've been looking for signs of the surfalicious one in toasted teacakes he's been chillin' with his homies on Maspalomas beach, Gran Canaria, just outside the Varadero Centre.

Also basking in the afternoon rays a few feet away are The Simpsons reenacting their infamous couch scene pose. Does anyone know if it's the same one which appeared on Digg about a month ago, or at least another creation by the same artist? If you look closely at the full size image you can see this one is looking a bit worse for wear, though I'm surprised it's still recognisable at all after the pelting it received from the previous night's downpour. Whatever he glazes them with must be pretty potent stuff.

The artist put the finishing touches to this one shortly before I snapped it so it's still in pristine condition. Absolutely stunning work; such a breath of fresh air after mooching through the tacky tourist tat paraded alongside Playa Del Ingles. Not an ornamental, peelable, banana-male-member hybrid in sight thankfully!

Hmmm-vee

2007-12-19T18:12:00.003Z

A particularly captivating episode of Brian Dunnings' Skeptoid podcast entitled 'SUV Phobia' (transcript available on the linked page) kick-started my rusty neural cogs. The crux of his argument is that it's fallacious and naive to scapegoat SUVs for their supposed poor fuel efficiency and excessive output of carbon emissions because many of them "are mechanically identical to conventional cars"; they are manufactured by slapping an overbearing, gangster-bling style shell over the top of the chassis of a typical family car. This really surprised me because until now I'd allowed myself to be hoodwinked by the shallow aesthetics of these performance hulks.

Brian goes on to apply the same logic to GM's H2 Hummer as it's essentially a cosmetically tarted up Yukon, but in defending SUVs in general, I think he skirts over the critical fact that the Yukon is far from an eco-friendly springboard on which to build a mechanical sheep in wolf's fur. I won't pretend I know the first thing about cars - I Googled the Yukon because my stubborn preconceptions wouldn't let me acquiesce to the possibility that Humvees may not be the vehicular incarnation of pure, unadulterated depravity.

A comparison chart of 1042 vehicles ranked in order of fuel efficiency compiled by Corporate Knights Inc., a Canadian corporate responsibility watchdog, seems to confirm this. Re-sort the Excel data in order of annual fuel consumption and the various Yukon models emerge as some of the worst offenders, occupying positions 788, 821, 875, 881, 897, 934, 949 – 951, 979-983, 1004, 1005, 1022 and 1034-1038.

So while Brian's other unduly slammed candidates mostly fair exceptionally well in the low emissions/fuel consumption stakes I uphold my recommendation that all Hummers, military spec or otherwise, be banished from civilian roads, crushed and dispatched to Room 101 in gleaming, miniature, cubic parcels festooned with pretty, little bows. Environmental considerations aside, we all know the caliber of low-lifes who drive these road-hogs, and this alone should be just cause to obliterate them (the vehicles, the owners, or both - I'm not going to quibble over the minutia).

Cushty Canaries?

2007-12-18T16:11:00.001Z

Despite all Gran Canaria has to offer, the impression I've returned to Britain with is predominantly one of aesthetically pleasing - though crumbling - shopping plazas full of dodgy Arabs hawking fake electronics at too-good-to-be-true prices. For reasons which escape me, electronics boutiques make up a third of all the businesses on the island - the other two thirds comprising 'international' restaurants (aimed at mindless Brits who don't find it at all odd that they've spent over 4 hours on a plane and flown thousands of miles to eat pie, chips and mushy peas and drink pints of Boddingtons) and purveyors of tacky tourist knick-knacks.

Drop your guard for a split nanosecond by revealing the most fleeting gesture of curiosity in something in the window of one of these out-of-their-time bazars and you're doomed. You'll be pounced on by a greasy wideboy replete with perma-grin and Euro symbols in his eyes. Then begins the patter; "Ah, I see you have a camera. Would you like to buy a camera, sir?" Letting them in on the secret that you already have a camera won't deter them. Next they'll want to sell you some useless gimmicky peripheral for it. If you don't bite their hand off at the first offer, the price will be slashed in half, and half again following the next rejection until it reaches a figure you could expect to pay in Jessops who aren't exactly known for their giveaway prices.

To them, if you've stopped to look at their merchandise they've already done you a favour and it's your duty to return it by letting them talk you into buying something you don't want. Tell them you're not interested, or you're just browsing, and you'll be interrogated within an inch of your life. They actually take it as an insult, or at least feign deep offense to make you feel guilty enough to change your mind.

One shop owner went so far as thrusting a video camera into my hand (which he claimed I could snap up for a meagre 20 Euros) and commenced dragging me into his den by the elbow to seal the deal. A dozen textbook scams played through my mind as I struggled to shake him off. I wondered if he was going to stage a clumsy fumble and blame me for dropping the camera on the concrete paving slabs and then demand compensation for the damage, sell me an empty shell or go for the fail-safe maneuver of stringing me upside and shaking my pockets empty. As it happened I somehow managed to walk away unscathed and unpickpocketed. "Can I interest you in a top quality Sony radio?", he pleaded desperately as I shuffled away into the distance. Ironically I was in the market for a radio, which was precisely why I stopped to gaze through his window in the first place.

Where they're going wrong is that they've spectacularly failed to associate their heavy-handed haranguing of potential customers with these walking-wallets scarpering for the Guanche caves. British people (who make up a large bulk of the tourists in the Canaries, I can't speak for the Germans) don't like to be told what to buy and when. If we want advice we'll ask for it. Likewise, if we've decided to buy something we'll attract your attention, cross your palm with silver and be on our way.

Clearly your current sales technique needs a drastic overhaul. You're not going to arrive at such a dramatic epiphany by yourselves so let me make some suggestions...

Mark your goods at the fixed price you'd be willing to sell them for, not ones which allow you to slice and dice them to the power of ten to make it look like you've been brow-beaten by a wily haggler.

Don't slap extortionate price tags on three-generation-old technology like cassette walkmans. What on earth is your angle here anyway? Nobody wants to buy this stuff so they're never going to engage in a bartering situation allowing you to play the amenable, fair shop keeper. If people see that one item is overpriced they'll assume all your stock is a rip-off and they'll spin on their heels in a heartbeat. Maybe we're supposed to see retro gear and high prices and think 'collector's item'?

Displaying fake iPods alongside the real thing doesn't present consumers with freedom of choice; it only serves to make us think that you've found a more talented counterfeiter, yet still have duff stock to shift.

Always put price tags on your goods. By not doing so you may as well display a flashing neon sign which reads, 'I've got something to hide'. Sensible people will not approach you to ask the price of an item because they know that once they do they'll be trapped like a fly in your sticky web.

One day even stupid people will have heard of eBay and you'll be up the creek without a rich mug to swindle. This one isn't so much a tip as a dawning reality I take great pleasure in bringing to your attention.

Quit it with the faux camaraderie and congeniality. Friendly strangers fall into one of six categories, none of which you should aspire to; cold-callers, paedophiles, muggers, rapists, politicians and bible bashers.

Poles apart

2007-10-16T21:22:00.000+01:00

Since the expansion of the EU in 2004 Britain has witnessed an influx of an estimated one million Polish immigrants. If you dare to point out the repercussions of this open-gate policy you're branded a Daily Mail reader and reminded of the enormous positive contribution these forward-thinking economic migrants make to the country.

Well I've been unfortunate enough to find myself living with a Polish couple, who, granted are determined to improve their economic and social standing through sheer hard work and dedication, though only at the expense of everyone else around them. Yes, it's true, they are dedicated to spending as much time in bed or feeding their faces with other people's food while pretending to seek employment.

They spend what little money they have on booze and cigarettes and then have the gall to complain with utmost sincerity that life here is so harrrd when they can't afford to pay the rent and the meanie of a bus driver won't let them travel for gratis. One of them did have a jarrrb for a short while, but getting all the way to Cheadle proved to be so harrrd that she decided she needed a holiday in Poland to recuperate. We live in Cheadle for christ's sake; her work place was practically on the door step!

And somehow it's the Brits who have a reputation for being 'whinging POHMs'.

I realise that right now I'm not exactly helping to shake off this stigma, but who wouldn't want to vent when you find yourself living with two slobs who do nothing but boil tomatoes and a variety of other pureed sludge and fornicate at 100+ decibels in rotation morning, noon and night and then leave you to clear up the mess?

One of them asked me if I thought the landlady might be kind enough to return their deposit when the inevitable happens and they are asked to leave, you know, if they "explained the situation". What, that you're selfish cretins and expect other people to pay for you to wash and tumble-dry one t-shirt at a time and share the bill for your long distance phone calls to Poland whilst you refuse to so much as empty the bin or wash a solitary cup? Yes, I'm sure she'll be nice as pie, the epitome of empathy. I know where I won't be when she returns to collect their rent at the weekend and the proverbial hits the fan.

If only us lazy Brits (hang your heads in shame, you know who you are!) could adopt their slavish work ethic this country might not be in such a mess.

...and you thought I was going rake up that xenophobic Daily Mail article about Polish people claiming child benefit for kids who aren't even British residents didn't you. Wouldn't dream of it.

Sunglasses; the cause of and solution to all of life's problems

2007-06-03T22:05:00.001+01:00

When it comes to protecting your health what you need is clear, practical advice from medical professionals. With this in mind isn't it wonderful that scientists have taken all the guess work out of avoiding skin cancer?

Ophthalmologists recommend wearing sunglasses when outdoors because they help to cut the level of ultraviolet radiation penetrating the eyes. This makes perfect sense because excessive exposure to UV light can cause an assortment of nasty ocular ailments such as cataracts, pterygium, photokeratitis, snow blindness, macular degeneration, and a whole host of eye cancers.

Right, so why wouldn't you choose to cover up your peepers? Well perhaps because wearing sunglasses - as well as warding off cancer - may cause cancer. This is supposedly because the artificial darkness tricks your brain into thinking you're not in danger of being fried by the sun's UV rays and so doesn't instigate the production of the melanocyte-stimulating hormone which thickens and tans your skin as a shield against the sun.

That sounds plausible enough... but fails by a country mile to beat the previously accepted notion that allowing intense sun rays capable of turning your skin a blistered shade of bright crimson before emulating reptilian ecdysis isn't such a good idea. Health advisers are always banging on about daubing your skin in sun cream, but you don't put any in your eyes do you.

I don't know about you, but I'll take a pair of healthy eyes, normal vision and a big dollop of skin cancer with sprinkles and a cherry on top.

While sunlight can cause cancer it is recommended that we absorb enough of it to upregulate the manufacture of vitamin D which facilitates a range of vital bodily processes - those that maintain healthy bone structure and sustain our immune system for instance.

So while we're catching some rays to top up our vitamin D supplies we should cover up to prevent accelerated skin aging (aka skin photodamage) and skin cancer. Hiding away inside from the sun like a hermit would be the ideal solution except that it contributes to seasonal affective disorder and leads to vitamin D deficiency which has been implicated in the aetiology of many forms of cancer.

Sunbeds can be used to combat SAD and increase vitamin D synthesis. Tanning salons will even throw in your choice of malignant melanoma or non-melanoma skin cancer such as squamous or basal cell carcinomas for no extra charge, while we destroy the planet with our clown-sized carbon footprints.

EyeTV MP3 playback

2007-06-03T17:45:00.000+01:00

I may be stating the obvious here, but as it's not mentioned anywhere in Elgato's FAQs I thought this might be worthy of a tech tip entry.

EyeTV (at least version 2 anyway), as well as playing back externally created video files is capable of opening MP3s. So what? you may be wondering. Well this means that if music and podcasts can be opened with EyeTV, they can be paused, fast-forwarded, rewound and generally monkeyed around with using the remote control which comes with your TV box/stick, and this will be helpful to anyone who doesn't sit right next to their computers while they listen to audio.

The way you do this is identical to the procedure for opening third-party movies; by clicking on the 'Open Quicktime Movie' option under the 'File' menu. You see this is obviously the killer clandestine feature Elgato don't want you to know about because, erm... oh you know, for all sorts of nefarious reasons, probably.

Another inconspicuous feature you may be unaware of is that if you keep pressing the increase volume button on your remote control after EyeTV's volume indicator hits its maximum notch, you can continue to boost the volume by ratcheting up your OS's volume control. Most sensible people would normally stop at this point, but apparently not me.

Geek criminals should be made to work harder to earn their jail cells say Finnish courts

2007-05-28T17:51:00.001+01:00

Mikko Rauhala, the owner of a web site where instructions for circumventing CSS DVD copyright protection were posted will not be prosecuted. The decision made by the Helsinki District Court resulted from the adherence to a 2001 amendment to European copyright laws that state it is only illegal to defeat "effective technological measures".

Knowledge pertaining to outwitting DVD copyright protection has been widely available on the internet since 1999, and a plethora of idiot-proof applications designed to automate the process are merely a mouse click or two away, rendering CSS barriers defective.

You've got to marvel at the Catch-22 of this judicial loophole. Cracking copyright protection is only illegal while it's too tricky to accomplish. As soon as someone susses out how to do it, the protection can be deemed ineffective and the perpetrator of this heinous crime against society walks free.

I'm hoping the same laws apply to bank robbery because my local branch of Barclays has this really flimsy safe and the only security guard patrolling the area always leaves his post at 9.00am to buy a bacon sarnie from the greasy spoon next door.

Hey, if everyone does it, it must be OK. ;)

Uninventing the search engine

2007-05-14T21:19:00.001+01:00

Don't you hate it when stuff just works? It's predictable and boring, and if you ask me, anything falling into this category should be sabotaged immediately to spice things up a little.

Many web coders clearly share my view because this is precisely what they've been doing with their previously accurate, efficient and dependable search engines.

Take Googles' Image Search for example. Imagine your typical day; you're surfing the web when a sudden impulse to track down a picture of Spiderman wrestling a T-Rex grips you with full force. You visit Google Image Search and type in the keywords 'spiderman', 'wrestles' and 'trex'.

Now you wouldn't imagine there would be all that many depictions of such a scene so it would be reasonable to expect a return of say less than half a dozen hits at the most. Well you'd be wrong; supposedly Google currently indexes 1030 images of the web-shooting wonder getting down and dirty with the "last and largest known carnosaur".

It's curious that amongst these 'hits' are images of King Kong, random politicians, The Simpsons, Bambi, fish corpses and Wacko Jacko's face embedded in a slice of toast, but none of them remotely resemble what I actually searched for.

The fact that there are lots of pictures containing isolated wrestlers, spidermen and dinosaurs might indicate that Google has applied the OR Boolean search operator to my query rather than the more useful AND one. This isn't the case, however; if you click on the 'Advanced Image Search' link you'll see that the keywords are automatically entered into the "find results related to all of the words" box to demonstrate which kind of search I performed prior to reaching this page. Just to confirm, clicking the search button again at this point returns exactly the same set of irrelevant flotsam.

It could be that I'll never ascertain for certain if Spider-Man (yes, I know that's the correct way to write it) ever unleashed the Pumphandle Michinoku driver II on a 43 foot long, 7.5 tonne 'tyrant lizard king'. It's no laughing matter.

That's just a drop in the ocean. All kinds of search engines across the board are falling prey to Boolean vandalism; software repositories, forums, recipe databases - the list is endless. The digg coders are prime suspects. Try probing it for stories involving two of the widest prevailing bedfellows, the 'llama' and 'blamange'. Go on, guess how many hits there are for this keyword combo. 89! That's eighty-nine, EIGHTY-NINE!

