Regular readers may know I collect old calculators (mostly 30-year-old HPs, but I do look for some other makes too). One of the best places to find them is eBay, but it’s counter-productive to go visit eBay every day to search, especially for some of the rarer ones that only come up once every couple of months, if that. Hence, for the longest time, I’ve made use of eBay’s facility for generating RSS feeds on the fly of various search terms. I then subscribe to these searches as RSS feeds in Google Reader. If something pops up in one of the searches, I get to see it pretty well immediately. Using this technique, *cough, cough*, I’ve even snagged some great “underpriced” Buy-It-Now (BIN) items as soon as they appeared. […]
READ MOREI’m currently writing a series of articles that will be published as a set of (fairly) static webpages, not blog posts. So I can’t really use Windows Live Writer and consequently started off using Microsoft Word. The biggest problem with Word in this scenario is that, when you save a document as HTML, it produces the ugliest markup ever, even worse than FrontPage of old. In fact, there are whole collections of utilities out there that just strip the fugly markup out, just to give you a passing chance at getting reasonable HTML. […]
READ MOREWay back in 2008, a new site started up called Posterous, and it was designed to make it easy to create a simple blog. The way to publish to the site was easy too: just email your thoughts and photos to a special Posterous email address and it would do the rest. I snagged jmbucknall.posterous.com in 2009 and experimented with a workflow that allowed me to tweet short thoughts on Twitter, longer – but relatively quick – thoughts on Posterous, and the much bigger articles on this blog. […]
READ MORERecently one of my favorite authors, Christopher Priest, discovered a stash of first editions of three of his novels, including the one that had the most effect on a much younger Bucknall, The Affirmation. (I reviewed it here, and reviewed Priest’s latest, The Islanders, set in the same fictional place, here. I’d forgotten until just now but I’d reviewed another of his novels, The Prestige, here.) He offered these first editions up for sale on his blog at very reasonable prices so I jumped on it and bought a copy of The Affirmation from 1981. (I have this vision of these books being discovered hidden deep within a boxroom, a quintessentially English place and nothing so banal as a basement where most of my books are stored.) […]
READ MOREAnother entry in my series of “fragrant dried leaves in a pot” (English version), or “rotten stuff in a pot” (French literal translation): in other words, stuff I found interesting in the past month and tweeted or Facebooked. […]
READ MOREAlthough this article appeared in January 2012, I wrote it in November the previous year. How do I know? Because I talk about the Kindle Fire I’d just received (I’d pre-ordered it) and about the Amazon Silk browser. In essence I wanted to talk about how Silk optimized (or not – it gets very subjective) the display of web pages. […]
READ MOREGiven the links on my site, it should come as no surprise to you that I have written a technical book, originally for a publisher, and then, once the copyright reverted to me, re-published by myself, first as a physical print-on-demand book, and then as an ebook. […]
READ MOREI’ve just reread this article and, damn, it’s interesting. I recall it being fun to write as well. In essence, I go from the properties of real money – cash is a physical object (coin, banknote), it’s really hard to clone these physical objects, and transactions with cash are anonymous and untraceable – to thinking about a digital representation of cash – it’s not physical but a collection of bits, unless we take care it’s really easy to clone it like any digital file, and how the heck do you “transfer” it from buyer to seller anonymously? […]
READ MOREJust after Christmas I splashed out a few thousand miles from my United MileagePlus account on a new Kindle Fire HD 7, the 32GB edition. Unlike the older (well, a mere 12 months older, if that) Kindle Fire, the new Fire HD has more of the trappings that make a good tablet: lighter, thinner, better screen, more memory, camera, faster WiFi connectivity, Bluetooth, and so on. I’d bought one of the original Kindle Fires when it first came out, and it turned into my favorite entertainment tablet even though it was severely hobbled with regard to what you might term basic functionality. […]
READ MOREKind of scary, but I’ve been using GraffitiCMS from the very early days when Telligent had it in beta, to the point when I plonked down $99 to buy it, through to today’s version which is open-source. That’s five-plus years, folks. There’s virtually no support or plug-ins for it any more, but it’s pretty easy to write your own anyway. It’s just ASP.NET with a few libraries. […]
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