Me and my life

I'm lactose intolerant. Not to a lethal sensitivity, but enough to care about selecting alternatives. So a while ago, shortly after a health foods supermarket opened up in my old town, and not having tried out any options other than goats and soya milk for a while, I thought I'd give all these new (to me) options a go...

1. almond milk - ok, not bad
2. Hazelnut - ok. Noticable flavour though; not that strong.
3. Wheat - watery, just wrong!

However, none of them were cheap enough or tasty enough to switch to; I'm sticking with soya for now. With the odd goats milk carton (of the less tangy kind) to make cooking easier.

Labels: milk lactose intolerant alternatives

Ok, so you've probably figured if you've read some of my recent twitters that I've become ever so slightly addicted to openstreetmap mapping.

I'm so involved I co-organised a mini mapping meet in Farnham (Surrey, UK) recently and dramatically improved the coverage and detail there; I took one of the most involved sections around the town.

It appeals to the slight OCD tendency many geeks have and helping out with OSM really feels like I'm contributing to a useful resource that many other people will use, so there's a big feelgood factor; plus it can be quite social and gets you exploring areas you wouldn't normally go to otherwise, even finding paths or features nearby that you wouldn't have discovered without the OSM motivation.

At the moment, the data isn't complete enough for the UK to be consistently usable for routing, but Central London is generally mapped better than google-maps with many details that you don't get with other maps (eg. amenities like recycling, telephone boxes and postboxes). The OSM Foundation reckon they'll have all the UK roads mapped by the end of 2009. Most of the work is being done by the few committed mappers with lots of time on their hands, but in the 'long tail' methodology, many many thousands of people have updated the places and names near them that they know through local knowledge. Maybe only one or two updates each, but its the sum total of those updates that makes the real difference.

Labels: farnham, gpsbabel, holux, linux, m241, openstreetmap, osm

I've seen a couple of episodes/shows recently where they question the phrase "moot point" - one of them being Earl. Earl's simpler brother thinks it must be "mute" point, as in "not worth mentioning" mute. This bothered me a little; and I suspect some people who don't know any different will take this use over the proper term. Not that they'll be reading this blog either (ho hum), but it definitely is moot!

From dictionary.reference.com online dictionary (just the adjective definition quoted):

moot

(adjective form:)

1. open to discussion or debate; debatable; doubtful: a moot point.
2. of little or no practical value or meaning; purely academic.

Labels: moot point english language

I only discovered XKCD relatively recently (within the last couple of years, '06/'07) and it's not always as funny as it can be, but this particular cartoon got me thinking what I would do:

And over there, we have the labyrinth guards. One always lies, one always tells the truth, and one stabs people who asks tricky questions.

This is clearly a take on the old classic problem where you have to try and find out who's telling the truth, but with the added problem of not being able to ask tricky q's until you've figured out who the stabber is. Obviously you don't want to get stabbed. So perhaps the first question to ask would be "Are you going to stab me?" or similar. I'm assuming that's not tricky enough to elicit his stab response.
If he says yes and doesn't stab you, he's the liar (if he does its obvious, as you lie in a pool of blood :-) ); if he says no he can't be the liar because he'd have to stab you and then he wouldn't be the liar - assuming mutual exclusivity of the 3 behaviour traits. Problem is, the way to identify more quickly who's who is to force him to try and stab you by asking a tricky Q which will figure out whether he's the liar or not, and hope you haven't picked the stabber; then run v.quickly out of stab-range after asking (but still so you can hear them)?. Mmm..

Labels: cartoon, comic, xkcd

I LOVE Opera Link synchronisation. I had a feeling it would be a bloody useful feature, and it f'in well is! What is it? Well it's only really useful if you run opera on at least one of your PCs, and you use multiple machines regularly (even if you don't use Opera on all). Seeing as Opera runs on just about anything (Linux, Windows, Mac, almost any smartphone, PDA, or any that can run Java J2ME apps which includes some not-quite-smartphone phones), that's quite easy to do. Read the link for more, but for the lazy: it allows you to see the same bookmarks; notes, speeddial if you want to across any computer you run Opera on. So I can add a bookmark at work, in my "to check out" folder, and when I get home, without any extra work whatsoever, I can load Opera and that bookmark is there ready to check out. It synchronises so quickly I don't even notice it and in the background while working away too.

I know I've mentioned it in my PiM synchronisation post a while ago

Opera is my favourite browser anyway - once you've got it loaded (and it's a lot faster than it used to be at starting up too, even with 30 or 40 tabs loaded at once), it's fast, very stable (more so than Firefox/IE), less of a memory hog (20 tabs loaded in Opera will often use less system resources than 3 tabs loaded in Firefox) and very very customisable. It doesn't have extensions like Firefox, but it has 'widgets' and it's so customisable you almost don't wish for them. Good if you want a UI that's in your own (non-popular) language too. They came up with a lot of the features that other browsers have first, and then FF/IE copied them. Minor annoyances are how the odd site doesn't look quite ok or work quite the same as in IE or Firefox, but they've become more conventional recently too in v9.51 (at the expense of breaking what it should do according to the specifications in some areas - pull yer act together IE!).

Labels: opera link synchronisation bookmarks sharing browser

A post over on slashdot caught my eye, referring to a post on publicly visible overpowered uses of Windows:

1. To display a static green arrow over the open TSA security lanes at Detroit Metro. I kid you not, at the main security checkpoint to get into Detroit Metro there are monitors over each metal detector. The ONLY thing those monitors ever display is a big green arrow pointing down. Oh, occasionally they display a blue screen with a Windows error notice.

Reminds me of the time earlier this year on the way back home on the tube, when Bank underground station's status displays were all BSOD'd

Labels: windows