Posts from November 2008

Toy of the day

A quadrotor, or quadrocopter, seems to be the cool new thing at the moment for remote-control enthusiasts.

They look a bit like this:

They seem to be very stable, so are a popular camera platform:

I must find an affordable one of these somewhere! And they're wonderful things if you want to fake a UFO sighting:

Lots more videos out there if you search YouTube - or have a look here.

You can make one yourself, of course, if you have the time, or you can buy them from someone like Draganfly if you have the money. Me, I don't have either :-(

A sense of freedom...

No, this is nothing to do with politics. It only needs much smaller things to make me happy... like the fact that I have a new hard disk in my laptop.

When I bought my MacBook Pro - two or three years ago, now, just after they first came out - I thought that a 100G drive equalled lots of space. Since then, I have gradually moved my video-editing stuff onto external drives, then my music, then my photos, and then quite a few of the larger applications.

But, despite regular cleanups, I kept finding myself running out of space. It's never really a good idea to run a filesystem with less than about 5-10% free, and I was regularly hovering around the 1% mark. So this week I called up the local Apple dealer, handed over a couple of hundred quid, and I now have 320GB to play with!

That doesn't give me enough space to put everything back on the internal drive, but it's a lot better than it was, and I can stop worrying about data corruption as my applications run out of swap space!

Aaaaah.

A tip, though - I has the OS installed on the new drive and used Apple's excellent Migration Assistant to copy stuff from the old drive to the new system - this brings across your user accounts and data, applications, network settings etc - all very smoothly.

However, it's really intended for those setting up a new machine and copying their data from an old one. As such, it doesn't assume that you have a licence on the new machine for any Apple pro apps - Final Cut, Aperture, Logic Pro etc. It copies the apps, but not the licences. So if you use this system to migrate to a new drive, remember that you'll need those serial numbers handy afterwards!

Change

I liked the Matt cartoon in the Telegraph this morning!

But since the British media, whenever it comes to America, almost invariably spout... well... the price of everything and the value of nothing, I was pleased also to see Anne Applebaum's piece, which quoted the most brilliant use of a hundred or so bytes that I've seen in a long time:

Early yesterday morning, black Americans were sending a short text message to one another:
"Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack is running so our children can fly."

It's easy to say that the honeymoon won't last, that things may not look so rosy in 4 years' time, etc. But it's been a very long time since America has had any good news. Now it's got some, and it has every right to be proud of it.