It appears that contrary to the norm, you can crowbar the AND operator in between them to narrow down the field, but why wouldn't this be the default setting to begin with as it is with Google? (well, the text search element of Google anyway). You wouldn't dial 999 to report a crime and when asked, "which service do you require" reply police... OR a florist please, either will do. So why would it make sense in any other context?

"Where Have All The Vampires Gone?"

2007-05-10T22:21:00.003+01:00

University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has employed elementary mathematics to lampoon cliche vampire folklore as portrayed in popular literature and Hollywood. According to the prof, if - starting in the year 1600 - the first vampire sunk its fangs into one human per month, and that human subsequently metamorphosed into a vampire and went on to feast on another human, the entire human population would be eradicated in under two and a half years.

Well I have a different theory which demonstrates how unbeknownst to the majority of the populace, humans and vampires currently co-exist in perfect har... well a close approximation of a harmony of sorts.

According to European, Chinese and Indian legend, vampires suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder which manifests in the insuppressible impulse to count particles of grain, sand, sawdust, rice, poppy seeds and a variety of other multitudinous identical items. To keep the bloodsuckers occupied and out of mischief should they rise from their coffins to feed, people would scatter such pacifiers throughout graveyards. They'd be so engrossed in the task of gathering them all up that before they could shriek "bright light, bright light!" the sun would begin to ascend in the sky forcing them to seek shelter until the following night where the process would be repeated Groundhog Day stylee.

This technique is effective in warding off achluophobic vampires, but not so much against the newer breed of vampire that have evolved to withstand sunlight and walk shoulder to shoulder with their unwitting victims.

Keeping these blighters in check is one of the few things we have the reptilian humanoid Illuminati (or Global Elite) to thank for. You see, these extraterrestrial prison warders - otherwise known as the Babylonian Brotherhood - from the constellation Draco compete with the daylight vampires for human blood (the hybrids sired through cross-breeding with humans consume it to transform themselves from reptiles to hominids, duh!) and so it is in their interests to assure the survival of the species.

To achieve this end the Illuminati have been remotely controlling vampires through the use of advanced brainwashing neurotechnology. With their penchant for frenzied bean-counting and parasitic jugular-mauling in mind they have been coercing the pliable vampires to sublimate their urges with (arguably) less destructive occupations. Hence we have swathes of apparently human creatures hell-bent on becoming traffic wardens, chancellors (of the exchequer), tax inspectors and inland revenue administrators.

To wrap up, we are artificially being kept alive today by the very existence of penny-pinching, Neo-Nazi, public servant vultures (aka sedated vampires). It's obvious really if you think about it. I dare anyone to propose a flaw in the theory.

Coloureds still getting a raw deal

2007-04-15T15:24:00.001+01:00

Is this happening where you live? Have Mr Green, and his inseparable buddy, Mr Red, been unceremoniously punted from their pedestal? There were riots in the 50s when the blacks were treated as second class citizens, but today, apparently it's OK to discriminate against reds and greens.

The ones in my locale used to perch proudly atop a tall post at either side of the road separated by a zebra crossing. Waiting to cross, pedestrians and LED shepherds faced one another directly. They made eye contact and had mutual respect. From their lofty position they could be seen by everyone from a hundred yards away. They were so well placed you could drop your gaze to check your flies are fastened and still a deft flicker of their bulbs would register in the corner of an eye alerting you that it's safe to cross.

The system worked so logic decrees that it must be scrapped. The pedestrian (or pelicon) crossing lights in my home town have all been replaced with kerb-facing, waist-high LED boxes. Consequently if there are a few people waiting to cross, the lights are entirely obscured forcing you to guess if you're likely to be squished into the tarmac should you decide to make a move. Call me crazy but isn't this counterproductive given that we now live in a compensation culture, nanny state climate where aspiring to be good little, rule-abiding, safety-conscious citizens is the order of the day?

Let's make a leap of faith and assume you can actually see one of these new white elephants. You're going to look a complete prat gawking at it like a snake charmers' transfixed pet, rather than casually watching the traffic flow whilst keeping your eyes peeled for a colour change.

It must have cost a fortune to ditch all the old - yet perfectly adequate - lights in favour of these new contraptions, so common sense would suggest that they must bring with them certain benefits. There has to be a rational explanation for implementing such an expensive scheme on a town-wide scale. The trouble is, I don't have the slightest inkling as to what it might be.

Edit: Seeing as this enthralling post has sparked such impassioned debate, I thought you'd be chomping at the bit for an update...

The local council - in recognition that these waist-high LED boxes are, for all intents and purposes, invisible to all but the person standing immediately next to them I presume - have installed an extra 'cross/don't cross' box a couple of feet above the existing ones on either side of the road. All it will take now is for a team of basketball players to move into town and they'll be shunted right back to their original locus. Stay tuned for more sensational pelicon crossing news!

Something I hadn't noticed about the new system until now is that the audible 'it's safe to cross' bleeper signal has been canned, so blind people have even less of a clue when to cross. Are they expected to wave their white sticks into the unknown and only make a move when the twang made by passing cars hitting it ceases?

Oooh those naughty banks are right rotters!

2007-04-11T10:55:00.001+01:00

Money Saving Expert of TV and radio fame, Martin Lewis, has been harping on about reclaiming exploitative bank charges recently. Barclays, for example, charge you £35 each time you fail to pay back your credit card balance on time. Financial analysts with letters after their names have established that it only costs the banks £4-ish in administration charges to process these deficits so the rest is just beer money.

Despite the hefty charges, the same people are continually going into the red and so have been racking up fees totaling many thousands of pounds. Martin has put together a template letter for you to fill in and submit to your bank to reclaim the unjustly pilfered funds and people have been doing this in their millions throughout the country.

This is all well and good, but it's a lot of hassle so I'm here to offer my guide to good money management. Can I have a drum roll please?

...

OK, here goes. If you spend more money than you've got in your bank account, the figure on the bottom line of your statement becomes negative and that's bad because the bank tells you off and takes more money you don't have. The secret is - wait for it - to only buy stuff when you can afford it. That way the numbers on your statement stay black and you don't end up living on the streets.

Now of course there are worthy exceptions to every rule. Say you've got an arrangement for money to be automatically deducted from your account to cover essentials like rent or mortgage repayments or bills and then unexpectedly you lose your job. It's the ones who spend £100 on a handbag and then are shocked to discover that they're broke. No, more than broke, they're severely bankrupt.

Which is another rant in itself. In Britain, if you become very, very bankrupt and have no way of getting back on an even keel (besides getting one of those job thingies, being frugal and paying back the money over a long period of time) you can opt to just right off your debts and start afresh. You're barred from owning a credit card for a while, but other than that you're free to go on another shoe shopping spree at Harrods the next day. Handbags and shoes? This is all starting to sound very sexist isn't it. I didn't mean it to. Just as many men are useless with money, and the ones with handbag and shoe fetishes are the absolute worst offenders.

To sum up (Congratulations if you're still awake. If not, you smell and your nose looks a bit funny and you can't hit me for saying so because you'll never read this): that £35 fine is supposed to be excessive because it's intended to act as a deterrent. You agree to it when you sign the credit card contract with your bank so it's a bit rich to moan about it now. Banks exist to make money. If you don't have any invested with them they can't reinvest it elsewhere. They aren't going to give you money for nothing over and above the 0% interest 28 day repayment policy (which they also profit from) out of the goodness of their hearts, so don't give them the satisfaction of reeling in your debts.

Anyway, look on the bright side. It's only money - it's not as if Barclays are going to come round to your house and repossess your legs is it?

Mmmphumpph

2007-04-10T20:04:00.003+01:00

Have you ever watched a film and found it almost impossible to fathom what the heck is going on because the cast all sound like they're trying to annunciate their lines around a giant gob-stopper? Could it be that they've all been held captive in the Marlon Brando school of method acting for the past decade?

A bizarre trend for delivering rapid-fire, hushed dialogue through clenched teeth seems to be gripping Hollywood at the moment. It's so prevalent I wouldn't be at all surprised if we soon decided to adopt lip reading as the official international language of celluloid. I catch these antiquated black and white classics on obscure Sky channels where the entire cast meticulously project the script like microphoneless thespians performing in a Roman ampitheatre, and have to wonder where it all went wrong. The days when TV and movie producers were cognisant of the relationship between clarity of dialogue and audiences actually being able to comprehend the plot are long gone.

Rafts of modern TV shows may as well be scripted in Swahili as so much of their dialogue is also getting lost in translation. If subtitles aren't available, often I'll just throw in the towel, and according to 'The joy of subtitles', an article by the Beeb, I'm not alone. I wonder how many of those six million people using subtitles in the absence of any hearing impairment also keep their trigger finger poised over their remote control's rewind button.

The theory the author postulates to explain the phenomenon indicates why we're just as likely to encounter duff dialogue clarity sitting in a cinema as we are watching a DVD or TV show at home through a traditional TV with tinny stereo speakers.

Even with the best audio system money can buy, on a few occasions sitting in cinemas I've had to restrain myself from grasping for the rewind button in a futile attempt to unravel an indecipherable line. Duh! Mummy always said I was special. ;)

If Johnny told you to jump over a cliff...

2007-04-05T19:15:00.001+01:00

GPS systems often direct motorists down blind alleys or across otherwise unsuitable terrain because, after all, they are only mindless machines. They lack the intricacies of local knowledge and that all important human trait, common sense.

Not the end of the world you might think since no car is going to force you to go where you don't want to. You see they all come fully equipped with a clever fail-safe device called a driver who interprets the computer's suggestions and then decides the best course of action to take. For instance, if your TomTom urged you to plunge your £96,000 Mercedes into a river...

Me 2.0

2007-02-26T20:41:00.000Z

What is it with all these new 'bleeding edge' web technology upstarts churning out useless online services people neither want nor need just to get in on the Web 2.0 'revolution'? Take Tumblr for instance (I wish that was a typo, yawn).

It's pitched expressly towards Webizen X who allegedly has a burning desire to post unblogworthy information, in a blog format. Stuff like disorderly scraps of half-baked ideas and other miscellaneous, incoherent flotsam and jetsam. The urge to verbalise neural hairballs when exhibited by infants or psychiatric patients is known as echolalia. Apparently in the Web 2.0 sphere it's called a 'tumblelog'.

Something else I can't quite wrap my head around is why this theoretically untapped cluster of niche publishers require a separate software solution in order to find their voice. Start a blog, turn off any snazzy features, disable comments, fill it with copious fragments of nothingness, and hey presto, you're Tumbling!

So how do they work in practice? Well the Tumblr FAQ proudly points us in the direction of Project.ioni.st by way of example. See what they've done there? (again!)

I swear if the likes of Davidville (the inventive chaps responsible for Tumblr) keep this up I'm going to dislodge a spoke or two and re-patent the whl (or should that be whe.el?) just to make them look silly.

...and if you think you've tasted the bottom of the barrel, think again.

Subscribe to podcasts without iTunes

2007-02-24T14:32:00.000Z

Lots of people don't like iTunes and would rather not use it to keep up to date with their favourite podcasts. I'm one of them.

One alternative is to subscribe to RSS podcast feeds using an RSS to email service such as Rmail. You can do this by submitting the feed as you would with any ordinary blog feed. The MP3 files themselves aren't attached to the emails; what you get instead is a description of the episode as it would appear in iTunes, along with a direct link to the MP3 file so you can decide whether or not you wish to download it.

Create a podcasts folder to save your audio in and you have the most lightweight, portable, platform-independent podcatching client available.

Energy saving ace in the hole unveiled

2007-02-13T14:10:00.000Z

The business manager of Hazel Grove High in Stockport, England has shaved £16,000 off his schools' £100,000 per year energy and water bill and slashed its 530 tonne carbon payload in the process.

How was this possible? You'd expect some fairly imaginative and dramatic compromises to be implicated wouldn't you. If you guessed that they've revised the dinnertime menu so as to feature nothing but salad and sandwiches, or ditched the traditional boiler-powered heating system in favour of an exercise-while-you-learn personal heat-generating programme you'd be way off the mark.

The solution - as proposed by an eco-friendly 'hit squad' - was to switch off their 500 computers when they weren't in use i.e. after the kids' home time, at the weekends and during school holidays when not a soul would be on the premises to even consider making a single key press.

Pure genius! If you're in the market for a cushy career change you could do much worse than becoming an energy consultant.

Ultimate Mac hack: turn your iPod into an MP3 player!

2007-02-12T10:48:00.001Z

Pin back your ears, this is a Kookclusive! Thanks to Isaac Huang and his new application, iPodDisk, you can now access songs stored on your iPod via OS X's Finder. When plugged in, your iPod appears alongside your other drives and folders through the magic of iDisk drive emulation. The mounted drive can be explored with non-iTunes applications, copied from and used as a launchpad for the playback of MP3 files... just like a real digital music player device.

Readers should note that iPodDisk doesn't enable you to also copy music to your iPod - the emulated drive is essentially read-only. If in future revisions Isaac can somehow manage to wangle his way around this impasse, I can really see this iPod thingy taking off. Call me crazy if you like, but I envision the iPod enjoying a worldwide mainstream adoption and going on to become the world's best-selling range of digital audio players. You read it here first!

'Friendly fire' muppet is a hero!

2007-02-11T15:03:00.001Z

Nearly four years after Lance Corporal Matty Hull was gunned down in a gung-ho fly-by shooting in Iraq, 'POPOV36', the trigger-happy pilot responsible, has been identified as Colonel Gus 'Skeeter' Kohntopp.

Despite evidence of numerous grave errors and the conclusion of a British Army inquiry - "that procedures were not followed" - neither Kohntopp or his still unnamed wingman, 'POPOV35', have been disciplined. On the contrary, Kohntopp has since become a full colonel (at the time of the incident he was a lieutenant colonel), been "awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious service as the chief of A-10 mission planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom" and promoted to the esteemed role of 'top gun', the man in charge of training hundreds of fresh-faced US pilots in the fine art of ground attacks.

Here Kohntopp can be seen proudly posing for the cover of the autumn 2005 edition of Pearls and Rubies, a local Boise magazine. Inside, ironically, he claims that "My best piloting experience has been flying the A10 in Iraqi Freedom. After all the years of training, to go to war and use my experiences to help dispose Saddam from power was the epitome of my career". Clearly putting this minor blip behind him hasn't posed too much of a challenge. The hypocrite goes on to preach: "Honour your values and be true to yourself. You have to live with your actions so make them worthwhile to your loved ones and this great nation".

His best pal and neighbour, Eldon Anderson, goes so far as to call him a hero and accuses the British media of making a fuss about nothing and failing in their duty to show sufficient support for the US-led war on terror.

Meanwhile, in a pitiful damage limitation exercise, PM Tony Blair has said he "deeply regretted" the distress caused to Matty Hull's family by the inquest delay. Apparently the MoD "acted in good faith". That is aside from colluding with the Pentagon in lying about the very existence of the video in the first instance, and then pretending that it couldn't be released to the coroner because it contained highly sensitive classified material, which, if leaked, could pose a serious threat to national security.

