Nicely illustrated essay on Apple's use of iOS features in Mac OS

"Julian often calls in his talks for architects and interior designers to create quiet working space in every office layout in order to regain this lost productivity; failing that, he advises workers to wear headphones and listen to birdsong, surf or rainfall to mask the distracting noise."

Noise cancelling headphones I suppose with gentle ambient sound recordings...

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “SendCoreEvents” “true”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “HorizScrollDelta” “0″
Option “SHMConfig” “on”
EndSection

Try this on the old Dell

Folding text in a window seems hard on Ubuntu

ffmpeg -i source.mp3 -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 128000 -f mp3 output.mp3

Resample purchased MP3 files for use on the phone at smaller file size. Saves around 50 to 60% of file size.

Doing a Windows 7 laptop for a relative. Hacker News tip off that Microsoft's own anti-virus is better than AVG and the commercial ones and costs nowt. Also slows system less.

I'm so glad I work in a place where IT are a couple of floors up. Yup, they do use remote desktop most of the time but f something is hard to describe, they just pop down to have a look.

Via HN

Hacker News for Europe, rails/ruby application. Watch this for London hacker space news

Amazing software can mine a technical account of a chemical preparation and produce a balanced chemical equation. But can't be used on many articles as both the major chemical indexes owned by an academic publisher with very restricted access

You write an equation with a tablet or whiteboard pen. The application recognises the formula and renders it as LaTeX markup with a visual rendition. Needs saving as image.

Via HN

"If consumers continue to demand low-cost and high-quality products, their vendors will demand that component suppliers do more for less. And they will."

I can't do much about this, but I buy recycled electronics (3 year old laptop and 4 year old HP Xeon workstation) to extract the maximum use I can from hardware, and to reduce the amount of electronics that ends up being stripped of rare earths in third world countries.

"...also shows how the analogue process of printing a photograph shares a lot with the the digital process of adjusting an image in Photoshop."

I think that is because the Photoshop programmers took and developed photographs!

"The importance of doing everything you do to your very best. And that the journey is the reward. If you do things well one at a time, you end up in a really good place. Don't get ahead of yourself. Control the things you can."

Via Daringfireball

Watch out for the popup credit rating advert! Cognitive dissonance strikes again...

Nicely presented quotes that commercial graphic designers must think or hear often. Comments good, via Hacker News

Will the readability version work ok on the phone?

Funny summary

I can now hibernate the PC from a menu. Giant leap forward.

Discoverability of music in the network age.

"During fractal generation, JP's brain uses the left hemisphere exclusively, and none of the regions in visual cortex are involved in producing the visual images. The regions in the temporal lobe normally associated with memory were not hyperactivated either. We don't quite know what to make of this yet. But it does seem to show for the first time that areas other than memory and visual areas can generate visual features."

Never underestimate the difficulties faced by students who have had head injuries.

Looks fun, need to compile on Linux

Vim grammar of commands

Privacy and money

"We noticed in testing that new users found the HUD faster than the old menu, as did power users who hadn’t memorised the shortcut for a given function."

Typing the name of menu commands into a special overlay window... sort of ubiquity for your computer

Downloads easily and gives me a 'traditional' pop3/smtp client on my blackberry. The smtp problem remains though. t-mobile won't allow access to their t-email smtp server from mobile devices because of spam. If I use the gmail authenticated smtp server, then the email looks as if it has originated from my gmail account.

At this rate it could be putty and ssh for non-google email on the phone...

"I got my start reading fiction from my local library; the voracious reading habits of a bookish child aren't easily supported from a family budget under strain from elsewhere during a time of cuts. I hate to think what the long term outcome of this short-term policy is going to be, but I don't believe any good will come of it."

This goes under the 'listening to faint signals' heading. Stross has noticed a 28% drop in his public lending rights payments in one year. His selling levels are increasing. His conclusion is that less people are using libraries, probably due to less availability of libraries.

