Archive for January, 2008

Wednesday reading

Off skiing, so these will have to wait until next week:

Innovation and surfing

Good case study (?) of how to get small groups collaborating and driving innovation. I can’t see us transferring ITW to a beach, though.

US SMS can be pretty expensive

Some interesting figures for US SMS costs vs standard internet. I wonder what the picture is like in the UK, where far more people have SMS bundles as part of their plan costs.

Beeping

I hadn’t come across beeping - making intentional missed calls - by that name. Nice idea: what other “standard” messages should we allow for free - I have “I’m leaving now” set up as a fast text on my phone, for example. As the article says, government should have a pile of these for its citizens and customers.

2D photos into 3D spaces

Very neat algorithm to extrapolate 2D to 3D. Take a few pictures, a reverse panorama, if you like, and you have a pretty good 3D model.

Vista lite

If only I had known before I installed Vista that I could massively reduce its footprint. Ach well.

Lookout date parsing error

So once you have gone to the trouble of getting Lookout to work in Outlook 2007, you find that the date parsing is broken (I got the “incorrect date syntax in range” error). You can either force Outlook to downgrade its .Net framework, or fix the Lookout dll (I downloaded the version on the site; it worked).

Communities and boundaries

Lots of good things on how to manage and facilitate communities with porous boundaries.

ExMerge as an exchange backup tool

ExMerge lets you grab multiple mailboxes to PSTs. This is a great backup, especially of old dead mailboxes you want to delete from your system. I got an “EXCHMEM.dll not found” error, fixed by copying the file from /Exchsvr/bin to the ExMerge folder. Some more useful stuff here. And you will most likely have to do this temporary work around to access data for backup. [Update: make sure you use a non-administrator account to do the ExMerging]

Mail merge to individual documents

Useful free add-in to allow you to save a sequence of individual documents from your mail merge. Now to work out how to automatically email them to the individuals with a tailored email message. [Update: this will work, but is a little tricky]

Organ donation

Couldn’t remember if I was on the register or not, so I registered online. Let’s see how joined up government can be…

Why is music different to pr0n?

Great article by Charles Arthur suggesting that many industries have already changed their business model (or died) in the light of consumer preference as expressed over the web.

Tufte on iPhone

I must watch Tufte having problems with the iPhone.

Astronomy

Great photo of the earth reflected in an astronaut’s visor. Meta-meta-meta kind of thing.

And another classic view of Andromeda, a standard run-of-the-mill galaxy.

Governmentium

I hadn’t come across governmentium before. I have now.

Apple gadgets design stolen from Braun?

An interesting side-by-side on Braun from the 60s and Apple today. Even more interesting also to see what newish Apple things weren’t included.

Apple Software Update error

I’ve seen a regular Apple Software Update error - essentially an unknown failure trying to install a new version of iTunes. I finally worked out that this was because I hadn’t opened iTunes between the new install (7.6 in this case) and the previous software update (7.5). On opening iTunes, as I finally did while upgrading my iPod, I saw a “Accept licensing” screen which I guess was preventing the new iTunes installing. So there’s the lesson: open iTunes at least once when you’ve updated it.

Cruise

Must watch this video of Tom Cruise on Scientology at some stage.

Many movies not to watch in 2008

A mostly depressing list, I’m afraid.

Chip on a contact lens

Nice - roll on all of those heads-up-displays we’ve seen in the movies.