There’ll be no video iPod

This, my friends, is why there will be no video iPod:

Hollywood allies sue DVD jukebox maker

A Hollywood-backed technology group is suing a high-end home theater system company, contending that its home DVD jukebox technology is illegal.

Update: more background here

Back…

Although not saying much right now.

More to come…

Ooh, this is interesting

(but only if you’re a Mac geek, that is.)

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Alpha 2 (to give it the full, formal title) is a port of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. There’s been an X11 port for a while, but the downside of that is that you need to run an X Windows emulator for the OpenOffice application to sit in - which sucks, to put it mildly. So the fact that there’s now an Aqua version is Rather Good News as far as I’m concerned. So far, so good - it’ll get a thrashing tomorrow as I’ve got a couple of large-ish documents to write.

What he wants for Christmas…

Euan Semple:

What I want for Christmas ….

…. is an RSS feed with all the TV or Radio programmes watched or listened to by the people on my blogroll each day. In the same way that I trust them to filter the web effectively for me this would allow me to be automatically fed the best broadcast content from around the world.

Problem is, we’re all so busy reading the contents of our blogroll that we haven’t got the time to be watching TV or listening to the radio (unless you count what’s streaming in the background)…

Win some, lose some…

Harumph. Today went something like this:

am: spend a happy half hour rhapsodising over acquaintance’s brand new Powerbook - another one rescued from the Dark Side…

pm: sulk because the new Google Desktop is Windows-only and only searches M$-format files…

A side effect of Mac ownership that noone mentions…

…is that the idea of going back to working full-time in a Wintel shop is so profoundly depressing that almost anything would be a better alternative.

Geek tours

Must. Find. Reason. To. Get. To. Santa. Clara. In. October…

Banning spamming bastards

I suppose it’s a sign that someone, somewhere thinks that your blog is worth something when the comment spam starts rolling in, but to be honest it’s attention I could do without. The frustrating part is that because I’m running Wordpress and I’ve set the comment moderation to ‘all’, the spam doesn’t actually get as far as the blog pages themselves. As soon as I get the email, I’m deleting the comments, so they never actually appear at all.

Not that it’s stopping someone spamming for various highly dodgy pharmaceuticals. This afternoon I got pissed off with it, so a quick trawl through the server logs led to one particular IP address - 220.93.120.39. So it’s now gone into a ‘deny all’ line in the .htaccess file, and one comment spammer is now battering their XMLRPC interface against an electronic brick wall.

So if you’ve got the option of banning specific IP addresses, can I suggest you try 220.93.120.93…

Original thoughts

The problem with having the internet at your fingertips is that you very quickly come to the conclusion that whatever original idea you’ve ever had in your life, someone somewhere else has had that original thought first.

The benefit of having the internet at your fingertips is that you’ll never need to have another original thought, because someone somewhere else has had it first and you can find it…

delicioustosafari

Seriously marvelous as it is, I still get ever-so-slightly twitchy when it comes to del.icio.us - while I’m sure think they’re not evil, the idea of them having all my bookmarks is a bit uncomfortable. They might not be about to rape and pillage their way through my metadata, but it’s an online service, and they do fall over every now and then.

So delicioustosafari is a Damn Fine Idea - one-click transfer of all your del.icio.us bookmarks into Safari, neatly organised to boot. del.icio.us users may sleep soundly once more…