'for instance' is dangerous

I've always tried to get students to find a place in their house or a library that they associate with Maths homework. Also a time and day. For those who are committed anyway this seems to work.

Good quote

"The more capable and multipurpose our tools become, the more the burden of deciding what they do shifts on us. Physical constraints must be replaced by artificial ones, and the effectiveness of our tools becomes an extension of our own willpower and self-discipline."

"It is highly unusual for a show of this scale not to be a retrospective, and it is made more unusual in that much of the work was not even made when the show was planned four years ago."

New work, some using iPad and video multiples.

This guy is writing way too much. He must be underemployed.

Two sides of A4 with some formulas to plot and an exercise about the characteristics of a set of lines deduced from their formulas alone. Students need squared (0.5cm) paper for this one and will need to draw axes.

Two sided A4 handout with some ready drawn plots. Students have to 'test' their formula by substituting in for an X value and then checking that the resulting Y value does fall on the line when plotted.

Two sided A4 designed for use in class. Plots provided and students have to find the gradient and intercept.

These vertical and horizontal lines specified by an X or a Y value always confuse students. A two sided handout for use during a whole class discussion of what it means to 'fix' (say) the coordinate of a point so that it is always X = 1...

First in a sequence of 5. Points to plot, shapes to complete and midpoints to find. These handouts are designed to be used in a lesson with pair work and tutor input. Just three sides of A4.

I love this kind of stuff. In the 70s, the geezer who ran Quad did a listening test with various HiFi journalists. Some cheap tranny gear, some excellent valve and expensive transistor kit. They were all over the place.

Stuff about desktop metaphor from an Ubunty

"The company that had inspired him at 17 had fallen under the control of accountants, he said, who overpriced the Archimedes to protect the BBC Micro."

An A3000 could not have cost that much to manufacture compared to the BBC Master. But that is UKPLC for you, beancounter central

Gruber thinks it's ok for the alarm function on a phone to sound when the phone is switched off. I think 'off' should mean 'off', not functioning, not taking power, not operational. The issue is one of control over the device and expected behaviours, not simply the New York Phil nightmare.

"As it happens, his accidental study provides a window onto a subject that has long stymied academics: white-collar crime. (Yes, shorting the bagel man is white-collar crime, writ however small.) Despite all the attention paid to companies like Enron, academics know very little about the practicalities of white-collar crime. The reason? There aren't enough data."

The bagel man - wonderful, but the original page has unreadable white on black text hence link to readability version

"The Reg asked the Department of Education to explain how students would be examined or awarded qualifications if there was no curriculum to test them on - for example whether ICT GCSEs be continue to be awarded in 2013 - but we have yet to hear a reply."

I suspect there will be a GCSE in ICT in 2013... Scratch is built on Squeak, which is a dialect of Smalltalk.

"Most of all, I have realized a long time ago that in a world where everyone has a camera, a lot of free time and fantastic tools to publish stuff, there is not a lot of money to be made anymore by taking pictures."

Making Andrew Keen's point (The Cult of the Amateur)

"WordPress is the best blogging platform I, or indeed we, have ever used… but as a CMS is falling far behind the alternatives."

Then perhaps the software should be used for the purpose for which it was designed?

Bruce Sterling winding people up on the WELL. Yes, its still going.

"In fact everything about the company is in version control, from code to notes to contracts to legal documents."

Interesting idea - commit log gives a journal of the context behind the documents and decisions. A GUI that was optimised for non coding records might be an idea...

"The next major version of software for PC’s, Windows 8, will look a lot like Windows Phone, which Microsoft hopes will help it work better on tablet devices."

“A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.”

Mark Twain in a speech given while opening Kensal Rise Library.

"Nevertheless, the resulting calculation is still a monster. The Dublin team say it took 7.1 million core-hours of processing time on a machine with 640 Intel Xeon hex-core processors. They started in January 2011 and finished in December."

That's a few shillings in the meter

"Microsoft has accused high-street retailer Comet of pirating 94,000 Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs and selling them to consumers."

