The BBC has some excellent guides to basic maths and a story about the death of Tommy Ramone…
…so 2014 – 1949 = ??
He was born in 1952.
All of which is just an excuse for…
Himself
Marks and Spencer web site
Apparently Marks and Spencer sales have been hit by a website move…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/28205935
who would have thought it?
Go to…
http://www.marksandspencer.com/s/beauty/virtual-makeover-counter
and click on Register to be confronted by….
Apparently a sub-domain of the Marks & Spencer site is running from a GoDaddy site…
http://makeover.marksandspencer.com
Caveat emptor.
Set up Xiki with Aquamacs
Step by step set up using Aquamacs editor with the awesome Xiki…
From these instructions.
Ingredients:
A Mac running OS X Mavericks which should have Ruby 1.9.3 as the default version.
Jewellery Box to manage your Ruby versions (RVM) and gems
The Aquamacs editor.
Recipe:
Open the Terminal and install the Xiki gem…
$ gem install xiki
Verify that all is well…
$ xiki
A Xiki directory will have been created in your Home folder so jump into that…
$ cd ~/xiki/
Then run the set up script…
$ bash etc/install/el4r_setup.sh
You will now need an editor that will see an invisible file (the dot at the start of the name hides the file from being listed in a Finder window: .el4r). I use BBEdit but the free version called Text Wrangler will do the job…
Add these lines to the end of the init.rb file in the .el4r folder within the xiki folder within your Home folder…
$LOAD_PATH.unshift “~/xiki/lib”
require ‘xiki’
Xiki.initKeyBindings.keys # Use default key bindings
Themes.use “Default” # Use xiki theme
Fire up Aquamacs and it should drop you straight into Xiki…
Happy Birthday Mac!
Can it really have been 30 years ago today that the world was introduced to the Macintosh?
Before the presentation the 27 year old Steve Jobs was shaking with fear and anticipation; “I’m scared shitless” he uttered and then stepped on stage and changed the world – a feat he would repeat several times.
Today, when all computers work like the Macintosh it is hard to imagine what was so special about windows, menus, scrolling text, graphics, speech synthesis etc. all chugging along on an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor and 128 Kb of RAM. The wonderful Cathode can take your modern Mac back to those wonderful pre-Mac days…
Jobs and Steve Wozniak had defined what a personal computer would be like and how it would work. IBM dominated the world of computing and were venturing into the fledgling personal micro computer market (micro computers as opposed to the mainframe and mini computers widely used at the time). The Apple II dominated the personal computer market of the day; introducing the world to the Spreadsheet and providing work for a small company called Microsoft..
The Apple II would continue to sell well despite the appearance of the Mac. The personal computer belonged to the individual and would empower them in their daily lives; liberating them from the corporate controlled IBM computers operated in the basement by boffins. That was the Big Brother that the Mac was designed to destroy….
Jobs saw the personal computer as something you could pick up and carry – the Apple II was a wedge shape so you could tuck it under your arm and the Mac had a built in carrying handle. The IBM personal computer models fail this basic requirement…
Just one year later Jobs will be sacked not to return to the then nearly bankrupt Apple in 1997.
November – The month of spam
While some spent November eating treats and occasionally writing a few words others spent it manfully holding back a flood of spam. Admittedly this is all taken care of by the wonderful Akismet plugin, without which many a blog would vanish under the ever growing spam problem, but even their servers occasionally struggled with the weight of it all.
Apparently some people still use the Windows operating system but it is increasingly hard to understand why they think that is a sensible or acceptable option when even that which claims to protect them from their own stupidity is part of the problem.
There are better alternatives to the piss-poor abomination that is Windows.
Inevitably…