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I recently bought Claire a bluetooth dongle (not for Christmas, even I’m not that tight).  This is how it arrived.  Clearly the Royal Mail’s move to charge by dimensions hasn’t affected some people.

I have, for years (17, in fact) been growing Jade Trees.  They have never flowered.  Ever.  Until this Christmas, that is! Yay, etc.

Strangely my parents have also been growing them for the same amount of time, and theirs too have never flowered.  Until this Christmas.  Spooky, huh?

There is a raging debate in the office. Are the likes of Lynne Truss and other grammar/punctuation nazis right? Or should it be they rather than the unfortunate illiterate “green grocer” that are lined up against the wall? Personally I stand with Ms Truss, although her fundamentalist tendencies do scare me. You can imagine my unalloyed joy when my daughter received this little gem in her “pretend shopping” set on Christmas day.

(Obviously, suddenly, I find myself analysing the grammar, punctuation and spelling of this post. Shut up. The lot of you. Please.)

Marvellous.  I particularly like:

Britney Spears’ entire musical career as a pop star has taken place during Duke Nukem Forever’s development.

And:

The Beatles formed, released every single one of their albums and broke up [in less time than Duke Nukem Forever’s development]. During this time they also toured the world several times.

So.  I too (like Doug and Adrian and many many more) have succumbed to the joys of an eee.  I agree with pretty much everything that Doug has to say, so won’t bother repeating - instead I’ll just add a little if I may…

I got it on Friday 21st of December (a full 8 days ago) and haven’t used another computer since.  The first couple of days I thought it was a novelty and was a little disappointed, to be honest.  However, I’m still using it now and have rather fallen in love with it.  It is extremely capable, and after a while the apparent limitation of the tiny screen sort of fades away and you stop noticing it.

I’ve just upgraded the RAM to 2GB and the change in performance is quite spectacular.  It was already nippy, but now applications open in the blink of an eye and it no longer slows with multiple applications open (as you would expect).  For £45 and the thrill of excitement of removing the ‘void if removed’ sticker it’s definitely worth it.

I’ve also just bought an 8GB SDHC card (this one, recommended to work with the eee) and suddenly I’m not worried about photos, music and video in the way that I was.  With 2GB working space on the on board drive and an essentially infinite number of SD cards it’s actually got all the space you need.  Clearly the new 16GB models will be a whole lot easier, but this sure will do.

Gripes?  A couple…  I really really want bluetooth.  Really.  The space bar is crap for right handed users (not just lefties, Doug), and once you’ve got used to the teeny tiny keyboard it’s really quite hard to use a full sized keyboard again.  And finally the terminal on my system seems to have some weird DNS glitch, such that occasionally everything resolves to 1.0.0.0; which has made getting extra software on it a right pain in the arse.

All in all, for the £300 it cost (including the RAM upgrade and the SD card) I’m amazed.

The above is a video done by friends Eko for Science City York. I post, simply as I rather like it, and you can see two of our sites in there somewhere

Well.  It’s taken me a long time to find something in Firefox that I both genuinely dislike and fundamentally disagree with the reasoning behind the decision.

Turns out that in Firefox 2 you cannot style RSS feeds with XSL direct in the browser.  Because, wait for it, they sniff the content and override your style sheet with their own.

Um.  This is Microsoft-like hubris, isn’t it?  If I take the time and effort to write a stylesheet and put it in my document, then surely I want it styled using that sheet, don’t I?  The comment from the developers are pretty upsetting too:

With more than 99% of the feeds with stylesheets just trying to do what we’re doing, but without the knowledge of what aggregators the user actually uses and without the chrome privileges to subscribe them, not using our transformation on feeds that have a stylesheet would just make for a worse and less consistent experience for our users.

Surely this is up to me to decide, is it not?  And now even more Microsoft-like:

please avoid chiming with your opinions/beliefs/etc (on either side). That’s just adding to the noise. We don’t make feature choices based on who shouts the loudest.

There is a (very ugly) workaround, but dear God, what a strange choice and intransigent attitude.  I’m genuinely surprised.

…

Flight of the Conchords.  All the songs. Thank you Anne.

Led Zeppelin clips may be hard to wipe off YouTube

1. Of course they will be. Fingerprinting is not going to work on cell phone or handycam shot footage, and
2. Surely ludicrous fan activity all over the net with poor quality sound and pictures only increases the hunger for the real deal?

As doug so succinctly puts it: “they are foolish, avaricious, clueless idiots and they deserve everything they get”

I can’t tell you how excited I am. We’ve been working on this in our spare time for such a long time now I’m amazed that we’ve actually finally made it. Forkd.com is live, in beta, and ready for your recipes. If I’ve not already sent you an invitation mail me (andy at isotoma.com) and I’ll sort one out straight away. Go for it people!