This is more of a problem in an area with a lot of holiday homes but The St. Ivean points out that you only have to look for the houses with a Yellow Pages standing by the front door to find one where you won’t be disturbed breaking in.
Empty property
22 Jan 2008 22:20 by Rick
Ingredients
09:29 by Rick
To most children, it seems, ingredients are the list of things on the side of the jar, mostly to be sneered at, so it will be a bit of a surprise when they are required to take some into school for cookery lessons. It may also be a bit of a surprise to their parents, who have missed out on a generation of practical home management education. So I think that when they are re-introduced, the schools will have to provide the basic raw materials as many home “kitchens” will not have them—not due to poverty but from lack of use. This may not be a bad thing. I recall taking stuff into school which was all mixed up by the time I arrived and the finished product was mangled and unrecognisable before I got it home anyway. Basic ingredients, in most cases are cheap, but the kids will miss out on discovering this unless “shopping lessons” are also included. I know I would have benefited from being taught how to recognise a good piece of meat then perhaps I wouldn’t be attracted to the pink water filled sponges we are offered in the shrink wrapped packets.
Donor card
16 Jan 2008 09:37 by Rick
For longer than I can remember, I have carried a Donor Card in my wallet—I have just looked and mine is dated 17 Apr 1986. They were easy to get and quite high profile; on the counter in doctor’s surgeries, dentist’s, blood donor sessions, even non medical places like pubs, newsagents etc. sometimes had them.
Today they are saying that there are nowhere near enough donors and perhaps we should change over to an opt-out system where permission to donate is assumed unless you have made a declaration that you do not want to. I don’t disagree with the idea but in passing I picked up another clue—the NHS Organ Donor Register. I had never heard of it! Is it now true that it is no longer good enough to carry a card but you have to be signed up to some online database? I don’t think I like that idea*. Perhaps that is why the number of available donors is so low.
* I have had a look at the registration web site and, despite the announcement that it uses Digi-Sign and so is secure, that is an illusion. The information required is Name, DOB and Address. This is fairly public information; anyone could fill this in. DOB is a bit harder to obtain, but is not fully private.
Open or not?
15 Jan 2008 14:21 by Rick
There is a big debate going on at the moment prompted by an article by Bruce Schneier in which he explains why he leaves his home Wi-Fi network unsecured i.e. no password, no encryption. He discusses the risks and benefits and comes to the conclusion that, for him, the latter outweigh the former. Note that he is not saying it is for everyone.
The key points in the debate centre around
- How much you trust your neighbours not to flood your bandwidth.
- The terms of service from your ISP, if you are bothered about that.
- The responsibility you have for what travels over your link—e.g. illegal/unsavoury material.
- Reducing your protection from hackers—this is why it is not for everyone.
I still don’t know which way to turn—which means I secure it for the time being.
All about Magic Nodes
11 Jan 2008 12:41 by Rick
Having got involved in discussions on the forum, I found that the Magic Nodes script for Media Monkey had advanced considerably since the last documentation was written. With little time to spare and without English as his first language, the author was unable to do this. So, rather than just gripe, I have put together a manual for Magic Nodes for MediaMonkey3 with the approval and being proof-read by Zvazdan, the author of the script.
At the moment it is in PDF format (but this may change) and documents the script at release 1.6.2.1. It will be updated in-situ and revisions will be announced on the forum thread.
Value
9 Jan 2008 11:43 by Rick
This morning, Sir Stuart Rose said
Marks & Spencer does not trade on price alone, but on value which is quality times price.
I know it would have sounded daft, but if you can give a metric to quality at all then value would be quality divided by price.
<Mathematical Pedant Mode off>
Media Monkey 3 and Magic Nodes
10:24 by Rick
Just two days after posting about my use of Media Monkey and Magic Nodes they finally released the long awaited Media Monkey 3 (what were they doing releasing software on Christmas Day!) This changes a few things—all for the better as it is now a much improved product.
The old Magic Nodes, which was well out of support anyway, has been replaced by an unofficial version (currently v1.6.2) by a new author. There have been a lot of enhancements and improvements and is being actively maintained. Remember to shut down Media Monkey and remove the Magic Nodes script before installing the new versions.
Media Monkey itself now does a lot of things natively that scripts used to be needed for, including some that Magic Nodes did. For instance, there is now an Album Artist node which is close enough to the one I created such that I don’t think mine is necessary any more. There is also a Composer node but that doesn’t filter for Classical Genres so the original needs to be retained but slightly altered for the new Magic Nodes syntax. First remove the standard Composer node from display (using right click –> Options –> Choose Tree Node and then create this one.
Composer|icon:top level|child of:artist|filter:genre in ('classical', 'opera', 'operetta')\<composer>\<album with album artist>
The Encoding magic node can be retained as before
Encoding|icon:bottom level|child of:year|show tracks:no\<format>\<VBR>\<bitrate>
There are a lot of other fancy things that can be tailored but, so far, this is enough for me.
N.B. I have noted that with the “Choose Tree Node” menu you can move nodes up and down the list, overriding the “child of:” value in Magic Nodes, but you do still need it to get the node into the library section in the first place.
Why was Clarkson wrong?
7 Jan 2008 16:01 by Rick
I didn’t see it at the time, but apparently Jeremy Clarkson published his own bank account details in a newspaper article to demonstrate that the loss of the Benefits database was not a big deal. Now he finds that someone has diverted £500 of his money to charity.
In principle, I think he was right, but I wouldn’t have done it. If any money is removed from your account without your permission it is the bank’s fault unless (maybe) you were negligent. The account number and sort codes, your name and address are not secret information. You require more information than that to withdraw or transfer money, but a lot of bank transactions still rely on unreliable signatures and I wouldn’t trust their diligence to check all that carefully.
They say that “The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.” That is utter rubbish They may not be able to find out who because they probably don’t know who, if it was done by a forged signature, but any clues they do have are criminal evidence and not subject to data protection from the relevant authorities. I think they perhaps mean that they can’t tell Jeremy. I suspect that in this case, he will not be pressing for an investigation, but normally you should.
The flaw seems to be that some Direct Debit forms do not require a signature and the banks allow this. That is not banking, that is a welfare agency and they should be liable. I have never trusted the Direct Debit system, but I hadn’t realised that it was that bad.
It would have been even funnier if the donation was made to Friends of the Earth 🙂
Hand baggage
13:34 by Rick
So today they are announcing that you will now be able to take more than one piece of hand baggage on board aircraft, and that people will be confused because you won’t be able to at some airports. So what is new? You have confused us already by implying that previously we could take more than one. If you can remember that far back, you will recall that, except for expensive and scheduled flights, the airlines would only allow one bag anyway, so what has changed, then or now? It is the airports that keep changing the rules (prompted by government) but it is the airline that affects most people.
P.S. I have never really understood why ladies’ handbags don’t seem to count, it is almost as if they were as invisible as Big Issue salesmen.
Google, We’re Sorry
4 Jan 2008 13:16 by Rick
In the office today we had a spate of the Google “We’re Sorry” screen. We have no idea why but it was coming up on quite innocent single word searches. I had a search around and found a few pages of explanation but I think they have made a few mistakes with the error page. First of all, it doesn’t look like a Google page—the font for the logo is wrong—all the Google error pages are like this. Secondly, it is directing you to a less than perfect source of anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Although it is C|Net, there are some very dodgy downloads in there. But most of all, there is no clearly explained reason why the message appears. Admittedly it is better than earlier versions when it told you point-blank that you were infected but a list of possible reasons would be useful.
When it comes to the Captcha needed to continue working, I can’t read many of them.
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