All things considered it's a farce worthy of a Blackadder script! No doubt backwater redneck, Eldon Anderson, and his ilk will still need this wholly absurd anti-Americanism thing explained to them.

Of warm mice and screwdrivers

2007-02-08T09:56:00.001Z

In winter my extremities (fingers and toes) swell up, itch and ache like hell due to poor circulation. The condition is known as Raynaud's and it's a pain in the posterior. To combat the vasospasms which cause your blood vessels to contract (vasocontriction) and reduce the blood flow, you have to induce the opposite phenomena (vasodilation) by keeping warm. I tend to blast my wrists with the hand dryer in the toilets, or run hot water over them.

You can't spend the whole of winter in the toilets so another solution is needed. That's why I bought the *commence breath-holding, drum roll* Thanko USB Warmer Mouse II. It may seem like an odd strategy considering it will only defrost one hand at a time, but it actually makes sense because the wrist you're putting pressure on by using a mouse all day long is going to be the point at which blood flow constriction is at its most severe.

So, the mouse arrived from Hong Kong, worked pretty well-ish for a few hours and then all of a sudden the cursor movement became highly erratic. The very nice, helpful Brando people promised to send me a replacement, and in the meantime I decided I'd dissect the ebbing rodent to see what makes it tick. Despite me using a screwdriver to open it up, I didn't unscrew any screws with it. There aren't any on the external housing so the mouse has to be broken open by force to see what's inside.

To the left you can see a view of the mouse with the top part of the shell removed. The heating element consists of a thin fibrous mat with a copper strip attached at either side. Each strip is connected to the innards of the mouse by a single red wire.

I'm probably asking too much for such a cheap device, but I expected to find some sort of oil-filled miniature radiator under the hood so was underwhelmed by this scrap of material which will only radiate heat into the centre of your palm.

To the right you can see what's under the second layer of the shell (the heating element is segregated to prevent damage to the circuitry). The red wires have been cut to remove the heating element.

The only other aspect of the design worthy of note is perhaps the switch built into the USB cable. This is used to enable or disable the heat function so the mouse can also be comfortably used in summer. It does its job, but I think it was silly to place it so close to the mouse itself because it gets dragged around like a dead weight as you navigate. I might end up Blu-Tacking it to my desk when the replacement arrives.

Maybe I'd be better off buying the Finger Mouse. No awkward wrist positions or pressure should equal no constriction, though I wonder how you stop the cursor flitting back and forth across your screen like a ping-pong ball while you type. None of the reviews I've read mention this.

Autoasphyxiation can be fun kids

2007-02-07T21:06:00.001Z

As a rule Mondays are not worth getting out of bed for, except the one just gone was marginally better because it marked the return of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe.

He spent a good chunk of screen time divulging the intricacies of the BBC's programming code of conduct. Unsurprisingly they take a dim view of advocating behaviour which might induce harm to minors. As an example of a cartoon you're unlikely to catch on CBeebies (tot's TV from the BBC) we were treated to a clip of The Magic Noose in which the narrator explains that by putting their heads through the eponymous tree-mounted hoop, children can be spontaneously transported into the realms of a kiddy nirvana.

I know child murderers come in all shapes and sizes, but this is certainly a novel modus operandi. What I'd like to know is if it's for real, and if so, when, and on what channel it was broadcast. Google searches reveal next to no information about it, and even YouTube which is home to video snippets of every other form of retarded depravity draws a blank.

Business applications are the devil's work

2007-02-05T21:07:00.001Z

Anyone who spends a significant amount of time managing great wads of data for a living will know exactly what I mean. Business applications are clearly designed by robots who will never have to use them, for people who spend 8+ hours a day pleading with the retched things to do as they're told.

Take the Oracle E-Business Suite for example. Firstly it's designed to run inside a web browser which, let's face it, wasn't the most forward thinking decision ever made considering most corporate users are obliged to use Internet Explorer on their AOL-style, walled garden systems.

As if that wasn't bad enough, it's a Java application. Yes, the same Java home users hastily disable altogether on their home computers to avert a psychologically damaging web based encounter with one of these toe-curling applets. The same Java platform human web designers abandoned back in 1996, 1. because everybody hates them, and 2. because they have the resource guzzling clout to bring a small country to its knees.

And every little task takes so damn long to carry out. Pressing the print button won't print a purchase order. Oh no, that would be too easy. There's a whole chapter of the manual dedicated to the procedure. Once you've done it a few times, you can do it with your eyes shut, but that's not the point. Why does it have to be so longwinded? Is the intention to evoke a sense of penitence? Are the Catholics behind it?

Make a simple mistake and there's no going back. If you've committed your changes you can't simply return to a field and, let's say, replace an A with a B. It's not uncommon to be confronted with ever so helpful tool tips like, "I'm sorry, you've made your bed and will have to lie in it (complete with accompanying Nelson-ha-ha). To adjust this field you must clamber up all five peaks of the Kangchenjunga mountain range with a ten tonne boulder strapped to your tender bits, leap through a dozen flaming hoops whilst balancing a kerosine-soaked chimpanzee on your nose and play the Lithuanian national anthem backwards with a bagpipe fashioned from a dodo's digestive system when you reach the summit". That's a genuine quote.

Fashionista favourite, 'random', is currently being shoehorned into every conceivable sentence in a vain attempt to sound chic, but if ever there was an appropriate occasion to use it, it's to describe Oracle. No two clicks are ever the same. Sometimes they'll action a change. At other times the same two clicks will cause your session to spontaneously terminate.

More infuriating still, getting a change to stick, or coercing a field to accept a keystroke, often requires you to enter a seemingly unrelated menu, untick a box, save your work, exit the menu, re-enter the menu, re-tick the box, save and withdraw from the menu again and finally return to the field you want to stick some trivial bit of information in.

To make doubly sure everything goes smoothly it doesn't hurt to offer up a small sacrifice (a hamster or goldfish is fine) to an effigy of the divine Oracle god.

Link checking with Firefox

2007-02-05T18:57:00.000Z

OK, so checking your blog or web site for dead links is never going to be glamorous or fun. Really the best you can hope for is to make the tedious process as painless as possible. I checked several hundred links in a matter of minutes with the aptly named Firefox extension, LinkChecker, and didn't blub like a baby once so I reckon we're on the right track.

Unlike most other link checkers this one embeds the results within the very page it's probing in real time in the form of multi-coloured highlights. Invalid links become red, valid ones turn green, forwarded, forbidden or otherwise inaccessible ones get a splash of yellow, while skipped ones are greyed out. Because these colours emerge sequentially and piecemeal(ially) you can manually test and fix broken links as the extension continues to chug away in the background.

If your pages contain links that you'd rather not have tested, maybe because they are sure to work, or connect to internal sign out, delete et al commands, you can opt to exclude them from testing. Note that while the exclusions list refers to 'keywords', they do not necessarily have to appear in linked text. Entering domain or sub-domain names works just as well providing you don't include any dots as they seem to confuse LinkChecker.

You might find that some links are automatically skipped despite them not containing any of your banned words. I assume this is because the extension respects rules declared by robots.txt files. How thoroughly decent and considerate. Pfft!

That aside my only other gripe is that it fails to skip excluded links if they happen to be internal anchors - something about the # symbol seems to be knocking it off balance.

Subscribing to blog labels or categories

2007-02-04T21:11:00.000Z

There will be times when you're only interested in receiving RSS blog updates which revolve around a particular theme. Many blogging platforms allow you to monitor individual categories via RSS even if their feeds aren't immediately apparent. Below I've compiled a list of the URL structure required for each kind of blogging software...

Blogger - http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/label/

Drupal - http://blogname.com/personal/subjects/label/feed/

Expression Engine - Reliant on individual blogger configuration.

Movable Type - Bespoke configuration required so feeds vary.

MySpace - Don't care and you shouldn't either. Nothing has ever been written on a MySpace blog that's worth reading.

Serendipity - http://blogname.com/rss.php?version=1.0&category=4 (hover over the category link in the sidebar to reveal its ID number)

TypePad - Depends on the way the blogger has configured the software.

Vox - http://blogname.vox.com/library/posts/tags/label/atom.xml

Wordpress - http://blogname.com/tag/label/feed/

Additions, corrections and any other feedback would be very welcome.

Gmail speed-up tips

2007-01-27T21:06:00.000Z

Occasionally Gmail can trip itself up while interpreting all that behind the scenes javascript and this can lead to delays when serving up your emails. If you're as important and popular as I am you'll know 0.7 milliseconds isn't acceptable - you want your information now! Below you'll find some steps you can take to squeeze that last drop of juice out of your Google web mail:-

1. Disable the chat feature by clicking on the "standard without chat" text link in your inbox's footer.

2. If half measures aren't for you try switching to "basic HTML" mode.

3. Not quite bare-bones enough? For the Amish Gmailers among you there's always Mobile Gmail. You could even make it pop out of your browser in its own incy-wincy, ickle phone sized window. This is handy if you want to stay in the loop at work without drawing too much attention to yourself. You can keep your pseudo phone pinned on top of all your other applications using PowerMenu / reSizer (Windows) or Afloat (Mac).

4. Visit your 'settings' menu and on the 'general' page select 'No snippets - Show subject only' to disable inline previewing of email content. Chances are you'll know if you want to open up an email judging by who it's from and what's in the title. There's no need for information overload.

5. If you don't use your Gmail account for chatting, disable the chat history feature located under the 'chat' tab of your settings menu.

6. Move a tab to your right and opt not to 'show my web clips above the Inbox' to exterminate distracting sponsored link fluff. Even when customised, this is a poor substitute for RSSFwd if you ask me.

7. Activate keyboard shortcuts under the 'general' settings tab to eliminate all that incessant flitting back and forth between keyboard and mouse when performing common tasks such as archiving mail or composing a new message. The only thing missing from this time-saver is a quickie delete key combo. Considering Google's history of playing hide and seek with the delete button in the actual GUI this doesn't surprise me.

8. If you already know you're using a Gmail compatible browser you can skip the automatic browser check in future by accessing your inbox via this URL.

9. Pages will render faster if your inbox isn't clogged up with excess mail so make sure you archive anything you want to keep and chuck out the rest. Otherwise reduce the number of 'conversations' shown on each page by tweaking the 'maximum page size' option under the 'general' settings tab.

10. Spring-cleaning your inbox will increase the relevance of your search results but putting it in the microwave probably isn't advisable.

Slimming World voodoo

2007-01-24T22:23:00.002Z

At work I'm enveloped by talk of red and green days, 'Syn values', food optimising and 'free' foods. This is the language of Slimming World, one of the major British weight-loss groups. Ultimately the plan hinges upon the assignment of 'Syn values' to 'non-free' foods ('free' in this context means those you can eat by the bucket load to satiate your hunger whilst consuming relatively few calories). Members are allocated a Syn budget which can be flexibly spent in whatever way they see fit providing they don't break the bank on any given day.

In order to do the maths (and tot up the number of Hail Marys you'll have to reprise should you overindulge) you must buy the Slimming World Food Bible (or 'Directory' as they would rather you called it) which lists the Syn values of 39,000 items of food and drink. Translating the nutritional value of so many foodstuffs by way of an undisclosed, cryptic formula seems like a heck of a lot of work, and, well, fruitless really when you consider that consumables are already labeled with the ubiquitous ingredients breakdown table... that is until you remember that someone is raking in a wad of cash by shrouding the whole shebang in mystery to engender a dependent member-base of regular contributors.

It wouldn't be quite so devious if the assigned Syn values appeared to follow some sort of logic. On the contrary, the rules seem arbitrary in many cases. For example, one lady I know stopped drinking her favourite flavour of hot chocolate because The Bible states that it has a higher Syn value than the flavour she has now resigned herself to buying as a substitute. The brand, calorie and fat content are identical. Another wacky curiosity concerns the mechanism by which the Magic Formula transmogrifies the nutritional value of foodstuffs simply by altering its constitution. According to the Slimming World gurus the same orange can be better or worse for your diet depending on how it is sliced, diced or blended. Nothing added, nothing removed, no evaporation or seepage. It's like the water into wine trick all over again.

To keep you guessing (and purchasing each new revision of The Bible), these Syn values are jiggled about and republished every two months. Unlisted Syn values for new or obscure products can't be requested by email "due to the huge demand from members", but, but you can call the Syns Hotline - charged at 60p per minute - to resolve your queries. Alternatively you can send product packaging by free post for analysis, and then - once you've unwittingly done Slimming World's detective work on their behalf - call their premium rate hotline to be rewarded with the fruits of your labour.

While "there isn't a particular formula for calculating Syns (if only it was that simple!)", you can use the members-only 'Online Syns Calculator' to calculate the incalculable Syn value of any unidentified products. "The Calculator takes into account all of the nutrition information, as well as considering if the product contains any Free Food".

Ahuh.

PMP up the jam

2007-01-04T18:03:00.001Z

I didn't think Portable Media Players, mobile cinemas - or whatever you want to call them - would be my thing, but when you're given one as a present you've got to at least have a tinker before leaving it in the bottom of a drawer to gather dust. I think my indifference towards them up until this point can be put down to not wanting to carry an extra bulky device around with me - even the svelte new iPod videos are quite chunky when you have to factor in the size of a mini hard drive.

With mine this isn't an issue as it's flash based - it has 1GB of memory built-in with the option of boosting the capacity via an SD card slot. The unit also supports photo slideshows, MP3 playback and e-book reading so there's no need to have a separate unit for each function. While it does include a camera and even a video camera, you'd be daft to rely on either of them to capture the birth of your first-born or wedding.

It's one of those no-name - and hence no support - models, made in a Chinese sweatshop no doubt. You know, the kind you'd avoid like the plague if you were shopping around for electronic gizmos yourself. Despite this it appears to be a solidly constructed device. The clarity of the screen is excellent, the 'Intoom' GUI is highly intuitive and there's no sign of any 'Engrish' in the menu system (well 'accessory' should really be 'accessories', but that's just me being picky). Several instances of odd sentence structure aside, they (whoever 'they' might be) have made a passable job of translating the manual to English so it's very easy to suss out how everything operates if this isn't apparent through fiddling alone.

The default - and only - movie format the player can handle is DivX video with IMA ADPCM audio contained within an ASF wrapper, so not overly Mac or Linux friendly. These devices don't play nicely with non-Windows systems full stop because they can't be mounted as driverless removable media. While this makes the internal memory inaccessible, you can format an SD memory card in the player and then write to it via an external memory card reader, assuming you can find a video editing tool which will allow you to match the codec specs required by the device. My search has so far been in vain.

For now I'm using the Sunplus PMP Transcoding Tool at work where I'm practically intravenously plugged into my Windows box. Sunplus are the manufacturers of the chips which power a staggering number of these unbranded mobile MP4 devices. This is a massive bonus because the same core software is distributed with them, and therefore updates are easier to get hold of (though not from any single, official source). It also means that more people are using it, and sharing their experiences, tips and tech support online.

The latest version appears to be 0.9.2.0, which is available from Speed Digital. Unfortunately, unlike the older incarnations it's not an all-inclusive, standalone package; three codecs must be installed prior to converting any videos, namely Storm Codec, QuickTime Alternative and DivX.

