Status-Q

Ah, now this is a very nice new feature in iTunes 7. There's more information here.

I've noticed a bit more of a trend in this direction recently: for applications to incorporate backup options for their own data. I think it's quite a good idea, because they often have a better idea of what needs backing up, how often, and in what way, than a more general "copy the files" backup. A couple of other packages I use which have two very different, but both very good, backup strategies built-in are the excellent accounting package MYOB and Apple's Aperture.

So my photos, my accounts and my music now all have their own backups in addition to the general disk-cloning that I do from time to time with SuperDuper. Good for one's peace of mind. I shall now go to bed and sleep soundly.

A couple more pictures from the Pyrenees:

If you have Google Earth, here's the location: Gaillagos.

In the UK, every vehicle has to display a tax disc which generally needs to be renewed once a year. This year, for the first time, I could pay for the replacement online, and it was posted to me. Very convenient. The details are also printed rather than handwritten, and are rather more legible than last year's one!

But in the past you had to go to the post office taking both evidence of your insurance and your vehicle's MOT (road-worthiness) certificate, which would be checked by the cashier before you could get the disc. In theory, then, the police or the traffic wardens could look at a car and tell that it had appropriate insurance and mechanical condition.

With the online process, you just have to tick boxes affirming that you have these. No other human is involved. Somehow this doesn't make me think that our roads will become safer...

Having taken lots of photos while on holiday, I'm becoming a real fan of Apple's Aperture software - designed to help photographers manage their workflow. Workflow, by the way, is something that professional photographers apparently have and that people like me aspire to.

Anyway, at $299, Aperture is a somewhat pricey but very nice piece of software. It has a bit of a learning curve, but is blessed with some really good tutorials. You get a DVD in the box with an hour or so's instruction, there are tutorials on line on the Aperture site, but if you're considering buying it and want to know the sort of things that make it different from say, iPhoto, I recommend Apple's introductory on-line seminar, which is well-produced. There's also an advanced one.

A warning, though; Aperture is one of those few things that makes you realise that Moore's law hasn't yet given us all the processing power we could possibly need. Make sure you have a pretty beefy Mac if you're planning on using it!

...after a fabulous week in the Pyrenees. The Val d'Azun now rates amongst my favourite places on the globe.

I may post more about it in due course - the blogging equivalent of inflicting my holiday snaps on you - but for the moment I'll just make you jealous with the view we've had from our bedroom window for the last week:

RyanAir has just announced that passengers will soon be able to make mobile calls on all of its flights.

I have mixed feelings about this; It might be very useful to get email into my Blackberry while in the air, or to be able to send one saying that the flight was delayed. But the idea of having to sit next to somebody who's making a long phone call, in the cramped confines of an economy flight, doesn't exactly fill me with glee. We need to make sure that, from the beginning, there's a strong in-flight ettiquette which says that you only make calls from the back of the plane, or something similar.

With a bit of luck, the roaming charges will be sufficiently high that most people on RyanAir flights (like me) won't be able to afford to make the calls...

Those splendid chaps over at NeoOffice have released the first completely free beta of version 2.0.

NeoOffice is OpenOffice with a Java-based Mac front-end; this means that you don't need to run X11 to use it, and it integrates rather better with many Mac features - most notably the native Mac fonts and printing.

NeoOffice has been around for some time, but it is now based on OpenOffice v2, which means that it's the best solution for Mac users wanting to embrace the increasingly-important OpenDocument formats.

I imagine most people in the States will know about this, but those of us elsewhere who interact with the US regularly may not know about Extended Daylight Savings Time.

DST in the US has traditionally gone from the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. This is almost, but not quite, the same as here in the UK, so for the majority of the year, California is eight hours away, except for one week, when it's nine.

From 2007, US DST is being extended by roughly one month, in an experiment which is expected to show substantial energy savings. For 2007, DST will run from Mar 11 to Nov 4.

Anyone planning meetings conference calls in the spring might need to know about this... and make sure that any software they use knows about it too!

More info here and here.

We've been playing with a new way to make a single PC into a multi-user machine. It's based around the idea that a simple USB hub could be the basis of a thin-client terminal. We call it Hubster.

More information on the Ndiyo site.

Are you a Photoshop user? If so, I heartily recommend John Arnold's tutorials at Photowalkthrough.com. He takes fairly ordinary images and, in these multi-episode video tutorials, walks you through what he does to them, why, and how.

This is fabulous tuitiion, but not for those in a hurry; each tutorial is typically in four parts of 20-30 mins each. But it's time well-invested if you can get away from other distractions. I watched one on a long flight recently and learned a vast amount.