nocto

I could have guessed this:

29 As a 1930s wife, I am Poor Take the test!

So I tried being the other half of the party:

107 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!

I saw this whilst surfing through my rss feeds today and fell instantly in love.

A magnetic spice rack I could visualise fixing inside my cupboard doors to stop me from having to root through a shelf of unsuitably labelled jars each time I want to find the paprika. The one shown is about $40 on amazon.com.

I look for a version for sale in the UK and find that they want £75 ($150ish) for the same kind of thing here.

My mind is already having visions of tins, magnets and nailing old biscuit tin lids to my cupboards when I notice in my search results that someone has been down that path already.

I’m just looking out for some supplies now!

i’d have thought that my most frequently used command line commands (there will be a less redundant way to say that) were only interesting to me, but i’ve enjoyed reading other people’s take on this so here goes.

locally: i mostly ssh in to my main web server machine, apart from that i kill off processes (ps & kill). this also reveals i still use lpr to print on my mac, and i have never got the hang of using “less” rather than “more” even though i prefer it’s features.

candor:~ kirsty$ uname -a
Darwin candor.local 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar 4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

candor:~ kirsty$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn | head
64 ssh
56 ps
56 cd
42 ls
28 kill
13 scp
10 more
8 lpr
7 chmod
6 su

remotely: this is the machine i usually ssh to and mess around with editing php. i’m surprised “mysql” isn’t in the list. this list reveals that i find “date” the easiest way to find out what time it is too; i don’t know why i put a clock at the top of my monitor.

loquax@loquax:~$ uname -a
Linux loquax 2.6.8-3-k7-smp #1 SMP Sat Jul 15 11:05:14 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

loquax@loquax:~$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
125 grep
95 fg
64 php
50 cd
32 nice
22 php4
21 more
19 date
18 crontab
9 emacs

I started off by thinking it’d be a good idea to rate all my music in iTunes. I put everything on Party Shuffle and left the last ten tracks visible in the window. When I remembered what I’d been listening to I’d go to the iTunes window and rate the last few songs.

After a bit I changed the Party Shuffle to only play unrated tunes so that I’d get the rest of the tunes rated faster.

What actually happened was that stuff I really like makes me head straight to iTunes and give it a 4 or 5 star rating. And stuff I really dislike makes me go and give it one star. The stuff in the middle which should be getting two, three, maybe four stars is just playing away in the background whilst I work and I’m not in any hurry to rate it.

So I’ve got the perfect work playlist just by stripping out the great and the dreadful.

BASICS

• Heat milk.
• Add cheese¹. Stir until melted.
• Dissolve cornflour in alcohol². Add.
• Heat for a couple of minutes.
• Dunk stuff³ in it.

ITALIAN

1. mozzarella, dolcelatte, parmesan
2. dry white wine
3. ciabatta, breadsticks, olives

ENGLISH

1. cheddar, red leicester, double gloucester
2. ale
3. crusty bread, celery, pickled onions

NORMANDY

1. camembert
2. calvados
3. baguette, apples, grapes

WEST COUNTRY

1. cheddar
2. cider
3. crusty bread, hmmm

DUTCH

1. gouda, edam
2. gin? (this is what my recipe book has, is gin especially dutch?)
3. rye bread, mushrooms (again, blame my recipe book, but it sounds good)

SCOTTISH

1. mature scottish cheddar
2. whisky
3. oatcakes, crusty bread

SWISS

1. emmental, gruyere
2. kirsch
3. crusty bread hmmmm

WELSH

1. caerphilly
2. beer
3. bread hm

GERMAN

1. i’m sure the germans make fabulous cheese, i just can’t think of a single type i know
2. beer
3. sausages!

Right, I think we are getting there. I started off just trying to integrate more of my “elsewhere” bits into the site and ended up thinking that what I really needed was more “here” stuff.

When Miranda was born three years ago I felt that I didn’t have the time to keep up with a weblog and tried to get this site to carry on without my input as much as possible, just grabbing the content I was creating and putting it here. Mostly this consisted of three bits –

1. posts collecting together pictures uploaded to flickr – the photos have kept coming because I made an effort to find somewhere simple to keep them in order so I didn’t end up with a shedload of unorganised baby pictures.
2. posts of links I’ve posted to the del.icio.us bookmark service – have been kind of a mini-blogging thing – find a link and just say the minimum about it.
3. posts where I keep track of the books I read – the books keep coming because “I read therefore I am” is just the kind of person I am – I started keeping a record of the books I read in 2000 and I like having the historical record.

Recently I’ve seen services like Second Brain, Friend Feed and Profilactic around and have tried them out for size. They try to aggregate all your web presences together. I ended up thinking that this was just what I was trying to do here on nocto though, that trying to do it somewhere else was a bit silly and that I just needed to have a bit of an update here.

