Wasting time with Windows

This is starting to become a ritual - the three-monthly rebuild of my laptop. So far it’s taken since 10am this morning, and there’s still more to do.

The GPRS bill from hell

I hate the constant looking-over-my-shoulder-watching-the-bill-mount-up that O2’s GPRS tariffs entail - but if bills like Joi Ito’s $3,500 GPRS bill are possible to run up, then I’m going to be looking over my shoulder for a while longer. $3,500 for GPRS is insane. …

Your anal retention superstore

It’s one of the unwritten rules of life that once you’ve been living in a place more than say, 10 minutes, you’ll find yourself on the Lakeland Plastics mailing list. For the uninitiated (and don’t worry, your copy will be in the post on Monday) it’s a collection of those-household-gadgets-that-you’re-really-not-sure-how-you-ever-managed-without - wine racks that double as boxes to take the empties back to the recycling point for example, or the Park-A-Plug - “instead of wrapping your plug chain around the taps, you can park the plug neatly in its own home!”

The online store really doesn’t capture the breathless excitement of the paper edition - partly because they don’t have the excerpts from letters sent in by Mrs Trellis of North Wales, waxing lyrical about how their lives were transformed when they discovered the Natural Ostrich Feather Duster. Difficult things to dust, those ostriches.

And the website also lacks the chatty welcome-to-our-latest-catalogue enclosure penned (allegedly) by Michelle Kershaw, Customer Director. I’ve got my suspicions about Michell Kershaw, Customer Director. For a start, her head-and-shoulders studio portrait has been getting steadily more soft-focus over the years, to the point where she’s starting to look like an extra from a soft-core hotel cable porn film. So soft-focus, in fact, that I wouldn’t be at all suprised to find that she was born the year before the Queen Mother and has gradually mutated into crocodile hide. She also appears to have personally sampled or tested every one of the five thousand-or-so products lines that the catalogue carries - which means that her home must have been subjected to so many different cleaning chemicals that Hans Blix wouldn’t go near the place without another UN resolution. She’s got no less than 20 pages of Speciality Cleaning products to go at, so if your Specialities are in need of cleaning, Lakeland is the place for you.

I always thought that this was a peculiarly British thing - that somehow deep down in the collective national psyche we were compensating for the loss of the Empire by obsessively purchasing Delia Smith’s Beachwood Citrus Reamers. There’s noone I’d want to be reamed by more, naturally. But then I came across Harriet Carter, or as A Boy And His Computer more accurately describes her, “your anal retention superstore“. The word “organizer” results in 38 hits for such essential household items as the microwave popcorn holder, a trouser organiser or little plastic boxes to keep half-tomatoes in.

So I was all set to get a bit depressed about how the US was out-anally-retenting us, when I came across Lakeland’s piece-de-resistance, the vacuum-powered spider catcher. No matter that we lost the Empire, our national sporting ability is so crap that the only sport we can call ourselves World Champions in is only played by another five countries, and our trains can’t cope with the wrong kind of snow. At least we can hold our heads high at the United Nations secure in the knowledge that no true subject of the Queen should ever need to make physical contact with a creepy-crawly in the bath…

Are you queuing in a sub-post office?

Courtesy of seethru, a handy checklist for determining if you’re queueing in a sub post office…

Have you been standing in the same spot for 53 minutes while a man at the counter buys five thousand pounds’ worth of 3-pence stamps, fills out an application form to get his mother committed and tries to post a piston engine to Venezuela?

Snowman

We woke up this morning to Memorial Gardens covered in an inch or so of snow - so there’s only one thing you can do. This was the result…

God-boggled garbage

I have no idea who Mykeru is - but whoever he/she is, he/she has a mind like a bacon slicer when it comes to dissecting great steaming heaps of prejudicial rantings penned by the more - how shall we put this - intense members of the American Deep South god-bothering community.

It’s a line-by-line dissection of the God-boggled garbage by someone who knows their compilation of myths by goat herders who didn’t know any better in considerably more detail than most mentalfundalists.

The Daily Mountain Eagle seems to agree with the analysis - this was the result of following the link:

Application Error
A fatal application error occured in /usr/WWW/bin/display (420)

* WebOS Error : The record requested (0) does not exist

Grey Tuesday

I don’t even particularly like the Grey Album, but EMI deserve everything they get. So I’m going went grey for Grey Tuesday as well.