Other people have had varying degrees of success with Microsoft's command-line utility, VidtoASF, Blaze Video Magic 2, Aplus Video to PMP Converter, the video conversion software which accompanies the kiddified RipRoar MP4 player, Wivisoft MP4 Video Converter, Boilsoft ASF Converter, Xilisoft Video Converter and Lesnar_mk's MP4 Movie Converter.

Something else I've learnt through my research is that you should never-ever-ever flash the firmware on these MP4 devices, unless it's a branded player with a specific model number and an official support web site where you can find a guaranteed-to-work ROM. And even then you shouldn't do it. The problem is that although many PMPs look identical, they are often made by different companies and according to varying internal component schematics. No single firmware ROM can take all this diversity into account, and your chances of finding an 'official' one are somewhere between Buckley's and none. Many intrepid flashers have naively embarked on such a treacherous adventure, and few have returned to tell the tale... or at the very least they've permanently toasted their players and had to buy a new one. Try taking a scrambled PMP back to the computer fair you bought it from for a refund and see what sort of a reception you get! They'll cut and run or change their trade name to avoid offering any after sales support when it's their fault your kit is DOA.

So it looks like I'm a convert; I've joined the video generation! Bus journeys will never be the same again. If I'm ever tempted to unplug my headphones and share the audio output with you, fellow commuters, feel free to lynch and launch me out of the top deck window. It's only fair.

The rise and rise of fan-created random off ofs

2006-12-30T19:17:00.000Z

The 2006 edition of Lake Superior State University's Banished Words List is out. Sadly it doesn't include any of my latest pet peeves so I intend to bore you with them here instead.

'Off of'. An imbecilic, infantile and totally redundant John Wayneism, yet it's everywhere you look at the moment. I'm convinced people are deliberately shoehorning it into the most inappropriate sentences simply to wind me up. There are almost no circumstances under which it makes sense to say 'off of'. "Spin-off of x" or "rip-off of y" I'll grant you, but in practically every other instance 'from', 'on' or a single 'off' will suffice.

Just stop it or I'll bounce the Oxford English Dictionary off of your bonce.

If you type "for * fans by * fans" into Google you are treated to a mélange of 126,000 instances of fans of one thing or another claiming to have created something for other fans of one thing or another. It seems to be the stock slogan for people who don't do slogans, yet insist on christening their magazine, blog, TV show, podcast or whatever with one anyway. And they don't just slip it in subtly, they announce it with chirpy glee as though the audience won't have heard anything remotely like it ever before.

Worse still is the even more glib variation "for the people by the people" (247,000 Google results!). On second thoughts, this one is quite informative because it distinguishes media intended for the consumption of rabbits, but created by snails from that devised by humans for humans.

If you're really that desperate to adopt a meaningless tagline use this instead. At least add a bit of flavour to the mix.

Why bother? Is it not safe to assume that if you're running an extensive web site solely dedicated to Tony the Tiger collectibles and memorabilia of the 1920s that you're reasonably fond of the subject matter? Even if you're getting paid to produce content for a niche readership I'd imagine that you've been specifically selected for the job at least partly on account of your specialist knowledge - and hence interest - in that field.

'That's so random'. Have you noticed how absolutely everything is 'random' these days? Life hasn't spontaneously become more haphazard than it was previously, yet only recently have people become preoccupied with pointing out what appears to be a new discovery for them. Unless you write a daily script to rival the predictability of a Scooby Doo cartoon and hand it out a week in advance to anyone you expect to come into contact with, you can guarantee that some Muppet will look at you with a tilty-headed, quizzical expression and declare "that's so random.

For the record, this post was generated by an exceedingly formulaic mathematical algorithm developed at the beginning of the paleolithic era as foretold by a soothsayer during the Lepton Epoch.

Filtering Google search results by date range

2006-12-17T10:44:00.000Z

Supposedly we are able to use the operator 'date:3/6/9/12' to limit search results to only those added to Google's index within the last 3 months, 6 months and so on. In practice you may as well not bother because all this tweak does is return pages which include keywords such as "Date: 12 December 2006". Chocolate fireguard anyone?

An alternative, undocumented, super-secret operator you can use is 'daterange:[julian date]-[julian date]'. Huh? As defined by Wikipedia: "The Julian day or Julian day number (JDN) is the number of days that have elapsed since 12 noon Greenwich Mean Time (UT or TT) on Monday, January 1, 4713 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar . That day is counted as Julian day zero. The Julian day system was intended to provide astronomers with a single system of dates that could be used when working with different calendars and to unify different historical chronologies."

Right so Stephen Hawking has his bases covered, but how are the rest of us going to do the maths in our heads? We don't need to. We can use the Gmacker date range search, which will plug in the correct calculations automagically based on the number of days or dates entered. The problem is, using the daterange operator doesn't make a scrap of difference to your search results either. Great tip this is turning out to be, eh! I hope the likes of Likehacker are taking note. The recipe for a top tech tip: identify problem > offer solution > decide solution is rubbish and shrug shoulders.

Take a major, recent news story, for example, and apply the only-the-last-30-days modifier to the keywords entered: ipswich prostitutes "serial killer" "paula clennell" daterange:2454055-2454085. Now try the same search without the daterange operator. Either way you get 44,500 hits. That's precision fine-tuning at work.

Actually I shouldn't call the victims 'prostitutes' so we're told by the politically correct, feminist mob because it belittles the tragedy and demeans the women involved. According to these pedants it isn't useful to identify them in this way so that other sex workers will know to be wary, employ safety-in-numbers tactics, or get off the streets altogether. Also it doesn't help the police to be able to draw correlations between the targets enabling them - with the help of criminal psychologists - to build a profile of the killer.

They argue that if all the victims had been McDonald's employees, this facet of the case wouldn't have featured so prominently, or received so much media attention. I think the rest of McDonald's staff working in the area would beg to differ.

One commentator ratcheted the farce up another notch when she tried to sugar-coat the reasons some prostitutes were still walking the streets in Ipswich despite the heightened risks: like any other doting mothers they need to put in extra hours at this time of year to be able to afford Christmas presents for their children. Paints a cosy picture doesn't it, but in reality most of them are compelled to put their lives in jeopardy to feed their addiction to hard drugs. According to the BBC's victim profiles page, only one of them was a mother, and a heroin user.

Of course the sum of these women's lives shouldn't be defined solely by their chosen career path, but surely a dead spade is still a spade? Why does truth have to be the casualty of news reporting in this era of politically correct doublespeak?

Excluding trashed items from Spotlight search results

2006-12-16T19:51:00.000Z

By default, OS X's Spotlight results include whatever is lingering in your trash can waiting to be permanently purged from the system. This can be confusing if you're engaged in a seek and destroy mission because the files you banish don't disappear from view until the trash is manually emptied.

To fix this you can exclude the trash can from Spotlight's search results by dragging its folder into the 'Privacy' pane of its 'System Preferences' panel.

First though, before you can manipulate your .trash folder you must instruct Finder to reveal any hidden files and folders on your system. This can be done in any one of the following ways...

1. Use the multifunction system maintenance tool, OnyX. 'Parameters' > 'Finder' > tick the 'Misc. Options: show hidden files and folders' check box.

2. Open a Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities) window and type the command, "defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles ON" (without the quotation marks).

3. Double-click on Show\Hide Files to reveal your hidden files and repeat the process to hide them again.

Once you've outed your trash folder, visit your /Users/Username/ folder and drag .Trash into the 'System Preferences' > 'Spotlight' > 'Privacy' pane.

Bollardial impalement

2006-12-15T22:35:00.001Z

Normally the merest mention of 'hilarious, must-see' YouTube movies has me yawning in record time, but when they feature an area of your home town you pass by almost every day, any old dross is worth a peek.

This one depicts screw-loose motorists trying to beat the bus-only automated bollard system we now have in place right in the city centre where traffic is at its most hectic.

The lengths some lazy chavs will go to to access a 'no park zone' where you are limited to crawling at a maximum speed of 2 mph due to the swathes of blinkered, Dawn of the Dead style shoppers spilling out into the road is staggering!

Suddenly sitting on a public bus in the midst of wannabe Tupacs blasting out gangster rap through their loud-speaker phone/MP3 players doesn't seem quite so bad. Whaddaya mean you're not in awe of them? They wear their jeans round the angles and swagger in time to the beatz. What more do you want? They're keepin' it real don'tcha know. There's no pleasing some people.

Tread carefully and carry a big ski pole, or two

2006-12-12T23:07:00.001Z

Whenever I'm out exploring the countryside I see people - who clearly consider themselves to be serious, die-hard hikers - carrying ski poles. No skis, no snow, no dry ski slope, just the poles. I've always assumed this is some sort of cliquey, ramblers club fashion statement and left them to their own devices... besides, the Men in White Coats already have their hands tied rounding up Tom and Katie.

However, according to this wikiHow article, these Gandalf staffs come in very handy for testing potentially unstable ground, jimmying yourself out of quicksand quagmires, or can function as tarpaulin tent holder-up-erers should the heavens open unexpectedly.

Who'd have thunk it? I was also surprised to learn that the view of quicksand as portrayed in the movies is nonsense. Providing you follow a few simple guidelines you can take a dip in the gritty goop and survive to tell the tale.

Botched with NVU

2006-12-07T14:08:00.000Z

Oddly enough you can't snag a show-your-support badge like this from the NVU home page, only the 'made with' ones.

NVU is a streamlined, free alternative to the clunky Dreamweaver WYSIWYG HTML editor. Sounds great in theory doesn't it. In practice it's wonkier than a drunken giraffe bowlegged with rickets, totally incapable of performing the simplest of tasks - inserting a *gasp* ...table for instance.

It can't be argued that the glaring gremlins in this crippleware were unknown; people have been posting (and ranting) about them on the official support forum for eons. Nevertheless, there hasn't been the merest whiff of a bug fix release since June 2005 - in fact the project seems to have been cut adrift by all concerned.

Given this lack of activity you'd think the developer would be delighted to see someone breathing new life into NVU without asking for anything in return. But no, Kazé has offended his delicate sensibilities by taking what is essentially the stub of a promising open source project, improving it and re-distributing the code for the community at large to benefit from. Shame on him, dissin' the spirit of the open source movement like that!

From now on each time I press a button or write a chunk of code in KompoZer and it does precisely what I expect it to I'll adopt a steely gaze, shake my fist and curse that menace to society.

Special - not Magic - K

2006-11-30T20:07:00.001Z

When it comes to dieting, isn't it amazing how some people can 'get it', yet at the same time completely miss the point?

Take this segment from the article above for example...

"Second of all, Special K cereal does not cause weight loss in any way whatsoever. It’s just calories. There are no weight loss vitamins, minerals, ingredients or magic fairy dust in it that makes it any different than any other calories. Sure, it’s low fat, and that’s always nice. Sure, it’s low in calories too, but so is everything else that’s low in fat. It is calories and nothing more.

Do you know what that means? It means that if someone is going to claim Special K makes you lose weight, or even just slightly helps you lose weight, you can equally claim that it makes you gain weight. Why? BECAUSE IT’S CALORIES. They control what your weight does, not specific foods. Eat too much Special K and you’ll gain weight no different than if you ate too many potato chips."

Personally I've never interpreted the Special K pledge ads as obliquely implying that anything otherworldly transpires to bring about weight loss when you eat a bowl of the cereal. Is it not more likely that people who assume otherwise are allowing their yearning for a quick fix to cloud their judgement and then kicking the cat when their misguided optimism is dashed?

Deriding Special K for its capacity to help people shed excess pounds - merely - by virtue of its low fat, low calories constitution is tantamount to accusing an aeroplane of deceiving its passengers because it can only fly with the aid of its wings and jet engine.

Of course you could indulge yourself with a mouse's nibble of double-chocolate gâteaux for breakfast and lunch for two weeks and still experience the same degree of weight loss, but that would hardly sustain you until tea time would it. The aim is obviously to devise a cereal that is simultaneously filling and healthy. The fact that it tastes like sawdust (I can relate because I get into lots of wild-wild-west bar brawls) only serves to backup the science behind Special K; it contains far less artery clogging gunk than a full English breakfast, hence substituting one for the other, over time, works wonders by reducing your paunch. Captain Pedantic, it's time to hang up your cape.

Dogs can't look up

2006-11-28T19:01:00.001Z

I never thought I'd find myself having a heated debate about dog's capacity for grape consumption of all things.

I was standing in the park the other day waiting for his royal highness to finish watering the lamp posts when he came bounding over to me, suddenly distracted by the bunch of grapes I was eating. His tongue was sloshing back and forth so maniacally I suspect he must have mistaken them for mini Cadbury's cream eggs, albeit those rare-as-rocking-horse-deposits, green, rubbery ones. Not wanting to deprive him, I hurled a few in his direction and watched while he scooped them out of thin air like a lizard catching flies.

It was at this point I was approached by a complete stranger who was overly concerned that I was feeding my dog grapes. The conversation went a lot like this...

Park-loitering nutter (henceforth known as PLN): "You know you shouldn't give grapes to dogs."

Me: "Oh really, why's that?"

PLN: "You just shouldn't, it's not good for them."

Me: "Hmm, so do they have trouble digesting them properly or something?"

PLN: "Err... well... I don't know, but I'd stop it if I were you."

Me: "If us humans can eat them without keeling over with uncontrollable abdominal spasms I doubt very much they can be harmful to dogs."

PLN: "Well if you're happy to take the ris--"

Me: "Risk of what exactly? They're grapes not used heroine needles for Christ's sake!".

You know how sometimes posts sound funnier in your head? If this were someone else's blog you'd have to pay me to read this drivel.

Anyway, we went back and forth for a while longer, our voices getting higher and more exasperated with each exchange. For a fleeting moment I was struck by the absurdity of standing about in the waning light of a freezing cold November evening arguing about the intricacies of the dog-grape complex, but I wasn't going to let it go. I was dumbstruck (and more than a bit intrigued) by the notion that this guy was prepared to defend his stance so vehemently when he had no evidence of any kind - not even a dubious, hand-me-down anecdote from a three-times-removed demented auntie - that what he was proclaiming contained an ounce of truth.

What's the most ridiculous, entirely baseless advice you've had unsuspectingly foisted upon you?

Greetings from the north pole

2006-11-26T22:41:00.001Z

I learnt today that here in the Greatest of Britains (not any of the lesser ones), if you write to "Santa, Reindeerland, SAN 1TA" before the 13th December, Royal Mail will deliver your letter directly to the red-coated, beardy bloke himself and hang around long enough to return with his personal reply.

You can imagine how this must have come about can't you. Every year 56 squillion (give or take a few hundred) sprogs and sproglets scribble down their Christmas wish lists, address them to Santa at the north pole and pop them into the post box expecting him to make their wildest dreams come true. The posties can't stamp them with 'address unknown' and return to sender because they'd shatter the illusions of all those cutey-wooty ikkle kiddies and risk psychologically scarring them for life. Neither can they just bin them because then they'd assume Santa received their letters, but was too mince pie-eyed to care.

It microwaves the icy cockles of my ticker to think the big, bad, faceless Royal Mail are prepared to dedicate so much time and energy to serving the needs of our nations young'uns.

Does this happen anywhere else in the world?