So I was trying to update this site using a stack of RSS feeds relating to things I’d done or looked at elsewhere. And it was just turning into a big mess of links.

And the more I messed with it the clearer my ideas became.

I didn’t want my website to be a place that just aggregated other places. That’s a part of it, a part of me, so links from del.icio.us and Google Reader are now over in the sidebar on the right and some other feeds will probably appear too. But I’m reclaiming the main column of this website to be for the things that I create: the things I write whether about books or websites or other things and the photos I take. Things that just catch my fancy are off to the side.

The design isn’t finished; some of the stylesheet is still a mess, everything isn’t quite where I want it yet, the colours aren’t quite right; but it’ll do. I’m working on it.

This site has always been, and will always be, a work in progress. That’s the way I like it. That’s the way I enjoy it.

Site rejig is in progress! Anything wonky is intentionally that way

Pattern at Hobbycraft – though I accidentally ignored it in certain strategic places, it probably would have been better if I paid attention! (Also, we’ll forget about the bit where I threw the sewing machine across the room! Stupid thread tangling machine!)

I’m a bit worried about filling 24 pockets for the next n years, but I guess I can always just resort to the all chocolates, all the time plan if need be.

I’d like a star for the top like in the patten, but my sewing wasn’t going to work on that one, so am waiting for more inspiration.

For the record this year she’s got 5 Happyland people & animals, 3 cars, 3 Batman model bits, a xmas dec (scheduled for the day we put the tree up), 2 packs of Thomas the Tank Engine stickers, a pack of xmas snap cards (in the big pot pocket for the 24th), a bouncy ball, and the remaining 8 are bits of woolies pick’n'mix sweets. It all came in at about £15, which I didn’t think was too bad really! (And I’ve got some bits left over for her stocking too.)

I just hope she gets her head round the “one a day” thing!

This is going to sound quite critical so I’ll start by saying that I do really like my iPhone. It’s got one absolutely fantastic feature which I love. But then every other feature is substandard in one way or another.

• web browser When the iPhone came out in the states a few months back I read numerous blog postings from people who run web sites saying that the browser was usable. This was pretty much all the marketing that the iPhone needed as far as I was concerned.

  The usable web browser is the killer feature. Over the years I’ve had
  various combinations of mobiles, PDAs, cables and what not, and whilst they’ve managed to get the job done for someone who wants to set things up to have website admin available on the hop they’ve all been seriously hacked and sticky taped together solutions. Safari on the iPhone displays regular web pages just fine, and Javascript works too. Fab!

  It works well on my home wifi network, well enough that for simple web browsing it’s easier to pull the phone out of my pocket than to walk to the computer in the next room (possibly just the newness factor, but also the boot time factor if the computer isn’t already up and running). I haven’t had the chance to use it on an Edge network yet but we loaded in some pages over GPRS in the pub and it worked ok.

• phone This is a secondary feature as far as I’m concerned! If you want a high performance texting phone go somewhere else. There are well documented shortcomings in SMS (no multiple recipients, no forwarding etc), a complete lack of MMS, and no Bluetooth business card function. These are all things I’d use if they were there, and have used in the past, but the browser function is good enough that I’ll compromise on them. They are also all things that I hope Apple will fix with software in the future.

  I’ve barely used the phone to talk on yet. I don’t use my old mobile much to talk on either.

• apps I’ll write another post about the apps on the iPhone as they all have serious shortcomings. This iPhone really feels like an early adopter version and I presume they were supposed to show off what could be done with the iPhone once third party developers are able to get their hands on the development kit. Except they don’t realy do that very well. Apple, let the third party developers in already!
• keyboard It’s not bad. That’s probably the best I can say. I’d prefer a stylus and Palm’s original graffiti. The screen is heat sensitive, not just touch sensitive. You need to use your fingers, and nails get in the way. Apparently the idea is that you can type with two thumbs, except I can’t figure that out because the pads of my thumbs are too big or my thumbnails get in the way. Did they try this keyboard out with any women? (I don’t have huge nails or anything out of the ordinary btw, just not ultra short bitten blokey ones.)

  I also don’t much like the auto correct feature. I may have missed something but it only gives you one option to correct with, unlike a predictive text thing on regular mobiles that let you page through until you find the right word. And if you type something that turns out to be a real word by accident you’re out of luck too. Also, backspace key is too easy to mistake for the return key at the moment, that probably just needs more practise. Or more customisation would be good.

I know I’m sounding like I hate it. I don’t, I think it’s lovely. Beautiful, tactile and useful. It just isn’t perfect. It’s a good way better than what has up to now been the best. I just have a huge list of things that could be better. More on that later.