os x

Video killed the radio star

Soon after the was born, a little over three years ago, sent me out with a shopping list, as follows: Lansinoh Cotton wool I decided to get these from the big John Lewis in town, on the ostensible grounds that it was marginally closer to the car park than Boots. This also meant that I could browse the AV department. One thing lead to another, and I ended up leaving with the following items: Lansinoh Cotton wool A Humax 9200-T PVR Apart from making a shopping basket that clearly shouts “new dad” (nipple cream + superfluous technology), the PVR has… Read More »Video killed the radio star

A maze of twisty PIM formats, all alike

These days, I use a Mac for all of my day-to-day computing, but I’ve never really got to grips with Mail.app, preferring to use Thunderbird instead. I also use GMail in a limited capacity for non-work mail, and I’ve been starting to look at the OS X Address Book (which ties in nicely with a whole bunch of things). Unfortunately, Thunderbird, Address Book and GMail all use different standards for importing and exporting contact information: Address Book Exports: vCard, Address Book Archive (package containing an sqlite database) Imports: vCard, LDIF, Address Book Archive Thunderbird Exports: LDIF, TSV (of some kind),… Read More »A maze of twisty PIM formats, all alike

OS X 10.5 font woes

Since moving to a Mac a bit over a year ago, I’ve had only a few reasons to look back (the business with the HP LJ1022 printer being one of them). I’m now rather close to the end of my tether, and the reason is fonts. As an academic and a computer scientist, I end up writing quite a lot of papers and presentations with maths in them. Like any sensible person, I use LaTeX for typesetting the maths; it’s a lot easier to type $\sum_{i=0}^{i=n-1} i^2$ than to wrestle with the equation editor in Word. I’ve also been using… Read More »OS X 10.5 font woes

The love affair is over

Let me get this straight. I can’t print from MacOS 10.4 to a commonplace HP non-postscript printer (in this case a LaserJet 1022) that’s connected to and shared from a Windows XP box without downloading, compiling and installing a bunch of open source software from a third party. I was under the impression that Apple computers were renowned for their ease of use.

Cataloguing the Library of Babel

So I exaggerate – we’re not quite at the level of certain other bibliophiles, but we do have upwards of 3-4000 books in Gark Villa. Unfortunately, I also have a poor memory so I’m forever buying duplicate copies of books that I already own, or lending out books and forgetting who to. One of my projects for paternity leave and Christmas was to investigate software for cataloguing our collection, and perhaps make a start on the task. However, the took up more of my time than I’d envisaged (that is, all of it) and I didn’t get very far. mentioned… Read More »Cataloguing the Library of Babel