Wake me up before you go go

2006-11-26T20:44:00.000Z

If a movie is on very late I tend to schedule it to record with EyeTV, set my Mac to automatically shut down shortly after it finishes, and then go to bed. Nevertheless, very often I'll wake up in the morning to find my computer is still switched on because OS X's 'Energy Saver' utility has failed to act on my so-clear-Britney-Spears-could-understand-them instructions.

Since discovering that it only does this when it's in sleep mode, I've tried to make a habit of shaking my Mac back to life before catching some zzzzzs (gosh darn it I'm hip). Many times I'll forget because I like sleep mode and have it enabled whenever possible.

For a long time I searched for a way to coerce the two functions into playing nicely together. After much Googling I'd pretty much thrown in the towel, chalking it up to duff never-to-be-fixed software, when today I came across an OS X support article which explains why my beloved Mac isn't being allowed to rest in peace at the end of a busy night's recording.

Apparently you have to set your computer - which is already running - to start up moments before you want it to shut down. Considering how illogical this seems you'd think such a nugget of information could be imparted by way of a simple tool tip.

I wonder if doctors operate on the same principle when it comes to coma patients. "No I'm sorry, we can't pull the plug on your clinically dead daughter until she's fully awake and sitting bolt upright ready for action".

Deciphering the indecipherable

2006-11-19T17:11:00.012Z

Sometimes the information you really want is only available on a single web site, and that web site happens to look like it was whipped up by a blind, drunk Thalidomide baby.

As much as you might like to, you can't just FTP into the author's web server and give them a stern lesson in web design. So what other avenues does this leave open to you? The easiest technique I know of is to 'zap' these bride-of-Frankensteins with a web page de-cluttering bookmarklet.

These are like favourites or bookmarks, except the hyperlink is supplanted by a string of javascript code. When activated (by simply clicking on them in your browser's toolbar or bookmarks archive) they perform a predefined action upon the web page you are currently viewing, or provide a shortcut to other web services, a thesaurus query engine for example.

The linked page offers a wide variety of bookmarklets designed for reformatting web pages to make them more readable and printable. Some apply individual changes, while others can be considered meta-bookmarklets as they aggregate the effects of many of the more specific ones.

To put them to the test I set out to find the world's most hideously, eye-stabbingly awful web site in existence. I don't know if Hayden Video Weddings is quite the pinnacle of web site indecipherability, but it must come pretty close!

Below you can see the before and after shots, having applied Jessie's multi-zapper (roll over the image to flip back and forth between the two).

Wow, that's what I call a make-under! Following an audit, the health and safety authorities stormed the Hayden Video Weddings HQ. Those responsible were heavily fined and strong-armed into redesigning the site to preclude subsequent visual assault (allegedly).

Holy ear perforation Batman!

2006-11-14T11:14:00.001Z

Whether you watch movies through your computer or on a traditional TV you will have noticed that there is often a dramatic contrast between the volume levels of the audio depending on what's happening on screen. The dialog can be so subdued the actors appear to be whispering making it impossible to determine what's being said, whereas the action sequences, explosions, gun shots and so on are loud enough to blow your socks off!

This is done deliberately and is known as 'dynamic range'; it's supposed to provide a more realistic interpretation of the natural soundscape. If you ask me it's enough to make you want to take Spielberg and his ilk by the throat and choke them to death.

In the cinema the projectionist 'works around' this issue by ramping up the volume to ear-splitting levels. Your head is usually ringing by the end of the film, but at least you'll know what it was all about. You're probably used to resorting to the same measures at home too, but not if your media playback software incorporates sound-shaping technology known as 'dynamic range compression'. This operates by standardising the extremes at each end of the auditory spectrum. In other words it amplifies softer sounds and dampens down louder ones so you don't need to keep your thumb poised on your remote control's volume button.

The image below is a screen capture of VLC's 'preferences' panel. It shows that ticking a box (well leaving the default setting alone actually) is all that is required to enable DRC.

'Normalisation' is another audio-taming feature often built into more advanced media players. It homogenises wave forms by applying a consistent gain ratio in conjunction with an upper volume cap.

Below is another screen capture of VLC's slick GUI. This one depicts its 'extended controls' panel, located under the 'window' menu. As before it's not difficult to guess how the 'tool-tipped' function operates.

So that's your DVDs covered, but what about the video content you record through your computer's TV tuner? If adding sound effects to a blog wasn't really irritating I'd insert one of me hitting a brick wall here. No audio manipulation gizmos of any kind are to be found in the EyeTV software, though I have an alert configured to give me a nudge the instant this situation changes.

Maybe the TV Volume Regulator could be configured to work with computer audio output. Still I'd rather wait for a software solution.

Samsung branches out... into ED-209 style automated killing machines

2006-11-13T12:48:00.001Z

Are you a dictator with conscription woes? Are your troops getting a tad too obstreperous? Maybe their trigger fingers are aching from all that rapid fire annihilation and their performance is suffering as a result? Why not usurp your whole motley crew with a legion of the all-new, bleeding edge Samsung isagRs.

In the blink of an eye the isagR will identify your adversaries, lock them into its sights and pulverize them before they have chance to shout, "Chicken Supreme and Buffalo Wings for two". I jest of course; the sentry's patented, precision pattern recognition and infra-red detection technology ensures not a single hair on a civilian's head will be ruffled.

Who'd have thunk Samsung (in conjunction with an institute of higher education) would be the ones to militarize Korea's demilitarized zone. Oxymoron anyone?

Pick 'n' mix RSS feeds

2006-11-12T14:00:00.002Z

If you subscribe to a high traffic blog or news web site through an RSS to email service such as R-Mail or RSSFwd, you won't be a stranger to a bulging inbox.

No matter how much you love a particular site you're unlikely to want to read absolutely every article posted to its RSS feed. Some sites will give you a range of tweaked feeds to choose from (one for each tag or a 'best of' round up for example) allowing you to selectively filter the information you receive, while with others it's a case of 'one size fits all'. This tip explains how to whittle down the updates you receive from the latter using Gmail's automated email filtering feature.

The idea is to instruct Gmail to instantly delete any emails from a specified sender containing keywords which describe topics you aren't remotely interested in.

To get started visit gmail.com, click on 'settings', 'filters' and then 'create new filter'. Enter the email address of your RSS-to-email provider in the 'from' box. If the name of the site you have chosen to receive RSS updates from appears in the subject line of each email you can enter this in the 'subject' box. If not, put it in the 'has the words' field instead along with any keywords you wish to blacklist.

Let's look at an example where you want to sieve email which uses only the title of the article or blog post to identify it within the subject line. Let's say you subscribe to 'Evangelism Online' and 'Godsquad' and you want to vanquish certain emails dealing with scary topics you can't face.

This string identifies all content originating from 'Evangelism Online' OR 'Godsquad', AND which contains ANY of the keywords/phrases listed between the second set of brackets.

When you're happy with your operator string, press the 'next' button, put a tick in the "delete it" checkbox and jab the 'update filter' button. If you already have some rogue emails festering in your inbox, you might want to tick the 'also apply filter to x conversations below' checkbox.

From time to time you can check how effective your filter is proving to be by casting an eye over your deleted items folder. The messages that have skipped the inbox will be easy to pick out because they will still be bold (as is the case with unread email).

Taking out the G-Trash

2006-11-10T19:00:00.001Z

It's funny how you can put up with niggling annoyances and learn to muddle through, and then as soon as you throw a tantrum a solution presents itself entirely out of the blue.

Today I stumbled upon what is known as Gumbmug, phonetically speaking. No idea where the name comes from, but being down with the latest web trends I'd guess it stems from the tendency to drop the vowels from words so you've got more chance of bagging a unique trademark. Well whatever, what it does is gives you back your Google by blacklisting notorious e-drool such as Shopbot, Dooyoo and so on, thereby tipping the spam-to-genuine-content ratio in your favour.

Let's have a tinker then shall we. A search for "wireless mp3 player" returns 91,300 results in plain old Google, while the same search generates only 25,400 hits via Gumbmug. Eureka, that's what I call progress! I have a new home page. In the rare event of actually wanting to run a price comparison check, I'll pick one 'screen scraper' and visit it directly. They're extremely useful in the right context of course.

I'm not usually one to lose myself in a tirade of strong language, but gosh darn it, sometimes a webapp gets me so excited I just can't help it. My apologies for the four letter words.

MiggyTrack

2006-11-09T19:01:00.001Z

When it comes to offering personalised search tools, Rollyo are no longer the only game in town. Google are hungry for a slice of the pie and aim to claim a sizable portion by way of their newly uncorked Co-Op webapp.

With Co-Op you get pretty much the same deal, except under the bonnet (or 'hood' I suppose :p) you'll find Google's own search engine rather than Yahoo's, you're supplied with a wacky, instantly forgettable URL to link to your widgets and you're given more scope to categorise your web-foraging offspring.

To check out the hue of the grass on the other side of the fence I've thrown together a custom search widget which queries eleven of the top-ranking Amiga game database web sites. Not that I'm obsessed or anything silly like that.

I was pleasantly surprised to find it's a nice shiny emerald green. The start pages are distinctly uncluttered as you'd expect from a Google Gooey, you can opt to eradicate all adverts (as long as you're not operating as a commercial organisation) and there are plenty of advanced options to keep the most demanding tweakers happy. For now the race is too close to call. Do the front-runners have any competition?

My First Search Engine. Porn and spam sold separately.

2006-11-08T22:24:00.000Z

Statistics show that 98.54% of the content on the internet is worthless dross, yet we still have to wade our way through it to get to the good stuff. Perfect example: whenever you search Google to locate a trustworthy review of a piece of tech gear you're considering purchasing, it spews out wads of irrelevant shopping spam sites which - purely by chance of course - contain the word 'review', even though no opinions, positive or negative, are imparted within their pages. Typically this fluff populates the first few pages of Google's output, pushing the genuine content deep into obscurity.

One workaround would be to identify a handful of reliable sources for each kind of information you require, bookmark and search them individually. Better still is Rollyo; a newish, startup web gizmo which provides the means to tailor your search results to suit your personal preferences. It does this by allowing you to 'Roll Your Own' categorised search filters. For instance, you could create a health 'Searchroll' by entering the URLs of up to 25 top-rated health-focused web sites, which when queried would only return content produced by these previously vetted sources.

Here are some I rolled earlier...

Help yourself and let me know if you found them useful.

Our cannon fodd... er, distinguished superhero soldiers are "plenty smart"

2006-11-07T15:15:00.001Z

Since hearing about John Kerry's cringeworthy "stuck in Iraq" goof I've been Googling away to discover if there is any truth behind the accusation he didn't make. I have to confess I've always believed in the 'stupid grunt' stereotype, but according to some credible studies I'm dead wrong.

I can't possibly imagine how I arrived at this conclusion. These people are perfectly content to be herded into the world's toilet to fight a farcically unwinnable war for no logical reason, under the auspices of an incompetent leadership (who at least have the common sense to never have served in the military themselves) for a salary they could earn flipping burgers in the comfort of their own home town. It should have been clear to me from the start that what we're dealing with here are no less than Einsteins-in-the-making!

Except when you see a group of soldiers holding up a "hilariously misspelled" sign supposedly as evidence that Kerry is clueless about the intelligence of the infantry serving in Iraq, you have to wonder. You'd have to be pretty dim to swallow the GOP-spin that Kerry - at the 11th hour of the midterms - would deliberately set out to alienate the swathes of the American populace who are either serving in the armed forces, are related to someone who is, or who pretend to support the troops while secretly thinking they're idiots for throwing their lives away on a wild goose chase they don't fully understand.

Another myth, I'm told, is that people don't join the army because they quite like the perk of being given free reign to bully and murder foreign baddies, civilians or whoever happens to be available at the time. I expect IT technicians don't choose to work in the IT industry because they like working with computers either. I'm wrong about a lot of things.

Convert owt to owt (ish)

2006-11-07T14:07:00.000Z

You can't have failed to notice the current web 2.0 trend of taking commonplace computing tasks online. Everything from virus scanning and making backups to writing documents can now be performed from within your web browser; the advantage being that you can take your 'applications' with you wherever you go and never have to worry about updating them (or paying for them in most cases for that matter).

One of the latest tasks to be given the online treatment is file conversion. What stands out about web services Zamzar and Media Convert is that they'll have a stab at converting pretty much any kind of file to an appropriate, alternative format. This is ideal for those of us who only convert a file once in a while and can never remember the name of the application you need to process one thing or the other when the need arises.

The downside is obviously that whatever you want to convert, first has to be uploaded, and then downloaded in its altered state, so how useful these services are to you will ultimately be determined by the speed of your internet connection.

Backup your entire Blogger blog in under 2 minutes

2006-11-02T18:46:00.000Z

For my next party trick I'm going to show you how to perform an entire backup of your Blogspot (aka Google's Blogger) blog in three idiot-proof steps.

This technique requires no software other than a web browser so you can put your offline site sucking tools back in their box. Neither will any template modifications or configuration alterations be necessary. Your backup will consist of a single html page containing every entry ever published in sequential order, a handful of miscellaneous css files, plus any images you have posted, no matter where they are hosted.

Should disaster strike you won't be able to use your backup to instantly restore you.blogspot.com as you might with an automated import script, but likewise this would be the case if you instead chose to follow Google's tortuous advice, or employed an offline browser (which I should point out would save multiple copies of the same posts in addition to all kinds of superfluous fluff).

Here's the procedure...

1. Scroll downwards through the list of dates in your 'blog archive' sidebar until you reach the year in which you began posting and click on the link.

The URL - minus the spaces which have been inserted to trigger word wrapping - in your address bar will look a lot like this:

http://kookosity.blogspot.com/ search?updated-min= 1999-01-01 T00%3A00%3A00Z&updated-max= 2000-01-01 T00%3A00%3A00Z&max-results=13

2. The URL in this example instructs Blogger to display all the posts created between the first day of 1999 and the first day of 2000, though if you extend the 'updated-max' date to reflect the date of your most recent post (or just set it way ahead into the future) and boost the 'max-results' limit to include all your entries you can force Blogger to cram everything onto one page.

3. Make your adjustments, press return and then save the output in "web page, complete" format (if you're using Firefox) to a safe place on your hard drive.

The result will look identical to its online counterpart so can easily be absorbed by the naked-eye (as opposed to an RSS interpreter for example). Beats pulling rabbits out of a top hat, eh.

The Farepak who stole Christmas

2006-10-24T14:31:00.001+01:00

I can't decide which of my two favourite recurring themes to file this under; it's a toss up between 'everyone is stupid except me' and 'unloading the emperor's new clothes'.

Prior to going bust this month, Farepak, was the best-known Christmas hamper and food/gift voucher supplier in the savings scheme market. The idea is that you set up a direct debit to issue monthly payments to the company, and then as Christmas approaches they issue you with either a modest hamper or the privilege of purchasing overpriced food or gifts from their own store. In effect they operate as a bank who profit from investing your money, but don't reward you with interest payments. Not only do they not pay you any interest, you actually pay them for sitting on it.

Believe it or not this bizarre scam appealed to thousands of people. Some thought it was such an ingenious concept they even signed up to become proselytising agents for Farepak. I expect they're having second thoughts now the company have gone into administration leaving them high and dry.

