You can’t see many stars in London, but on a clear night you can see a few and it drives me mad not knowing what some of the brighter stars and planets are.
So I was thrilled to find Stellarium. It’s a great bit of astronomy software that’s free, open-source and cross-platform. And I love software that’s free and cross-platform.
Enter your latitude and longitude and it’ll draw beautiful real-time maps of the sky where you are. You can speed it up and watch the stars race past and the sun shoot up. You can turn the ground or the atmosphere on or off. Click on a star and it’ll tell you its name.
I’ll be taking this to Cornwall later in the year and making sure that I have the latitude and longitude of my favourite spot plumbed in - then I can stare up at the zillions of stars in the Milky Way and have a chance of figuring out what some of them are called.
Just need to find something to do satellite predictions now… it’s got to be out there.
Just got the new howies catalogue, called the Little Book of Hope.
Their language can be a bit sickly, and I’m disappointed they don’t seem to have many new graphic tees, but I do admire them, for what they do and how they do it.
Customers had suggested ‘Songs of Hope’. I’m just not sure that ‘This Charming Man’ qualifies as a ’song of hope’ though… it might have a jingly jangly tune, but I always thought it was about, if not child abuse, at least about an older person taking sexual advantage of a youngster.
The MSF low frequency time-signal that drives ‘radio-controlled’ clocks is moving from Rugby to Anthorn in the Lake District.
That sounds like quite a mad idea as Rugby feels like it’s in the middle of the country and anything in the Lakes doesn’t.
But looking at a map I guess it actually does make sense, especially if you live in Scotland.
I just worry how my ‘radio-controlled’ Sony clock radio will cope. When not doing wheelies and dives it struggles to pick up a signal from Rugby. And, boy, does it need that Rugby signal. It loses just over three seconds a day. Quite an achievement for a digital mains-powered time piece. My watch is a Timex that cost about �5 and it loses less than three seconds a week.
As I lie there watching it struggle to get its time signal and inevitably hurl me three seconds into the future, I wonder why the designer didn’t have it measure the amount of correction needed each day and apply an appropriate offset to the counter on the clock.
But then I wonder why Renault couldn’t put a small socket on my car radio so I can plug my iPod in. Or maybe get the car’s clock to set its time from the RDS radio that’s built into the same unit. Or, or, or…
I like Bad Science. Which is to say, I really enjoy the column of that name in The Guardian written by Ben Goldacre.
I’m a sucker for anything that shows that the opposite of what most people think is, in fact, the case.
Ben’s column this week has a great example of this - that (if you use a mobile) you’re better off having a mobile phone mast very close to your home.
It reminds me of the study done at MIT on the effectiveness of aluminium foil helmets, as worn by self-loathing paranoid crazy folk the world over. In short, they actually amplify radio frequencies in the parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum controlled by Governments.
The excellent Channel 4 sit-com Green Wing has just finished its second series.
I love everything about it. I love the casting, the writing, the editing, the music.
It’s just about the only current British TV programme that can hold a candle to the best of US television. A ten-foot long pink candle, in the shape of a penis, admittedly, but if it’s the best we can do I’m quite happy.
If this programme were on the BBC it would be followed by an announcement saying, “if you’ve been affected by any of the issues in tonight’s programme - dwarf-murdering, Clanger-phobia and terminal illness - then you can call our helpline…”
Whatever happened to ‘having it off’ as a euphemism for sexual intercourse?
As a child there was nothing more guaranteed to induce fits of uncontrollable sniggering than someone using the phrase, especially innocently.
The phrase “I’m having next Friday off” would induce life-threatening sniggering fits.
Now I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone use it, on radio, TV or In Real Life.
Maybe it was just a phrase used by kids in the 1970s. Maybe, like daps, it was just a North Somerset thing.
I just spent a rather odd day in Germany. You’d expect with the World Cup just round the corner that you’d find the country in the grip of World Cup fever, German flags flying from every shop window and car windscreen.
Well, not in Dusseldorf, and not any place else in Germany either, I expect.
It’s odd because on the surface, to a Martian, England and Germany look so similar. The people look similar. Many years ago my brother was stopped by some Americans in a hotel in Los Angeles and they said “don’t tell me, you’re either from England or Germany.”
There were a few football shirts on sale in the airport, from different counties. Argentina, Australia and, yes, Germany. But they were hard to find amongst the alchohol, cigarettes and - best of all - Micro Magnetic Playmobil boxes (my boys got one each).
On the flight home I flicked through the Lufthansa in-flight magazine, and found this wonderful photo and caption: “Football and beer are the perfect combination”.
I just can’t work out if this is a sly dig at the English, or if it’s just naive.
Apple are making it hard for me to love them at the moment.
I’ve been spending a huge amount of time fixing up my mother-in-law’s Bondi Blue iMac; decided early on to cut my losses and wipe the hard drive and re-install OS 9.2. But even though she told me not to bother, I decided to try and back up her data.
Big mistake.
You’d think it would be quite easy to get an iMac with the newest version of OS 9 talking to a Powerbook with the newest version of OS X, right?
Wrong.
After much frustration, and yes, shouting at the screen, I found out that Tiger only supports Appletalk over TCP/IP. It won’t talk Appletalk direct. Which explains why I was going nutzoid trying to figure out why the OS 9 iMac and the OS 10.4 PowerBook would talk via my WiFi router, but - amazingly - not if I join their two ethernet ports together with a bit of CAT5 cable.
Next time: the Exciting Story of the MacMinis that Cannot For The Life of them Remember What Screen Resolution They Should Be In.
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