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tech stuff

tea-bag accelerometer

this was a nice touch. it’s a dangly tea bag outside the window on my train this morning. it had been dipped in milky tea so left a trail behind as it swung backwards and forwards as the train accelerated.
so, what we ended up with was a time based wind splodge showing the trains’ acceleration ! what a great idea.
sadly these photos don’t do it justice, but i think you can see what i was getting at.
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tanoy

the sound systems they use in country fairs are amazing. they’re built for voice rather than sound and must be decades old in design.
they make me think of cold war nuclear announcements. and tellytubby land.
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wet jumpers

a soggy street cabinet containing lots of important phone lines and broadband connections. not sure who you’re meant to tell when you see things like this in the street. so i’ll tell you.
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cashpoints

in the UK there are two main domestic financial institutions where you can stash your cash – banks and building societies. there is a difference, but i don’t know what it is !
anyroadupdown, banks used to be the kings when it came to extracting your cash and they had the whole hole-in-the-wall thing sewn up (if you see what i mean).
but the building societies got themselves together with their LINK network and soon they were allowing other building society card holders to use each other’s machines.
the latest ‘craze’ is cash back in supermarkets which are neutral on the whole bank vs building society debate (as far as i’m aware).
but there’s another force going on. it’s portable branded cash machines. they’ve appears in 24×7 grocery shops and here are a load in a motorway service station. note the branded bin in the middle. probably for making deposits.
these machines seem to run off a mains socket and a normal telephone line. i may get one set up at home. be ideal for if i realise i’ve run out of cash in the morning before heading off to work.
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tony wifi

here is tony trying out wifi things in our house.
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it broke

our home cable modem internet access and digital tv died last night at about 7.15pm. ntl aren’t particularly well know for mending stuff so i expect it will be out for a while which is a shame. i’m all over the place work-wise this week too.
so apologies in advance for any spasmodicism this week.
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oh dear
update: it’s mended again. hoorah

spamerama

i’m starting to really love spam after a period of finding it very annoying.
it’s thanks to the random combinations of words they put together to get through the spam traps. here are two i received today.
how would you charade them ?
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resize that browser

spotted this on TummyMonsters
cool thing. go to a site. replace the URL with javascript:resizeTo(800,600); and there you have a resized browser window.
great if you are working on a big monitor and want to check what a site looks like on a smaller monitor.

Sony DSC-P71 windows driver

I don’t know about you but I’ve scoured the internet looking for drivers for my Sony DSC-P71 cybershot camera. [SEE UPDATE AT THE BOTTOM OF PAGE]
In the end I gave up and tried to find the original disk. Half an hour later I found the driver disk. If others are interested, here are the drivers:
(now moved to Driver Guide to save my server some bandwidth) You may need to register, but it’s free.
If you have Windows 2K you want to install the USB Update (15KB) after you’ve installed the main driver. this was sourced from the sony website.
This driver allows you to access the memory stick in your camera as if it was an extra drive on your PC. An ideal way to drain your batteries !
Not worked out how to use the camera as a webcam in this mode. Suspect it’s not possible. Sony say their cameras aren’t decided to be used as webcams on their online FAQs.
Whilst downloading the file, why not have a quick look at the rest of the blog or leave a comment to say where you are from ?
If you find the driver useful then be thankful. you can thank me by saying “hello” and smiling at three strangers over the next few days.
If you have any problems accessing the file, let me know !
UPDATE: you could also try this bit of the Sony site for the Windows 2K and Windows ME drivers which might work on WinXP and 98 respectively (maybe!)
LATEST UPDATE: Sony now host these drivers on their own site. go here or start on the sony front page then go to the Support / Download drivers section. i’ve recently found them here (including a TWAIN driver)

inconvenience

apologies for any loss of viewing earlier this evening. the server threw a wobbler. or something