Of course it's atrocious that Christmas this year is going to be pretty much null and void for these low-income families (while the managing directors of this crooked firm stuff their faces with luxury mince pies and port at the Hilton), but you've got to wonder what they were smoking when they agreed to pay Farepak to take their cash. Even if they'd stuffed their savings under a mattress and let it gather dust it would still be there by the time Christmas rolled around. Rocketry it's not.

What have they got against grown-up money? The fact that it can be spent anywhere, or that - providing you don't shop at Harrods - 100 pennies equals a pound?

Disciple of Zod, Non, lives...

2006-10-11T21:02:00.001+01:00

...and equally shocking, speaks. Quite a feat for a mute alien whose only notable utterances are grrrr and uhhrrr!

Superman The Movie director, Richard Donner, had already completed 75% of Superman II when he was unceremoniously dismissed from the project by producers, the Salkind brothers. He was replaced by UK director, Richard Lester, who was at the time better known for his involvement in a slew of embarrassingly cheesy 'comedies' and his collaboration with The Beatles.

To Superman fans he is the anti-christ; the clueless usurper who transformed their beloved Man of Steel into a camp caricature. For Lester to be credited with the director title it was stipulated that he would have to be responsible for at least 51% of the Superman II footage. To meet this demand he set about re-shooting Donner's scenes, laying waste to decades of the hero's esteemed heritage. Lester's vision incorporated a number of excruciating, slapstick, pantomime routines, some unfathomable dialogue and at least one major plot hole.

Ever since its release, Superman purists have been petitioning Warner Brothers to allow Donner to restore his far superior cut of Superman II. Only recently did they concede to these pleas for sanity to prevail - it is due for release on 28th November this year!

While searching for a definite d-day on the IMDB message boards I stumbled across some insightful posts by, none other than, erm... Non, aka Jack O'Halloran.

Jack kindly gave up some of his time to answer a mixed bag of fan questions. A few tidbits I managed to glean from his replies include...

~The actor has spoken to Bryan Singer about the possibility of himself, General Zod and Ursa appearing in the sequel to Superman Returns.

~How the caped crusader regained his super powers after relinquishing them so he could become a mere mortal and be with the love of his life, Lois Lane, will be revealed in Donner's cut.

~In response to suggestions that Donner was fired due to creative differences or an inability to work within the film's budget, Jack insists that neither statement is true, but doesn't offer any other explanations even when pressed.

~Lester is an ice cream cone, Donner is a banana split.

Seeing Jack spring from nowhere to mingle with the proletariat got me wondering how many more celebs may have graced us with their presence on the IMDB forums. I decided I'd trawl the net looking for clues, construct a staggeringly protracted list of them and post it to my blog. People would travel from far and wide to witness the spectacle and I'd be awarded a Nobel prize for writing the most cunning blog entry of the 28 known universes. Then I thought, "sod it! - it would take forever and life's too short".

For more details of Donner's cut of Superman II refer to this Wikipedia article.

Free TV guide and scheduler for UK EyeTV users

2006-10-06T14:26:00.000+01:00

Prior to EyeTV 2.0 we were stuck with the default EPG (or electronic programming guide), tvtv, a premium subscription service. Now a subtle new feature allows you to switch to a totally free alternative known as DVB Guide.

The advantage with using an EPG rather than, say Radio Times online, is that you can schedule recordings with a mere two mouse clicks, plus the information is instantly accessible because it's retroactively downloaded to your computer. The alternative can be a real chore: find the show you want to record, click 'new recording', give it a name (and optional description), set the date, start and finish time, select the right channel and click OK.

Here's how to ditch tvtv:

1. Open up the 'EyeTV Programs' menu by poking the rectangular button in the upper right corner of the virtual remote control.

2. Select the 'Channels' panel and highlight all the ones you want to receive listings for via the EPG. You can hold down the shift key and click on the first and then last item to choose all of them, or hold down the option key and click individual items to highlight a non-contiguous range.

3. Click on one of the downward pointing arrows in the EPG column and change 'tvtv' to 'DVB' within the drop down menu.

4. Switch to the 'Program Guide' panel, right click and select 'Update DVB Guide'.

To schedule a recording you would either browse the listings for a show or type its name into the Spotlight style search box, select it with a left click and then push the 'Add Schedule' button.

Lemmicide

2006-10-05T15:40:00.000+01:00

'Cos I'm dead clever I've known for a long time that the popularly held belief that lemmings commit mass suicide as a means of self-regulated population control is a myth. What I wasn't aware of until now is the origin of this legend.

As it happens it's all Walt Disney's fault - well more accurately it's the fault of people who watched the 1958 Disney nature documentary 'White Wilderness' and didn't listen to the narration carefully enough.

The film depicts a herd of lemmings mindlessly plunging over the edge of a cliff and into the 'sea'. Despite being good swimmers, the critters are unable to battle against the 'tide' indefinitely - rendered immobile through exhaustion they eventually drown and are seen floating in a watery grave.

The rodents' behaviour wasn't captured in-situ, the 'sea' was really a lake in Canada and their leap of doom was all staged - the poor creatures were actually hurled to their deaths by the producers. Nice, though we shouldn't be too surprised considering how the same animation house dispatched Bambi's mum more than 20 years earlier.

As interesting as this is, the film has been misinterpreted. The narrator refers to the lemmings' compulsion to keep moving, not to engage in hari-kari. Their goal is to migrate away from their current densely populated habitat where food and space are scarce. They dive bomb en bloc into the 'sea' because they have poor eyesight and so mistake it for a lake which they would otherwise easily be able to cross on their pilgrimage to the Great Valley (TM).

"...and so is acted out the legend of mass suicide and destruction of a species it would seem to be", the film concludes.

This is the answer to the opening precis:-

"In this land of many mysteries it's a strange fact the largest legends seem to collect around the smallest creatures. One of these is a mousy little rodent called the lemming. Here's an actual living legend. For it's said of this tiny animal that it commits mass suicide by rushing into the sea in droves. The story is one of the persistent tales of the arctic and as often happens in man's nature lore it's a story both true and false as we shall see in a moment."

It doesn't mean an avalanche of suicidal lemmings intentionally sacrifice themselves to allow the Chosen Few to stretch their legs and swing a cat or two.

You can watch the critical segment of the film here and read more about the mockumentary here.

USBatteries

2006-09-26T22:06:00.000+01:00

Knowing how flaky built-in MP3 player batteries can be I decided to buy one which runs on replaceable AA power. This way the whole device wouldn't have to be trashed if the battery alone gave up the ghost.

With USBCells you can have the best of both worlds. Flip back the cover on these 1300mah AA NiMH batteries and you'll find a plug which can be inserted into a standard USB port to recharge them - in other words, they're a battery and charger rolled into one compact package. The process takes 5 hours; you'll know when they're ready to rumble because the LED light will switch off.

USBCells cost £12.99 for a pack of two including VAT and delivery.

Postal movie distribution; a solution looking for a problem?

2006-09-19T22:06:00.001+01:00

So I don't get any smart alecks pointing at me and laughing at my utter stupidity, I'll start this post by saying, I've got to be missing something here. These services must exist for a perfectly logical reason, I'm just too dumb to see what's staring me in the face, dancing a jig and singing, "here I am, look at me" at the top of its anthropomorphic voice.

Right, with that disclaimer firmly in place I've given myself free reign to be as simple-minded as I like and get clean away with it.

You've all seen these companies that specialise in sending you x number of DVD movies through the post for a fixed monthly fee. You compile an online list of must-watch-before-I-die movies, hand over your credit card details and wait for the first one to drop through your letter box. When you've seen it, you pop it into the prepaid envelope, bung it in the post box and they send you the next one in your queue. No more visits to Blockbuster, no more late fees, no hassle and lots of cheap movies. Great stuff, hallelujah!

So why is this considered revolutionary? People have been beaming movies straight to their TVs via Sky and cable for years now... all without the aid of Postman Pat. I'm not talking about setting up a subscription to Sky Movies either. I mean the 'Box Office' movies where you get to pick and mix what you want to watch by tapping a few buttons on your remote - the charge appears on your phone bill and the movies are 'delivered' instantaneously as if by Jedi mind trick.

Only recently did the music industry get its act together by adopting - rather than fighting - the Napster distribution model. So far their 'gamble' has paid off. Piracy is still rampant of course, but lots more people are choosing to purchase their music instead of stealing it. Any previously untapped revenue generated through this channel, above and beyond £0.00, I'd say is a bonus.

The movie industry has timidly followed suit in a limited way because movies are so much more cumbersome to punt around cyberspace. Imagine how fat your 'toobs' would have to be to stream, or otherwise disperse, video data via traditional, non-swarming mechanisms. Nevertheless, it strikes me as odd that Tinseltownians and movie distributors are expending so much energy debating the issue at all when Sky and cable make bandwidth issues irrelevant.

All Warner Brothers, Sony, Miramax et al need to do is grant the TV networks permission to close up the time frame between a movie appearing at the cinema and it being available to buy or screen in people's homes. Either way the studios would be employing an intermediary so that can't be the issue. Presumably the consumers who are in the habit of renting movies aren't concerned that they don't get to keep the physical discs so this is surely a moot point.

I just don't get it.

ABC explains it all

2006-09-15T18:44:00.002+01:00

Anyone - even whole nations - can make an honest mistake, but re-electing George Bush after enduring four years worth of embarrassing faux pas and horrifically inept foreign and homeland policy decisions is nothing short of criminally stupid.

Two years later I still wonder how the hell it happened. I've contemplated all kinds of wacky scenarios from alien mind-control technology to ballot tampering (OK so envisaging this one doesn't require a supreme leap of faith).

When I stumbled across an ABC News poll taken in February 2004 it all became clear; context is the key. The survey examined the percentage of Americans who believe that selected biblical parables are literally true.

The most unsettling disclosure has to be that a whopping 60 per cent of the participants stated they believe the story of Noah's ark and the great flood really, truly, actually happened exactly as depicted in the old testament.

Let's take a moment to step back and consider some of the finer details of this tall tale:-

Sprightly 500 year old Noah (along with his wife, sons and their wives) spent 120 years - using nothing more than primitive hand tools - building a 450 foot boat. A boat which is significantly longer than the largest wooden vessel ever constructed - the 338 foot Pretoria schooner-barge, which incidentally broke apart and sunk in 1905 during a violent storm.

In a time frame of only 7 days Noah loaded 30 million different animal species (including prehistoric ones!) and sufficient sustenance to keep them alive into the ark and sailed around for a year and a day until the flood water receded.

Experts with too much time on their hands have calculated that this would take approximately 35 years to accomplish and each animal would have to be squeezed into a space the size of a golf ball. This, of course, is assuming all the animals had previously been gathered from around the globe and were waiting obediently on the shore ready to board the ark - a feat other analysts believe would take a further 684 years!

Once bath time was over, the same merciful, benevolent god who wrought this carnage upon the entire animal and human population conjured a rainbow in the sky as an everlasting symbol of his covenant with Noah (he promised not to obliterate any of his creations again, even if he was having a really bad day). This is why rainbows appear to this day whenever the heavens open on a sunny day, don't you know.

60 per cent.

Yep, I can believe the same people elected a borderline retarded chimp in a cowboy suit to rule the richest, most powerful nation on earth.

Virtual jukeboxes

2006-09-14T14:20:00.000+01:00

The web is currently abuzz with talk of an evolving breed of push-button, 'two-dot-oh' services that allow you to name a tune and have it streamed to your computer instantaneously and for free (as opposed to those that feed you music deemed similar to the bands or artists you type in). This is predominantly thanks to the people behind BlogMusik, a new French outfit who have adopted the concept and slapped a cutesy iPod-like, Flash interface on top to get the fad-followers salivating.

BlogMusik draws its content from Radio Blog Club, which in turn taps into music uploaded by bloggers. Every genre of music is catered for, some of it belonging to multi-platinum selling artists and some the work of unknowns.

Common sense would suggest that unless the copyright holders of this material are receiving royalties from BlogMusik et al, they are likely to be breaking the law and will soon be squished into oblivion by music industry watchdogs. If this is true, the case against them must be progressing treacle-treadingly slowly because similar well-established startups such as Streampad, Fine Tune, Webjay and The Hype Machine look pretty healthy to me. Maybe the limitations imposed by the streaming protocol serve to bolster their legitimacy? I don't buy the, "it's hosted in France so anything goes" tack. Could it be that such technology is considered less of a threat to the music industry because people will still want to own physical discs, or at least digital files which can be transferred to any device and played anywhere?

While it is possible to rip the music you listen to through BlogMusik (you only have to search your computer's internet cache for .rbs files and rename them to .mp3) it remains to be seen if anyone will be inclined to do so considering the low bitrate of the music files made available.

Real Player radio on demand

2006-09-12T09:24:00.000+01:00

Earlier in the year I wrote a post explaining how to go about converting web-based, Real audio radio streams into a more portable format. Since then a new-ish Mac application has emerged to streamline (see what I did there?) the process even further.

In the spirit of granny-proof Mac software, Stream Recorder does everything for you without asking any complicated questions or pestering you with inane dialogue alerts and requires no ancillary software. There are no parametres to tweak before you begin recording; you simply drag 'listen again' links into the application window and leave it to generate an MP3 file, which can then be transferred to your not-necessarily-Apple-branded MP3 player.

There's a clue in the title of the app, but for anyone who hasn't yet had their first coffee of the day, Stream Recorder captures audio in real-time so it's prone to connection drop-outs unlike the Flashget / HiDownload / Net Transport / Mass Downloader plus Switch method (which involves downloading .ra files via a resumable download manager before converting them locally).

That said, it performed flawlessly when I tested it with two three-hour, 32 kbps broadcasts. It could be that the application has some sort of built-in blip recovery gizmo in place, but as I haven't experienced any yet I can't be certain one way or the other. If not your recordings are no more susceptible to premature coma than they would be if recorded using better established software like Audio Hijacker - on several occasions whilst 'hijacking' BBC radio streams, Real Player has ceased transferring data and Audio Hijacker hasn't known how to pick up the ball again.

In each case Stream Recorder churned out a 163mb MP3 file encoded at 128 kbps. This seems to be the application's default - and unalterable - setting, though as you're unlikely to find web audio streams encoded at a superior bitrate I don't see it as a limitation. Well unless, at the other end of the spectrum, you're running low on flash memory capacity.

One feature I would like to see included in future releases is a timer to indicate how long a stream has been recording. Oh and it wouldn't hurt to drop the redundant, obligatory association with the iPod. Otherwise Stream Recorder gets a big thumbs up from yours truly.

Flash some flesh and boost your blog traffic

2006-09-07T14:04:00.001+01:00

Promoting your blog offline isn't easy; billboard and newspaper real estate is expensive, while radio and TV air - or screen - time is totally out of the question for most hobbyists. To really make an impact you have to think outside of that dog-eared old box marketing schmucks are forever jabbering on about.

So what would be the most cost-efficient and persuasive medium through which to foist my message onto the unsuspecting public? My own body of course, it's perfect! It's mine to do what I want with and - according to the local police force's log book - gets plenty of exposure.

As long as I wear my boob tube and never change my blog's URL I'll have a source of high-vis self-publicity for life.

