Stationary and coffe

That's the Steadtler graphite 779 0.5mm and those great plastic book
tabbies.

Fwd: Multitasking

> I don't think it'll take off - seems like witchcraft to me.
>

Recession over but the spectre of inflation looms

OK So whilst the growth in the economy was less than stellar and certainly less than the predictions or even hopes of the economists... GB Plc did grow last quarter. See graph from the BBC. However reports had been expecting a 0.3% rise or some hopefuls wanting 0.4% so the lacklustre 0.1 is disappointing but a start none the less.  Certainly one report I heard declared that GB Plc is the last G8 country to emerge from  it's deepest and longest recession since the war - grrrr!


However despite the growth and the positive news cycle, we should remember that some of that growth has been spurred by decent Christmas sales and apparently the VAT slash we had last year. That VAT rate has now returned to 17.5% and has added to the rise in cost of living that affects real people. The BBC handily provide a personal "Cost of living calculator"

I pumped my details, rent, eating out, energy bills into and it made a prediction of my own cost of living increase! Thankfully I received this month a cost of living increase in my pay back dated to September, so that helps!

Uptime

Whilst many of my friends and colleagues think this is certainly one of my weirdest habits. I don't like to reboot my computer, purely because I have SO much open at once and my machine is ready to go whatever I want, whenever I want... see this tweet....

http://twitter.com/musingsonamac/status/8193400547

Anyway... I am pretty sure I now have a new personal best... 71 Days.

Now I've always been a big proponent of how much more stable my chosen platform is compared to others. Even so the life of a laptop, especially how I batter mine, constantly suspending and waking up etc. is never a fun one. I attribute this new stability to snow leopard. I've never hit 70+ days before I'm quite sure. To be fair that means the machine was last rebooted on the the 17th November 2009 - pretty impressive for a working machine that's not a server!

Font recogniser

Well recently I need to match a font to logo we were using on a webpage. I could have just used any old font and most people wouldn't have minded but me being the perfectionist I am - I want to try and get it RIGHT!

In comes the "whatthefont" website beta available at http://is.gd/78L49

You upload an image, or point to an image on the web then. After some OCR the site asks you confirm it's recognition of some fonts... and based on baselines, serifs etc. it will recommend some matching fonts.

Face test

It appears I have completely normal facial recognition ability.


Click below if you'd like to have a go at testing your facial recognition abilities. It does take a while, I admit I got a bit bored towards the end!
http://is.gd/78KgU

So what's the score?

Excuse my previous tweet if the cricket score was wrong. The ECB app
is mis reporting it in two screens.

I can't check the live score because te bar I'm in hasn't got working
Wifi - annoyingly. So if someone can oblige with the score that'll be
great.

Great company we keep

Happy New Year All!

These screen shots are taken from the British Conservative Party's Podcast and David's New Year message! The shot opens with David working on a mac! Obviously I instantly realised that we'd all identify with this superior technology choice!

Backup Disk is full

I took this screen shot some time ago but not long enough ago that I wasn't impressed that I had backups stretching far back to May 2009 at the start of December!

Clever Time Machine

Time machine is a wonderful hands off solution making that claim of "invisible technology" a reality for many. It dutifully guards the data of many people using macs. Myself and my Dad included. Previously I was pretty good at cloning or taking a copy of "that" important file - but still not good enough. My Dad, never. No time, unsure of what to do etc.

Time machine does it all, hourly incremental safeguarding of all our precious data.

One thing that bugged me on more than one occasion was if I changed my machine Time Machine seemed to lose all sense of reason. Despite being wonderful at setting up my new machine to the exact condition of my old machine... it's the best migration path I've ever used! When I then wanted to backup my new machine, it wanted to start all over again and usually lose all my previous backups. Yes they were accessible but still it lost that element of seamlessness!

Things have improved, I understand this is a snow leopard update, in that at least it spots the old backups are relevant to the new machine can it can preserve your route back to those older files. It still decided to backup EVERYTHING on the new laptop, thus starting again (and taking hours and hours again) but still this is progress!

Yes I understand that is was all access list malarce and it was hackable to make the old backups integrate with the new backsup - but hacking about ACLs and Terminal settings etc. is pretty much an anathema to what timemachine is supposed to achieve!

Bad insomnia

I had a genuine use for Insomnia the mac app that stop the laptop sleeping when you close the lid. I just thought this was a mac habbit, but I learnt recently that IBM, Lenovo's have the same habbit. Most of the time it's fine, but on this occasion I wanted to close the lid and have the laptop keep running - perfect just what this app. is for!

however since then even though it's turned off, disabled, quit etc. my laptop now doesn't sleep when I close the lid, I have to use the Insomnia app to sleep the system... it's not the magnet that the problem because it does wake up when opening the lid.

So one day I forgot this, closed the lid, left work put laptop in rubbery case thing in briefcase and went home, via a bar - couple of drinks later... I get home and get the laptop and it's broiling in the briefcase! OUCH!