tenthofjune

Here’s a useful video explaining Photoshop’s blending modes:

I take most TV adverts with a pinch of salt but BT’s current broadband advert contains a completely irrelevant claim. It claims that their service provides “unbeatable wireless speed” in the UK. This is the equivalent of your electricity provider claiming their electricity produces warmer light or your gas provider saying it heats your room more efficiently.

Which wireless router or access point (if I choose to actually use wireless) is up to the customer and will therefore determine the speed.

This claim obviously plays on the consumer broadband mentality that suggests you are tied to the router provided by the ISP. Even if BT’s router is wireless-n it would be foolish to choose your ISP based on the router they provide.

At any rate, a fantastic wireless speed is irrelevent if the connection provided by BT is only a fraction of that.

SatNav maps are only as good as the map data on which they are based. Inevitably errors will creep in and roads change. TomTom GPS units have a feature called MapShare which ostensibly allows you to report any such errors to allow the maps to be corrected.

Since I got my SatNav five years ago, TomTom has shown a road in Horwich that has never existed. Unfortunately, despite reporting this error using MapShare (and prior to that directly to TeleAtlas, the map provider), this road is still shown on TomTom’s maps (updated today v845.2666):

This may well be a phantom road – a deliberate mistake put there by TeleAtlas to catch out anyone who decides to copy their maps. The problem is that the TomTom will try to use this road as a route. SatNav units often come in for some stick when they route drivers down none-existent roads, but if the suppliers fail to fix these errors, despite being told about them several times, it is hardly surprising.

Love the way he calmly sets up his next shot.

Been meaning to transfer this from video tape for a while now. This is the demolition of Agecroft Power Station on 8th May 1994.

There are also some photos on flickr.

On the face of it, the iTunes ‘remove duplicates’ feature sounds like a great idea as you may well have the same track on an artist’s album, a greatest hits album and a ‘various’ compilation album and this is needlessly taking up space on your hard drive. Unfortunately, the feature is rather crude as using it means that two of your albums will now be missing tracks when you come to listen to them as an album (yes people still do that sometimes).

A much more intelligent functionality (Apple please consider implementing this) would be for iTunes to discard two of the files (thereby saving space) but re-link the remaining file to all occurrences of that track in your library. Without this, the feature is next to useless.

Facebook have made some long awaited changes to privacy settings, but while some are welcomed, they have completely dropped the ball on what they term Publicly available information. The EFF has more details here.

Profile pic no longer private

Whereas previously you could limit the visibility of both your profile picture and your friend list to your friends, this is no longer the case and anyone can see them. There doesn’t seem to be a workaround for the profile picture cock-up, so I have changed my facebook profile pic to the image shown on the right. Feel free to borrow it.

Friends List

While you can’t differentiate between friends and non-friends, you can change your profile not to show your friends list. Obviously this also removes this list for your friends. See this picture already posted by Phil VdG.

As many will know, Snow Leopard changed the way printer drivers work in Mac OS X and Hewlett Packard decided to class several printers as obsolete, even though those involved are anything but. No doubt they’d rather you spend unnecessary money on a replacement HP printer; a strategy that may backfire if the sentiments in several forums is anything to go by.

Owning a perfectly serviceable Deskjet 995C, I found myself in this situation, however Apple had provided a fall-back in the shape of Gutenprint drivers, or so I thought. While the Gutenprint drivers are adequate, although slow, for printing letters or line-art, they are completely useless for photographs. The prints are washed out and no amount of tinkering with driver settings will fix it.

One step forward, two steps back

I had almost resigned myself to buying another printer when I decided to try the HPIJS drivers. You need to ensure you download and install all three packages (HPIJS, Foomatic-RIP and Ghostscript). Success, I could once again print photographs, but suddenly all my Microsoft Office v.X applications (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) crashed on startup.

I removed the new printer drivers but Office still crashed.
I checked for any Office updates and found I wasn’t quite running the latest version. Unfortunately, trying to run the updater resulted in a hung installer.
I tried using Time Machine to revert to a pre-HPIJS version of the Office folder but Office still crashed.
Even removing Office and re-installing from the original Office CD resulted in applications crashing.

I started to look at my options:
Microsoft have finally seen sense and realised that home users shouldn’t have to pay the ridiculous £400 for Office and have a Home/Student edition for around £70 but the latest version appears from the reviews to be unstable bloatware, so I have gone down three roads: I have downloaded and installed the free OpenOffice and I have also downloaded the one-month trial version of Apple’s iWork (around £60) and the one-month trial of Microsoft Office 2008.

The advantage of OpenOffice (apart from being free) is that it opens and saves MS Office documents directly whereas iWork has to ‘Save As’ in Office format for compatibility and still wants to save in iWork format; you don’t seem to be able to tell it to default to MS Office format; iWork on the other hand seems more intuitive but will involve a learning curve.

I think a new printer may have been cheaper and less hassle.

Just been reading this article in the Bolton News regarding the war memorial here in Horwich. The names engraved on the side are in danger of becoming illegible due to weather erosion. The cost to fix this could be £9,000.

One thing struck me – the memorial was originally funded by a subscription from employees at the Loco Works and there are currently around 20,000 residents in Horwich. I know many of that number will be children, but even if half the residents gave a pound this could be sorted. I know some will say “We’ve already paid our council tax, let them pay for it” but that’s not the point.

“Lest we forget“

According to the Bolton News, six railway station in Bolton have been identified by Network Rail as those most in need of improvement. Not surprisingly, once again, Blackrod station is missing from that list. (Full National list here)

Can someone please explain why Lostock station, which has both a ticket office and live train information screens, is on the list of six stations earmarked for improvements, when Blackrod with neither of these basic facilities is not? I’m not saying Lostock should not receive investment (particularly in reinstating the Wigan platforms short-sightedly removed in the past) but surely Blackrod station is in more need.

Given the lack of respect Blackrod station is given on the timetabled service, the cynic in me would guess that secretly Network Rail will be thinking “Why spend money on a station we’re trying to close down by reducing the service?”.

Network Rail are running a survey about station improvements. If you feel Blackrod (or an other station) deserves better, go to www.networkrail.co.uk/actionstations and make your views known.