Cash on Delivery

2006-08-31T18:59:00.000+01:00

Here in the UK we have this half-baked, government-run get rich quick scheme called 'child benefit'. To qualify for this handout you don't need to be homeless, destitute or disabled, only to be the guardian of a child under the age of 16, or a 'big kid' under the age of 19 who is in full time education. Your first-born sprog is worth £17.45 a week and any additional ones earn a bonus windfall of £11.70 a week, all tax free. Child benefit isn't means tested in any way so a billionaire duke - in the eyes of the law - is just as entitled to it as an unemployed, wheelchair-bound single mother. I'm sure some of their ilk must claim it too as statistics reveal that child benefit is taken up by nearly 100% of the eligible population.

Rewarding strangers for exacerbating Britain's overcrowding crisis will cost tax-payers an estimated £10.153 billion between 2006 and 2007 (according to the HM Revenue & Customs Spring 2006 Departmental Report). It makes me wonder what other luxury items it's possible to claim compensation for. For instance, is there a champagne allowance I'm not aware of? I hope so - why should I spend my own money when I could liberate some of yours?

A stick sharpened at both ends

2006-08-31T11:27:00.001+01:00

For years experts and amateur observers alike have been debating what does and doesn't constitute art. Personally I don't understand why the issue is considered by so many fence-sitters to be unfathomable, so I'm going to lay the matter to rest right here and now.

A composition is definitely not art if putting it together requires no creative talent whatsoever. There, done, it's that simple. If the opposite was true anyone and everyone could be considered an artist and the word would immediately be expunged from the dictionary; 'human' already covers every member of the populace.

Quintessential to this pretentious, manufactured is-it-isn't-it tug of war is Kira O'Reilly's Inthewrongplaceness. Let's get real here: this work of whatever consists of a deranged naked women hugging a dead pig for four hours. No Kira, it's not about "pigginess, unexpected fantasies of emergence and interspecies metamorphoses", it's a larger-than-life warning against the perils of 'care in the community' programmes. Yes dear, the experience may have left you "making fiercely tender and ferocious identifications with the pig as stand-in, double, twin, doll and imaginary self", but that doesn't make what you're doing art, does it.

The science faction of re-animation

2006-08-29T15:48:00.000+01:00

At a loose end I found myself watching a schlocky gore-fest of a horror film called Re-Animator. It features a goofball scientist who capitulates to his unhealthy obsession with reviving the dead by injecting them with what looks like a radioactive magic serum. Of course this being a comedy-horror, his hapless subjects aren't returned to the land of the living in prime mental or physical condition; they are transformed into zombiefied, slathering imbeciles. They develop super-human strength and plunge headlong into murderous rampages - some even do so without their heads!

Aside from wishing I could have the 90 minutes I invested watching this trashy nonsense refunded, the film got me wondering if the events portrayed really are as far-fetched as they first appear. No, bear with me. We know doctors are able to defibrillate patients back to life shortly after their heart has stopped, so the real brain-teasers are:-

What is the shelf life of a human or animal corpse? If they're brought back after, say, 10 minutes, will they continue to function normally? What is the cutoff point?

Can internal organs be substituted for man-made contraptions in order to keep an organism alive? If so, which ones are viable?

Is it possible for a decapitated brain to retain consciousness? How long for, and under what conditions?

The following research aims to answer some of these questions:-

As far back as 1940 the Russians were killing and resurrecting dogs in the name of science. This video demonstrates the artificial sustenance of a heart and lung when isolated from the body, the mechanical resuscitation of a dog whose blood has been drained to bring about the cessation of heart, lung and brain activity, and the reactions to various stimuli of a dog's dismembered head! The ill-fated canines weren't the only sick puppies in this scenario! As a dog lover it turns my stomach just thinking about it. A Wikipedia article on the experiments can be found here.

More recently a US scientist claims to have yanked a three-hour-dead dog back from the other side. The procedure entailed draining the dog's blood thereby forcing the heart to shut down. A cold saline solution was then pumped into its blood vessels effectively lowering its metabolism to bring about a state of 'suspended animation'. After three hours had elapsed blood was pumped back into the dog and its heart was defibrillated.

Again in the US, a similar method has been used to save pigs from - artificially induced - certain death. The doctors are now seeking approval to trial the technique using human car crash and gunshot victims. Let's hope if they get the go-ahead they'll let their wounds occur naturally.

The freaky case of Mike the Headless Chicken goes some way towards explaining how the body of a bird adapts to life without a head.

For some truly disturbing human examples refer to this article.

You won't be laughing when your pickled undead head is languishing in a jar on the mantelpiece... [Dr Evil little finger to the corner of the mouth thing] or will you?

I won't tell you again!

2006-08-18T14:55:00.000+01:00

Movies You Should See is a Podcast You Should Listen To - it's so side-splittingly funny you won't mind being told what to do in the least. In each zany, ad hoc episode Richard Smith, Allison Downing, Mike Dawson, Craig Bevan and Tristan Ofield attempt to make the case for why your life won't be complete until you've watched the elected movie of the week, assuming they can remember what it is.

Mostly though you shouldn't need much cajoling. Unless you've been living under a Wi-Fi Enabled Rock, you won't be tuning in for advice, you will have seen the plugged movies dozens of times and bought the accompanying lunch box and posing pouch. To be honest, if you're not familiar with the movie up for discussion you'll feel like an Alien in New Yorkshire. The crew do provide synopses though they're often quite scanty, so relying on the podcast as a celluloid divining rod isn't recommended.

A more appropriate title might be, 'If You Haven't Seen Star Wars Go Out & Buy It, Stick It In Your DVD Player, Thoroughly Digest It & Then Come Back & Listen to Our Podcast', but that wouldn't roll off the tongue quite so smoothly, and would only apply if they were pimping Star Wars, which they haven't yet. This is by no means a criticism, it's meant as a helpful tip to ensure you get the most out of the show.

Movies You Should See's meandering, ADHD-addled style is what makes it so compelling. It's like earwigging on a pub conversation, except the participants are still sober and know what they're talking about because they're in the biz themselves. The off-topic rants and did-you-know? tidbits are as entertaining as the planned-ish discussion points.

For instance, the recurring ITV-dialogue-mangling segment has me in stitches every time; to make movies more watershed-friendly the British network, Independent TeleVision, like to dub over any language they - in their dubious wisdom - consider offensive. Well, to be fair to them I think sometimes it's the case that they simply opt to broadcast official, alternative, TV-friendly versions of movies. Whatever the source of the edits they're trivia gems. One of my favourites comes from Caddy Shack: with a swish of the almighty Wand of Political Correctness the line, "hey everybody, let's all get laid" becomes, "hey everybody, let's go take a shower". Unsurprisingly expletive-littered gangster films are butchered to a greater extent. I don't care whose company they find themselves in, hardcore Mafia bosses do not use phrases like 'melon farmer', 'muddy funster', 'flip you', 'jeez Loueez' or 'forget you'.

It turns out that this meddling isn't restricted to audio; ITV/whoever even went so far as to edit the text on the sandwich board John McLane is coerced into wearing in Die Hard With a Vengeance to read "I hate everybody" rather than "I hate niggers". This fouls-up the significance of the entire scene because he was specifically made to stroll through Harlem - home of The Brothers - where he would inevitably find himself on the receiving end of a jolly thorough bottom spanking.

I've always been fascinated by the decision making process involved in cutting certain scenes from movies, and the way creative editing can radically alter the narrative and character development. All this is covered in depth, as is the reason director's cuts are sometimes little more than spurious marketing gimmicks concocted to sell you movies you already own.

MYSS is a refreshingly rough and ready blend of quick-witted banter, insightful observations and analysis and insider film production geekery (did you know the pioneering, pre-CGI arrow-eye-view shots in Prince of Thieves were created by simply attaching an arrow to the side of a camera mounted on a track, sliding the entire rig towards its target and then speeding the whole thing up?). There's nothing else quite like it.

If you want to sample MYSS without the 'commitment' of subscribing to the podcast I can highly recommend the Arnie-bashing special. It's hysterical from start to finish.

Is it a bird, is it a plane?

2006-08-17T22:38:00.000+01:00

Nope, neither, it's a web page masquerading as a Word document. Work Friendly is a free web service that serves one purpose; to aid and abet surfing on the job. It operates by channelling a web site of your choice through an authentic-looking mock-up of an MS Word application window. Because any graphics are omitted and text is reformatted to look entirely business-like no-one would know you're not slogging your guts out for your employer.

It's pretty much foolproof, but it wouldn't hurt to err on the side of caution - if you bite your lower lip and appear sufficiently harassed and downtrodden your boss will assume it's just another typical day at the office and leave you to it.

Look out, the world's behind you!

2006-07-18T10:39:00.000+01:00

If I was into drinking games and took a swig every time a CTU agent asked to be "patched through" to someone in the TV series, 24, I'd be velly, velly dlunk.

Another good trigger would be the occurrence of dodgy logic arising out of a complete lack of understanding of what goes on beyond US borders.

Here's a great example from series 2, episode 6...

Tony: "You're doing business with a known terrorist [actually he wasn't, though his fiance was] and you're going to sit there and tell me with a straight face you don't know what's going on?"

Reza: "I grew up in London. I'm marrying an American girl, a protestant. So, if you're going to racially profile me, you should at least get it right."

Tony: "You ever hear of the Finsbury Park Mosque? It's considered one of the main recruitment centers for Islamic terrorists in the West [don't know about 'main', otherwise this is true]. Our main targets are European Muslims with Western educations, passports and the potential to blend into Western society. And do you know where that mosque is located? Your hometown, London. So tell me, Reza, how's my racial profiling going now?"

Reza: "I want a lawyer."

Tony: "No."

So to qualify as a terrorist these days you just have to live in a city where known terrorists gather to conspire? Of course London is so minuscule everyone lives under the same roof and is on first name terms with the Queen's Corgies. I wonder if this scene raised any eyebrows amongst US audiences. I hope so.

Actually London covers an area of 609 square miles and has a population in the region of 7.5 million. That's a hell of a lot of terrorists! Maybe we should be gearing up to nuke the place in the interests of public safety.

Incidentally, the Finsbury Park Mosque line was cut from the UK version of the episode - if the Imam had spotted it he would probably have threatened to set Allah (pox be upon him) on Tony.

Firefox, patch me through to my post button. Go, go, go!

Faunal ponderings

2006-07-17T11:06:00.000+01:00

I've been giving serious consideration to bat poo.

Gingerly entering the Twilight Zone bat cave at Chester Zoo my first thought was, how am I going to survive this experience without getting plastered with bat guano? (the collective, scientific term for the droppings of seabirds and bats). I wasn't so much concerned that bat droppings make excellent gunpowder - I'd lived through the Manchester bombing after all. I just didn't want to get any in my hair.

Once my eyes had acclimatised to the dark I scanned the walkways for evidence of aerial bombardment of the faecal kind, and found none. That's interesting, I thought; I know from watching nature documentaries that bats are known to do their business mid-flight as well as when roosting. In light of our hypersensitive compensation culture I reasoned that people wouldn't be allowed to wander about in this environment without the protection of a helmet. Therefore until someone can prove otherwise I'm going to make the logical leap that these bats are trained to only fire when circling above peopleless woodland areas. Any stray payloads are likely genetically analysed and paired with the offending bat, who would then be punished by way of withholding fruit and other privileges like watching old Batfink re-runs on TV.

Milling around the rhino enclosures I was struck by another conundrum. There aren't any Vietnamese Javan rhinos at Chester Zoo, but they do make reference to them on the information panels dotted around the viewing area. One fact bite said there were "only 2-7 Vietnamese Javan rhinos left in the world". Two to seven. Just think, a single drunk safari tourist in a jeep could wipe the entire species off the face of the planet! This is shocking and depressing in itself of course, but why be so vague about the population count when it can be totted up on two hands? It can't be that they are dispersed throughout the country, roaming the wilderness in difficult to reach, unmonitored areas because I know they are all located in the same habitat, the Cat Tien National Park.

Wouldn't you think if there were so few remaining members of a species in existence they would be known individually by pet name, electronically tagged and guarded round the clock by an elite squad of Green Peace, animal-defense guerrillas? At the very least they should be allowed to unwind in lavish palaces, freely partake in on-tap beer and assorted delicatessen and have their every whim satisfied by a team of doting soubrettes. While they were reposing I'd expect a throng of gynaecologists to be feverishly instructing their sperm in all the best fallopian tube navigation/ovum penetration techniques to improve their chances of procreation.

Find out what you can do to help at the International Rhino Foundation web site.

The food industry is contaminating our cyanide!

2006-07-10T11:09:00.000+01:00

I can understand people getting upset about food manufacturers foisting noxious additives and preservatives upon consumers through the consumption of supposedly healthy products, but this is bordering on farce.

Here in the UK we're about to embark on a major trans-fat crackdown. Trans-fat is man-made gunk produced by adding hydrogen to vegetable oil (a process known as hydrogenation). It's added to a vast range of food to prolong its shelf-life and stabilise flavour; a home run for the food industry, but certainly not for your arteries, heart or waistline.

So to stay fit and healthy you'll be anxious to know which back doors these sneaky trans-fats are breaching so you can nail them shut, right? Are supermarkets injecting the stuff into celery and carrots after the witching hour to evade detection? Nope. Get this. They're found principally in all the products you'd expect to make you obese when consumed to excess, namely fast food, chocolate bars, cookies, creamy gateauxs and so on.

On which planet is it rational to wolf down a Triple Heart-Decimator Burger with a jumbo side serving of Artery-Annihilating Fries from McLardy's and then get your knickers in a knot because your diet contains fat E as well as fats A, B, C and D?

Recovering 'lost' or 'forgotten' Windows passwords

2006-07-06T14:27:00.000+01:00

Give me a second to catch my breath...

...

Much obliged. Here I am sprawled out before a computer quivering from a mixture of exertion and trepidation. Sporting my Milk Tray, all-black, covert ops gear - with the aid of a set of ankle and wrist suction cups - I've just scaled the dizzying pinnacle of an office block, delicately scored and removed a section of glass and sneaked inside.

Still clamped between my teeth is a CD; it's an 'Ophcrack Live CD', "the fastest Windows password cracker". As I remove it from the opaque, foil-sealed packaging, the angel-devil tag team perched on my shoulders begin to quarrel over the pros and cons of inserting it into my office computer's CD drive to 'recover' the administrative password.

Not being privy to this information is seriously hampering my ability to perform all sorts of trivial operations such as installing the driver for my new printer and the Java plugin for Firefox. I'd be embarrassed to call tech support and have them traipse all the way over here just to enter the admin password. Besides, I'm sure they have more pressing matters to attend to... like watching rapping chimps on YouTube.

Actually, that's only half the battle. On several occasions I've bumped into one of the techies who happened to already be over here on an unrelated mission and asked them to do the honours, leaving them to get on with it while I'm away. When I got back, nothing had changed so I presume they were inadvertently distracted by a YouTubian limbo-dancing giraffe.

So you see my predicament. Do I keep on badgering the techies every time I need a 'i' dotting or a 't' crossing, or throw caution to the wind, run the Ophcrack Live CD and risk being lynched by the IT department's elite SWAT team?

That looked suspiciously like REM transpiring between the gap in my blinds. I'm outta here...

The shocking truth about Fox News

2006-07-04T14:57:00.000+01:00

I've always assumed Fox News is a cunning and deeply ironic satire of the Russian revolution - in particular the plague of chronic propaganda which seized the Soviet Union during this era.

