Status-Q

The Mac fansites are buzzing:

Apple has announced that Steve Jobs will not deliver the opening keynote presentation at the upcoming Macworld Expo in San Francisco on January 6th, 2009. Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will take the stage in Jobs' place. In addition, Apple announced that this is the final year in which Apple will exhibit at the Macworld Expo, pointing to the decreasing relevance of trade shows as Apple has expanded its direct contact with customers via retail stores and the company's website.

MacWorld is one of the biggest Mac-related trade shows and the Steve Jobs keynote has always been the highlight. Many new Apple products have been announced here in the past. This is a significant press release, but not just for Apple enthusiasts. Many others have commented on the declining relevance of the trade show/expo format, and having endured quite a number of them on a variety of subjects - albeit never an Apple one - I certainly wouldn't mourn their passing.

And that was when I was only a visitor. In January, though, we'll have a stand at BETT - the big UK jamboree for education-related technologies. The charges for our small stand are ludicrous - £120 per power socket, for example, and over £300 for the most basic internet connection. The plentiful spam, junk mail and telesales calls we've received since registering as an exhibitor are another disincentive ever to do this again. And that's just the start. Big companies like Apple spend many millions on attending such events.

So perhaps the trade shows are not long for this world. But, in the short term, it's still deemed to be an important way to communicate with existing customers and to reach new ones. We'll soon find out whether that's the case. Please do come along and see us at BETT. Remember how we suffer to be there for you!

Besides, you should visit these shows while they still last, so you can tell your children about them...

A few months back I wrote about the importance of Google's new support for CalDav, which allows you to edit and share your Google calendars in apps such as Apple's iCal. At Camvine, since then, we've been managing our company calendars that way, and it's worked very nicely, though it took a couple of minutes to set up iCal on each new machine because you had to enter complex URLs.

Now, I discover, there's a utility called Calaboration to do it for you; much more convenient.

If you're an iPhone/iTouch user... you can sync the calendars to the iPhone but it's one-way only - you can' t update them from there using the standard iPhone calendar app. However, you can of course use the web browser on the phone, which works quite nicely, or a third-party calendar utility like SaiSuke.

I keep most of my email, except for spam and obviously temporary stuff. And I'm fairly careful about removing myself from mailing lists whenever possible.

But I notice that my IMAP server is currently storing just under 57,000 of my past messages. That's over 9 years, so the average is only 17 per day that I've kept. It still seems like a big number, though!

I've been thinking about and experimenting with various backup options recently, seeking the One True Backup Solution. In my search for enlightenment I came across a rather nice site called The Tao of Backup.

Here's a simple keystroke that I find I'm using more and more:

As I get older, I find it harder to remember long strings of modifier keys, so I think of this as 'V with everything except control'!

This does a paste from the clipboard without any formatting. In days of yore, most cut-and-paste operations were just plain text anyway but, increasingly, I'm finding that when I copy text from a webpage to an email, from a document to a blog post, and so forth, it brings across too much of the formatting with it and I end up with chunks in the wrong font size, or with funny line spacing etc. Occasionally this is useful, but more often than not I just want the plain text, or I want to control the formatting carefully.

That's when you need today's mantra: Cmd-C to copy, V with all but Control to paste!

Many of my readers, I know, have been good enough to read Rose's novel, The Blackstone Key, and I suppose it would be terribly churlish to suggest that it might make a good Christmas present for somebody, so I shall avoid doing so.

I have had fun revamping Rose's web site over the last few weekends, though, and those of you who enjoyed the story might be interested in the first batch of historical facts that we've added to the site, which give a little more background to the novel - you can find them on the left hand side of the book's page under 'The world of The Blackstone Key'. More to come...

You might also be interested to know that the sequel, The Counterfeit Guest, will hit UK shelves three months from today (at about the same time as the paperback of the first book). Both are available to pre-order from Amazon.

Many years in the making, this is a masterpiece: beautifully produced, thoroughly researched, and intelligently presented. I suspect it will become required reading for anyone really interested in the topic of sustainable energy: how to generate it, and how to use less of it. And yet it lives up to its name, being delightfully un-stuffy.

David is more interested in spreading sense than in making money, and you can download the book for free if wanted from withouthotair.com. Almost all of the materials are under a Creative Commons licence and he's made high-resolution versions of most of the figures available on the web site.

But I recommend buying it: the book itself is very aesthetically pleasing, and could make a good Christmas present.