Secret underground temple

Secret underground temple built by private enthusiasts in Italy, over 20 years.

Rollerblading grace

(Note: it does not get really started until about 50 seconds. Poor edit.)

Beowulf

It looks like Beowulf is a hit, early sales are at the top of the lists. Lord knows why, the trailer does not appeal to me. It looks like a video game, the story looks like it's clichéd beyond words, and the main character can't pronounce his own name ("beahwoof").
I had hoped better, since Neil Gaiman is coauthor.

Prices

You'd think that easy online access to pricing information would have evened out pricing. But maybe not. It still pays to look around.

Recently I wanted an ethernet cable. I could get a 20-meter one online for £25. But I decided that I wanted it the same day, and went across the street to PC World, and they had a 15-meter one for £40. That's 60% more!

And look at this pricing: Apple UK: £370, Amazon UK: £240. That's a 54% premium at Apple.



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And by the way, something good is happening to phone call prices. I can call the USA now from the UK for just over 1 pound (two dollars) per hour. Excellent. And that's without any special cards or codes.

Wiki on ads

Wikipedia on why they do not run ads.

Broken Back Mount

When Dances With Wolves was current, I didn't think a film would ever come around that I felt less desire to see.
But then Titanic arrived. This was surely the zenith of maudlin crap?
No, now comes Brokeback Mountain.
I shudder to think how this record will ever be broken.

SanDisk II, The Vampire Strikes Back

Another in my faintly embarrassing series of notes on how fast technology moves: I did not dream five years (such a short span of time) that in 2007 you could buy a 4-gigabyte memory card, and a card reader, for around 30 bucks/18 pounds. It's just ridiculous.


(Funny, I seem to be fixated on five year spans. In my life, everything changes in five years.)

UK charger

I want to buy an Amazon Kindle from the US and have it shipped here to the UK (by a friend, Amazon won't ship them outside the US). It surely won't work connection-wise, but I just want one for reading, and lord knows how long it will take them to get the finger out and get it on the UK/Eu market (we can't even get the Sony Reader yet).

The question is: the charger will be with an American plug and 110 voltage. Does anybody know: what's the likelihood it will adapt to UK voltage or that I can jury-rig another solution to charging the thing?

A sophisticated insult

What's a sophisticated insult? Pascal suggests "Go to the Wizard and request a brain". Perhaps it would be even better if it really required a familiarity with Oz, like: "comb your straw and go petition the wizard."

I was once treated exceedingly rudely by somebody on an otherwise very educated mailing list, so I said something like:
"I acknowledge and appreciate your input, pointed though it was, and humbly suggest that you take advantage of your next available vacation time by a protracted, if possible permanent, visit to the netherworld."

Background patterns

Sometimes I get tired for a while of having a distracting photo on my desktop ("wallpaper"). But on the other hand, just a solid color is very boring. So I got the idea of making these subtle patterns. They are both based on photos, and made to a tiling pattern with a Photoshop plugin called Terrazzo, and then bled of most of the contrast. I quite like them, whaddayathink?
They are designed for my 30-inch screen, I don't know if they suffer if used on smaller screens.
Update: Goshdarn, I forgot that Blogger allows maximum of 1600 pixels. Here is a link to a zip file of both, in full size.

Is the new iMac a pro machine?

My pal Laurie Jeffery is a bit of a gear-head and a busy professional photographer. He knows what's good. This guy is now using one of the new aluminium iMacs for his main machine (The 24-inch model I'm sure.), and he loves it. *

And Laurie is not the only one to be in doubt about the alleged "amateur" status of the new iMacs.

*I once told him I almost bought him an Apple Cinema monitor for Christmas, but I decided that he "would just be embarrassed by such a display".

TTL said:
I am not sure I understand the question. But clearly Apple sees the iMac as a consumer product. That's why they have a separate Mac Pro line.

Whether you can use an iMac in a profession successfully is a different matter. It's certainly very usable for writing software -- even if not in the specific field and style of programming Alex is involved in.

On the other hand, in the field of music production it's generally not considered "pro" because there's no PCI expansion slots. But you could still use it for many music production tasks in a professional manner.

When it comes to editing and retouching of photos it's probably not considered pro because you can't change the monitor (as I understand, current LCDs still are lacking in gamut compared to high end CRTs). Of course you could always add an external secondary monitor for colour proofing.

The difference between an iMac and a Mac Pro is the same as that of a compact camera and a DSLR. Your question therefore is like asking whether a compact camera, say Nikon Coolpix P5100, is a pro camera?

I beg to differ. I the (meant to be rhetorical) question is more kind to asking whether the Nikon D300 is a pro camera. Which I tend to think it is. And interestingly, it is descended in a direct line from Nikon D100, which was definitely an amateur camera.

Of course there are no final answers to these questions, since it all depends on where you set the lines. But the lines are clearly moving up continually.

Public libraries

Does anybody know if a public library pays more for a book than normal, to compensate for the lending?

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From wikipedia:
In December 2004, Salinas, California almost became the first city in the United States to completely close down its entire library system. A tax increase passed by the voters in November 2005 allowed the libraries to open, but hours remain limited. The American Library Association says media reports it has compiled in 2004 showed some $162 million in funding cuts to libraries nationwide.

Oh yes. I think that will pay for about 3 or 4 minutes of warfare abroad. A good deal.