Watching the documentary, Outfoxed has convinced me otherwise. Apparently Rupert Murdoch's 24 hours a day current affairs station is a genuine attempt at serious news broadcasting. Who'd have thunk it?

I doubt very much I'm the first person to have jumped to this seemingly logical conclusion. Bill O'Reilly parrots the mantras 'Fair and Balanced' and 'We Report, You Decide' so frequently and with such stony-faced conviction that you can only assume he's an actor playing the part of a Goebbels-esque caricature. How was I to know that ordering his prey - I mean guests - to 'shut up' and cutting their mics whenever they began to rattle his prejudiced, narrow-minded little world view wasn't all part of the pantomime?

In the light of this expose, clearly I'm going to need to revise my theory. As shocking as this sounds, could it be that Fox's function is to act as a shameless vehicle for republican disinformation? If that's the case I can only guess that Bill and his cronies are having a laugh at the expense of their oblivious audience. Why else would they ram the bare-faced lie 'fair and balanced' down their throats at every opportunity and in the same breath proclaim that everything is honky-dory in Iraq and George Bush will keep them safe from the bogeyman?

Up RIAA Creek? $19 may buy you a Paddle of Impunity (TM)

2006-07-03T15:33:00.000+01:00

According to a recent Boing Boing post a pioneering new all-you-can-eat music buffet download subscription service is now available to anyone lucky enough to live in Sweden.

For a paltry $19 a year you are given free reign to chomp your way through as much copyright protected music as your paunch will accommodate safe in the knowledge that 'Tankafritt' will pick up the tab should you be sued by the RIAA.

That was the gist of the spokesperson's press junket wasn't it? :|

Sounds like a real steal (ho ho) to me, until casual file sharing is declared a crime punishable by jail time that is. Under these circumstances maybe Tankafritt will also supply a doppelganger to break rocks on your behalf.

Hello? Is this thing on?

2006-06-29T19:08:00.000+01:00

You've got your anti-virus package installed and it's greedily sucking up system resources in the background, but is it actually doing anything useful besides blinking and looking authoritative as it languishes in your task tray? You'd have to be crazy to track down and execute a live virus to find out for sure. Luckily there's some middle ground - it goes by the name of the Eicar test file.

This is a plain text file you create yourself by pasting an alpha-numeric string of characters into a Notepad window. If your anti-virus application is paying attention it will detect the presence of the 'virus' as soon as you save the text file to disk and offer to take action to extinguish the supposed threat.

When I tried it at work, McAfee kicked its behind into orbit a split second after it touched my desktop. Nice to know it's not just a pretty face.

Scannerless scans R go

2006-06-21T11:28:00.000+01:00

If you occasionally need to digitise paper copies of documents and own a digital camera, but not a scanner, this service might appeal to you. It takes a snapshot of a document or whiteboard, cleans it up, re-aligns it and generally makes it more legible for screen reading. To this end it does an admirable job.

As I was more interested in scanR's ability to decipher and transform the characters found within an image to make them more accessible I decided I'd test the service using a pre-scanned article from a magazine rather than a photograph. The results were less than impressive. Highlighting specific parts of text within the generated PDF was very hit and miss, and the chunks I attempted to copy and paste in no way corresponded to my original selection. It is possible to extract all the text from a document and paste that into an editor, but a lot of painstaking massage would be required before you could do anything useful with it.

To be fair to them, nowhere on the scanR web site do they rave about their software's ability to perform optical character recognition beyond the functional level required to index documents by keywords. Nevertheless you'd expect this technology to go with the territory. It would be like buying a kettle only to discover that boiling water isn't an option with your chosen model.

It may not do proper OCR (or boil water for that matter), but you can't fault it for box-ticking, Web 2.0 zeitgeist. With its abbreviated/missing vowel chic scanR can't fail to be a hit with the hip txt-speak generation.

Can you give me a call to discuss it?

2006-06-16T20:09:00.000+01:00

What is it with people who refuse point blank to reply to emails? No matter how quick and simple your enquiry may be they insist on turning it into a conference. While it's true my dulcet tones can be equated to aural manna, is it really necessary to force me to employ them quite so often?

Compare the two scenarios:

1. At your convenience and only when you have all the pertinent information in front of you, you email a question to someone. They respond to your enquiry once they've dug out whatever paperwork they need to refer to in order to help you whenever it's most convenient for them to do so. You both go on with your lives with minimal fuss. End of story, everyone's a winner.

2. You email someone with a question and they reply with a request to phone them instead, leaving you with a general office number. Grudgingly you dial the number and a secretary or colleague of the person you need to speak to answers. You explain who you are, what you want and who you need to talk to. They sound miffed because you're not calling to speak to them personally and resent forwarding your call. You hear a ringing tone again, but either no-one answers or you're greeted by a robotic recorded message. You either leave a message, in effect kick starting a spiralling game of phone tag, or ring back later.

If they're in their office and pick up the phone, once again you have to go through all the kerfuffle of explaining who you are, why you're calling and worst of all pretend to be interested in the well being of someone who is likely a complete stranger, and will forever remain one after you've hung up. You wait a moment for this information to register and then the person on the other end of the phone goes off to gather any paperwork relating to your enquiry while you hum, twiddle your thumbs and dream up creative ways of torturing e-phobes.

Because they've misheard some of the information you provided they haven't been able to locate the paperwork your query relates to so they return to the phone to ask you to repeat it. You give them the correct details and off they toddle again leaving you dangling on the line for what seems like an aeon or three.

Eventually you resolve the issue, exchange pointless social niceties and go on your way... until the next time he or she - who has clearly learnt nothing from the previous encounter - insists on repeating the process.

There are endless reasons why in many cases it's more practical to use email; confidentiality for one. When I want to ask my fashion guru whether Estee Lauder Pure Pops Berry Twist, Maybelline Water Shine Liquid Diamonds or Dior Kiss Luscious Lip-Plumping lip gloss would better compliment my fuchsia PVC super slinky mini dress I don't want to do it out loud in front of a room full of people. They might get the wrong idea.

Who on earth does all this faffing around on the phone actually benefit? Are these people earning commission from British Telecom? I know poor old BT are in for a rough ride what with Skype beginning to take off, but this is ridiculous. Bash out a quick email and we can both tick it off our to-do lists. Am I right or am I not wrong? It's one of the two.

Recorded Amiga Games

2006-06-13T21:56:00.000+01:00

Recorded Amiga Games is the premier source for Amiga game speed run, long play and high score movies, and not just because it's the only one in existence.

The site serves to host video captures of exemplary gaming sessions immortalised by way of WinUAE's output feature. All genres are represented and the movies are available as either direct or BitTorrent downloads.

If using cheat codes and trainers to reveal all a game has to offer seems too much like hard work, this is the perfect compromise. Please note that I sound sarcastic only because the dial on my crankometer is stuck in the 'overkill' position. Honestly I'm a big fan of this project. I love kicking back with a mug of coffee and watching far superior gamers than I ever was making mincemeat of the end-of-level baddies who floored me way back when.

I've always been curious about what strange worlds and wacky inhabitants await beyond these merciless critters and how the loose ends will be tied up in the finale. I know I'll never have the patience, time or dexterity to plod through to the end of all these games myself so this is the next best thing.

I've even found myself checking out some of the games I thought were totally overrated just to see if they miraculously became more entertaining after advancing past the stage where I would typically be vaporised, beheaded or otherwise dispatched. They didn't actually (especially in the case of the Shadow of the Beast series), but at least now I know I wasn't missing out on anything.

In particular I was looking forward to savouring the 'closing curtains' sequences of many games for the first time. I was genuinely taken aback by just how feeble many of them are - even some of the ones annexed to the most highly acclaimed titles. The developers must have reasoned that since so few people will cross the finishing line, it's not worth the trouble of applying the same rigourous quality control standards to this portion of their work. Either that or they simply got bored or ran out of steam.

Whatever the reason, flashing a vanilla "The End" message on screen for a nano second before fading to black somehow doesn't strike me as an appropriate reward for spending countless hours plugging away at the same game into the wee small hours of the night. It's like getting to the final page of Lord of the Rings and reading, "...and then Frodo woke up - it had all been a dream".

I can appreciate the "journey, not the destination" approach to most aspects of life, but surely the budget would have stretched to a couple of party poppers and some silly string.

Tales from the crypt

2006-06-08T06:27:00.000+01:00

Are you spoilt, narcissistic, have more moolah than you know what to do with, and ready to kick the bucket in the near future? Then why not consider investing in the ultimate family resting place? For a mere £200,000 (or $372,000) you could be the proud owner of a palatial mausoleum constructed using the finest white granite set in Florida's charming and picturesque Daytona Memorial Park. Thrown into the bargain is a selection of tacky window dressings and architectural trinkets to include Greek pillars, chandeliers, intricate brass fittings and family portraits.

This is the entry level model; the deluxe tomb will set you back £300,000 (or $619,000). You could feed half the population of Ethiopia for that!

Hilda Peck who already has her plot staked out has no qualms about exploring her tomb-to-be:

"I don't feel any different, I'm not dead. Someday, I will be, but I won't know it. Everything is already done and I know exactly what it's going to be like even though I won't know it when it happens."

Well why bother then you silly wench? Put the money towards doing something which will actually benefit the living.

Lowell Lohman who runs this horror show attempts to justify his customer's self-absorbed decadence:

"As you see the weather across the country with floods and hurricanes, I think that's had a lot to do with an increase in mausoleums. A lot of families just don't like to be in the ground."

Have they never heard of cremation? Arrange for your useless bodies to be torched and be done with it. It's not rocket science.

Ironically, here in the UK we've been contemplating the problem of overcrowding in graveyards. Some of the possible solutions proposed include exhuming abandoned graves and recycling the space, adding extra bodies to existing graves and tacking on headstone engravings to commemorate the most recently departed, 'double-decking' whereby bodies would be stacked many layers high and upright burials as opposed to more traditional horizontal ones.

We don't have enough real estate to house the living so why we're digging our own grave when it comes to the dead is beyond me.

The Big Book of British Smiles

2006-06-06T19:15:00.001+01:00

There are times when I'm astounded by the cultural acuity of some our 'special' relations, the Americans. Recently I came into contact with a group of US exchange students through work. We met and broke the ice by making small talk, as you do.

"How are you enjoying your stay in the UK?" I enquired. A predictable opener, but you've got to start somewhere. After commenting on the miserable weather (fair point I thought), they turned their attention to the British populace.

"Your teeth aren't as bad as I expected them to be", one of them chipped in, and the others tipped a synchronised nod of agreement.

"What was she wittering on about?" my inner voice demanded of my grey matter (it didn't have a clue incidentally). The Brits are renowned for exporting football hooliganism, underage (and overage for that matter) binge drinking and grudgingly providing a cushy refuge for a parasitic, out of touch monarchy, but I didn't know we were in any way defined by the state of our knashers.

It would also likely be news to the highly astute Swiss guy who characterised us as follows...

Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, and then travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American TV shows on a Japanese TV.

And the most British thing of all? Suspicion of anything foreign.

(Swiped from an email circular I received. The original source is believed to be a British tabloid rag)

As diplomatically as possible I asked Dolly, Britney or whatever the air-head's name was what she meant. Big surprise! She couldn't tell me, despite being certain that the British somehow have 'bad teeth'. After an awkward, shifty-eyed moment or two we moved on.

Ever since I've been wracking my brains trying to come up with an explanation. In case you didn't know, the UK is part of one of the richest, most well developed continents in the world. Our health care system leaves a lot to be desired, but - believe it or not - we do have the odd qualified dentist knocking about the place (often in a luxury sports car though that's another issue). So why on earth should the teeth of British people be markedly different to those of Americans, or at least appear that way to foreigners?

My best theory so far concerns the dissemination of British history in American schools. Could it be that the Elizabethan period is the only one covered? Let me explain; it was during this time when the sugar trade spun into overdrive, having first been imported to England from the Atlantic island of Madeira in 1319. Because the availability of super-sonic jets, helicopters and speed boats was limited, any goods that had to be shipped from abroad cost a small fortune, and consequently could only be indulged by the upper classes and nobility. Said toffs got hooked on the stuff and - in the absence of sensible hygiene practices - sure enough their teeth turned black. Rotten teeth soon came to be associated with wealth, hence they were seen as a status symbol; something for the rich and poor alike to aspire to. This wacky fashion fad became so pervasive that people would actually have their teeth artificially discoloured to convey an air of sophistication. I kid you not.

In 1598 a German traveller by the name of Paul Henter popped round to Queen Elizabeth I's pad for tea. I expect he couldn't help noticing that her mouth had become a festering, abscess-filled cess pool populated with putrid stumps which presumably had once been teeth. Nevertheless he was more subtle than me (the wimp was probably fretting over losing his precious head to the blade of a guillotine) and so only cautiously pointed out that her teeth were black, "a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar".

Could this single quotation account for the British bad teeth myth? Probably not; our propensity for sugar is apparent throughout history. For instance, Charles Dickens makes reference to it on 102 separate occasions within his collected works. Dickens' novels, which indubitably feature a statutory levy of dentally-challenged street urchins and undesirables, have since been turned into screenplays and exported to the far reaches of the globe. This can't have helped to diminish the cement-like bond between the English in particular and rotten teeth.

In any case, to make sure I wasn't missing some unique feature of the American way of life that serves to specifically protect the teeth of its inhabitants I set about comparing the World Health Organisation's oral health data for both the US and the UK (yes, it's been a very slow day). I shouldn't have been in any doubt; after all Americans consume more sugary, nutrient-deficient gunk than any other nation on the planet (their supermarkets are death-traps - I know, I've shopped in them) so why should we expect their teeth to be in superior shape? In reality they're not, evidenced by the fact that tooth decay is the second most common disease in the United States. Tooth decay is actually a huge problem globally, but that doesn't detract from the home truth that it's no less of an issue in the US.

To demonstrate this we can compare the DMFT (an indicator of the prevalence of Decayed, Missing and Filled Teeth) statistics between countries. For 12 year olds living in the UK this equates to 0.9, while the figure for 12 year olds living in the US is 1.75. The global average is a marginally healthier 1.61 (source). The significant caries index is a more recent yard stick used to assess the extent of tooth decay. The 'SiC' Index for 12 year olds living in the US is identical to that of 12 year olds living in the UK (when the figures for England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are averaged) (source). This 'disparity' is hardly grounds for bundling us all off to Ripley's Believe It or Not! Maybe the abundance of oral cancer is a better predictor of general mouth ickiness, and the Americans run rings around us in that department. Nope, the figures don't bear this out either. The US has an incidence rate of 1.66 per 100,000 people (source), whereas the UK average is 1.035 per 100,000 people (source).

That's settled then. Americans are watching black and white period dramas set in Blighty in days of yore, and shrewdly intuiting that the closest we come to encountering modern dental care is wrenching out owie chompers with a length of string and a slammed door. Cor blimey guvnor, I think I've cracked it! Would you Adam and Eve it?

Of course we've been stereotyping the Americans for years so you could say we deserve what we get. I disagree; it's perfectly fine for us to pigeonhole them because our labels are founded on genuine observations garnered through personal experience. I won't apologise for drawing conclusions from the fact that a hefty chunk of the US electorate voted George W into office, twice!