Archive for
February, 2004
February 28th, 2004
Another major UK company that doesn’t seem to know it’s arse from it’s elbow:
I used to use a great little company called Amerada – They provided my Gas and Electricity (well they didn’t actually provide it – but they billed me for it.)
They had the forward-thinking idea of Online billing *only* (no paper) and could offer lower rates as a consequence.
Unfortunately Amerada were recently swallowed by Powergen – a larger, older Energy company. Their online billing system is…. somwhat different.
Here is an email I received today:
Subject: Your Powergen bill
Date: 28 February 2004 6:02:17 am GMT
Dear Powergen customer
Your latest bill is now ready to view. All you need to do is click on the link below and login.
Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be shown all your Powergen bills that can be viewed online. The most recent bill will always be at the top.
https://www.powergen.co.uk/myaccount/view_bills.asp
If you’ve any questions about your online bill, please get in touch using our online bill query form and we’ll get back to you.
There’s no need to reply to this email.
Kind regards
Powergen Internet Team
www.powergen.co.uk
compare this with their web site:
[edit] – Oh god – the pain continues: Remember kids – Browser sniffing is bad , designing sites using web standards is good.
The Browser I was using here was Mozilla FireFox.
February 27th, 2004
It turns out that There’s really no need.
February 27th, 2004
Salling Clicker has been updated to support the Sony Ericsson P800/P900.
Clicker Main Menu
It’s a very nice piece of software – very “mac-like” and now supports Palm, Series 60 phones, UIQ phones and some older pre-symbian Sony Ericsson phones. And with today’s exchange rates – it’s very reasonably priced as well – $20 (~£11).
If you have a Symbian phone, or a Bluetooth enabled Palm I suggest you check it out.
iTunes integration
The really cool thing about it (apart from the iPhoto and iTunes integration) is that it can be extended with AppleScripts – so you can ask your Mac to do almost anything from a phone/palm.
iPhoto integration
(This image file does not exist on my Phone – It was slurped from iPhoto over Bluetooth. Funky.)
Flip-Closed
February 26th, 2004
If you didn’t already know – Apple Corps. is suing Apple Computer.
It turns out the Judge has an iPod. Wow, British judges aren’t the most… um, how shall I put this?… cutting-edge types. So this really shows how successful the iPod has become. Especially in the UK last Christmas. You see the white headphones all over London – so much so that Theives are specifically targeting them. I personally find those in-ear headphones uncomfortable.
February 24th, 2004
from: A Slashdot Article.
“A chap at work was recently the victim of an ATM card skimmer which took his card details, cloned them and allowed the fraudster to take 550 pounds out of his account. Having tried to explain how the fraudsters can hide a camera and card reader around the ATM, he decided it would be easier to show one of them after a few drinks down the pub. He was a little surprised to find that the machine he chose had a card reader and camera in place. These were removed and analysed, we believe we have reclaimed about 800 pounds worth of kit.”
Pics here
Yikes! Shouldn’t they have left it in place and informed the police though?
February 23rd, 2004
I had another DSL outage this afternoon – the Bayswater exchange seems a little temperamental.
Being a total geek I whipped-up this applescript to alert me when the Network was up again. Simple, but effective…
Of course if your net connection goes down and you want to use it you won’t be able to copy and paste from here – so you’d better copy it now 
The script needs to be saved as an “application” and it should “stay open”. (there are options for both of those in Script Editor’s “Save As…” menu item.)
[edit] – I posted the script on MacOSXHints and after a few comments have tweaked the code to be more friendly to users with Proxies and people who listen to iTunes:
on idle
set secondsToWaitBetweenChecks to 120 — 2 Minutes between checks
set availText to “Your Network Connection is now available.”
set unavailText to “The network is still down.”
set hostToCheck to “www.apple.com”
set checkNetScript to “scutil -r ” & hostToCheck
try
set netStatus to do shell script checkNetScript
if netStatus is “Reachable” then
my announceText(availText)
activate
quit
else
– my announceText(unavailText)
end if
on error
display dialog “Could not check the net status this time.” buttons {“OK”} default button 1 giving up after 5 — seconds
end try
return secondsToWaitBetweenChecks
end idle
to announceText(textToSpeak)
tell application “System Events”
– If iTunes is running dip the Audio.
if (exists process “iTunes”) then
tell application “iTunes”
set oldVolume to sound volume
set sound volume to (sound volume * 0.25)
delay 1
say textToSpeak
delay 1
set sound volume to oldVolume
end tell
else
say textToSpeak
end if
– If the User has Salling Clicker show a funky alert.
if (exists process “SEC Helper”) then
tell application “SEC Helper”
show screen message textToSpeak
end tell
else
display dialog textToSpeak
end if
end tell
end announceText
Announce Network availability source as Applescript Link (requires MacOS X Panther or Script Editor 2)
February 20th, 2004
GT4 is delayed until Autumn. However Hard Disc support is apparently now going to be included. Interesting…
The US gets the HD add-on at the end of next month.
February 19th, 2004
Disastrous news:
Mark and Lard are leaving Radio 1. They’ve been dropping occasional hints in their show about it for the last few months.
I can’t stand Sarah Cox (who comes after M & L’s slot), so this could spell the end of daytime listening to Radio 1 for me.
I don’t suppose I’m really target audience any more though – being almost 30 (yikes!)
Luckily R1′s weekend and evening output is still good (with the exception of the “Gap-Toothed Gypsy”, Dave Pearce).
an end of an Era…
February 18th, 2004
Very funky:
MacSkinz
February 17th, 2004
Has just been released by Apple – check Software Update.
February 17th, 2004
http://www.apple.com/rss/
Feeds galore.
February 17th, 2004
I’m alive – - I promise!
Meanwhile:
try gettting out of this room:
February 6th, 2004
Belle-de-Jour has an RSS feed at last – hooray!
Finally, filthy revelations directly in to my Dock (ooh err!)
You are welcome to submit better puns via the comments. 
February 6th, 2004
Channel 4 News had an interview with Jonathan Ive last night.
I captured it – there’s nothing a die-hard mac head won’t already know, but interesting none the less.
February 5th, 2004
Headset Support for Bluetooth on Mac OS X – yay!
[edit]
12 hours later and I’ll summarise my Headset findings:
To set up a headset you can’t just pair it – you need to use the “set-up Bluetooth device” menu item from the Bluetooth menu extra (or use the button in the ‘Bluetooth’ Pref. Pane.)
If you can’t see the ‘headset’ option in the set-up assistant then your Bluetooth adapter is not fully supported by Apple’s BT stack. Only D-Link adapters are supported. Built-in adapters – such as in my 17″ PB are D-Link and therefore supported.
I had to update the Firmware in my PowerBook’s internal BT adapter before it would allow me to set-up a headset. The Firmware updater is available Here.
The D-Link USB adapter connected to my Server is not supported by the Firmware updater (it is revision A2, but B2 is the minimum required) so I cannot use headsets with that machine (which is not a big deal for me.)
iChat + a Bluetooth Headset is very good! I like being able to continue a chat even if I have to wander away from my computer.
Speakable Items + Bluetooth Headset looks very futuristic but alas the sound quality in my headset does not seem good enough for recognition purposes – not surprising since the headset was designed for telecom use mainly.