There are benefits to free software (Linux can be copied and distributed legally)

"Your 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s."

Strange, but true

"The R language is the scripting language for the R environment, just as VBA is the scripting language for Microsoft Excel. Some of the more unusual features of the R language begin to make sense when viewed from this perspective."

Seems a sensible way of looking at it

Hand labelling over computer plotted topography. Site is down as bandwidth has been exceeded, so Mr Imus will need to work on his back orders. Long live Will Tirion

CSS and js zooming presentation application emulating prezzi without the Flash. Via hacker news. Works best in Chrome/Safari. Slow in Firefox 10

"Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions."

"I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making," he said. "I discovered at an early age that all I've ever wanted to do is design."

"Ive, who grew up in Chingford, a town northeast of London, credits his silversmith father with inspiring him as a designer."

Where the shareholder value idea came from

UI design walk through by an ex-microsoft programmer who worked on Office. Practical, aimed at programmers.

For when someone boots the live CD and can't work out how the Unity interface works...

Just two pages designed to print back to back and fold to form a four page single sided handout. Works at A4 page size.

The first page of the PDF file is pages 2 and 3 of the guide, and the second page of the PDF file is pages 1 and 4 of the guide.

And the Man's own web site looks more professional and inviting than the newspaper that published the article about his work...

The history of writing on computers is being written by the look of it...

"A group of manufacturers met to address this and decided to switch to a single digital standard to ensure they could source replacement parts and make different companies' systems interoperable."

Here we go...

The computer programming aspects of discrete probability

"Someone, Blok reasoned, was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theatre and they were strong enough to interfere with the projector's electric arc discharge lamp."

That is some serious power

Networking from the command line just in case

How to do a kiosk in Linux

...so these nice people wrote gLabels. Knows about standard peel and stick label sizes, and business cards.

Comprehensive book about Inkscape kindly provided free on HTML by the author. I intend to work through the quick start then consider buying the paper version from Amazon UK. Yes, paper, the Kindle doesn't do technical manuals well...

program or be programmed example. Note the html hiccup (manual mark up added on top of a programmed template)

That old thing about UIs for beginners being different to UIs for regular users of software? Or something new?

Wicked and evil. Happy Christmas for those that keep the holiday and best wishes to all

Synapse looks fun

A free book about software repositories and version control. Uses fictional scenarios in a small company to liven up what could be a dry subject. Comes free as a pdf or as the LaTeX sources, themselves in a git repository.

PS: the author did the Ubuntu Login Sound.

An example of an activity based interface running on Mac OS. Has a section looking at desktop metaphor.

Linus having a wobbly

I'm not sure that rounding errors of 2% make that much difference, but I stand to be corrected. Application of arithmetic involving Golden Section to column width and line spacing on a Web page

"The cultural phenomenon that has the most potential to overcome all the old prejudices and oppression is doing worse than the mainstream “closed” versions in many cases"

Strange isn't it? Involvement in any of the incidents documented by Valerie Aurora would get you the sack in most large commercial companies.

Nice clear presentation that has me using the Dash a little more. I tend to work in a folder tree though and have little problem finding files.

Ted Gould is an Ubuntu developer, and he spent some time recording his mouse track while using an application. Menu not used much. Suggests it does not matter where the menu goes!

"But the next generation of users will make their learning investments with computers, and it is counterproductive to give them interfaces based on awkward imitations of obsolete technologies. Instead, we need to develop new interface paradigms based on the structure of computer systems and the tasks users really have to perform, rather than paradigms that enshrine outmoded technology."

"There are a number of approaches to displaying the menu bar, and none of them are ideal in all situations. The screen-attached menu doesn’t scale to large screens. The per-window menu is difficult to hit in a lot of uses. The floating menu encourages clutter, and the mouse-invoked menu is difficult for touch-screen users and provides no visual clue to its existence for others. "

Implications of the Unity fixed menu bar for X remote sessions: I hadn't thought of this. Scroll down to the X window bit...