“EMI isn’t looking for compensation, they’re trying to ban a work of art,” said Downhill Battle’s Rebecca Laurie.

“Special interests, including the major labels, have turned copyright law into a weapon,” said Downhill Battle co-founder Holmes Wilson. “If Danger Mouse had requested permission and offered to pay royalties, EMI still would have said no and the public would never have been able to enjoy this critically acclaimed work. Artists are being forced to break the law to innovate.”

You can download the entire album from here - and you can bet that thanks to EMI’s cack-handed tactics, there’ll be ten times the downloads than there would have been if they’d smiled and live and let live.

Guardian stays broadsheet

The Guardian has announced that it’s eschewing the lead of the Independent and Times, and is staying as a broadsheet-format-only title.

I can’t say I’m particularly bothered by this - OK, so broadsheets are a pain in confined spaces, but a bit of judicious folding takes care of that. But, oh-god-please, will Mr Rusbridger do something about the damn ink that his paper is printed with? It has to be the filthiest paper in Britain, in a literal sense - I just have to think about buying it and my hands turn black. I’ve lost count of the number of shirts that have been ruined as the cuffs stain black, and it’s all the damn Guardian’s fault.

It must be possible - after all, the Evening Standard is printed with ink that doesn’t come off on your hands (although that’s the only reason for buying - quality of editorial content certainly ain’t…)

Build your own Bayeux tapestry

A drag-and-drop ‘hIStoric tale constrvction kit‘ - extreme Flash involved, but damn funny results nevertheless…

Hercules Gamesurround Muse USB sound card

Fond as I am of my laptop, one of it’s major drawback is that the built-in sound card is terrible. Although it’s got a rather nifty instant-mute button, that’s the only redeeming feature - the sound quality is marred by a constant buzzing and clicking, presumably crosstalk from the CPU and the buses.

Since I discovered iTunes and online radio I’ve got really fed up with this - plus there was no easy way to connect a mic so I could use Skype. So I went in search of USB sound cards and ended up with the (takes deep breath) Hercules Gamesurround Muse USB (exhales). Partly because it was cheaper than the alternative Creative model, and partly because the alternatives were rectangular beige plastic boxes, and there’s enough of those in my life already. The HGSMUSB resembles a large (10cm or so in diameter) turned aluminium volume control that’s been wrenched off the front of a hifi and turned through 45 degrees to sit on a table top. It connects to a standard USB (1.1 or 2.0) via a Mac-eqsue silvery 2m lead and translucent plug. The bottom is translucent, and lights up green while in use, rather like the Microsoft optical mice do.

There’s headphone, front, rear and centre 5.1 outputs; and mic and line-in inputs. The bundled software gives various output options for headphone, 5.1 surround and standard stereo, but I can’t speak for how well those work not having 5.1 speakers.

Generally speaking, it works pretty well. The knob acts as a volume control when rotated, and mute/unmute if it’s pressed. It’s not terribly responsive - the software’s got a bit of a lag, so you tend to turn the knob too much and overshoot the desired volume; and it’s not as well-screwed together as it looks - with it being turned aluminium and heavy, you expect the knob to be a lot less wobbly than it actually is. You also pick up a fair amount of mains hum if you touch it when in use, using the headphone out at least.

The sound outputs aren’t too bad - the headphone out has a bit of background hiss which is apparent if the volume is low, but there’s a nicely heavy bass sound, and there’s enought top end for my ears, shot to bits though they are. I”ve no idea what audiophiles would make of it, but then audiophiles aren’t likely to be seen dead using something like this anyway.

If you connect headphones to the speaker outs the sound is devoid of any hiss or hum, but the volume is a bit on the low side (with these headphones at least). The bundled software works without a hitch with WinXP - there’s various options for tweaking volume and frequency response, but I’ve tended not to bother with that as iTunes has all the options I need.

Overall, I’m fairly pleased with it - for the price it seems to do everything I need it to do adequately. I’m not sure it’s as portable as Hercules would like you to believe - they seem to position it as a travelling device, but as it’s a couple of hundred grams and 10cm or so in diameter, it’s a fairly chunky addition to my laptop bag. If you’re looking for a decent external USB soundcard and want something that doesn’t look like a beige plastic box, this will do the job nicely.