... Cityrail needs to improve their carriage PA systems. I was sure that today's announcement was: Ruck dog Rawson's Pom.
(Next stop: Milson's Point)
Sunday 30 October 2011
Tuesday 25 October 2011
Please do not arbitrarily refuse to be thrown out...
(The full text of rule 6: To protect the environment. Please do not arbitrarily refuse to be thrown out or throw away in the vehicle.)
Sunday 16 October 2011
Saturday 15 October 2011
Cashier protocol
Having just remonstrated with a cashier who gave me change believing that I had given her a $10 note rather than what I actually gave, a $20 note, I find myself wondering why young entrants into the retail industry are not taught the correct protocol for making change: You put to one side the money that the customer has proffered and give her the change before depositing the money into the till. That way it's easy to check that you have not made a mistake in your fatigue during a shift.
I have a way to counter this kind of accident but I often forget to apply it: You say aloud to the cashier what you are giving her, e.g. Here's $20.
I have a way to counter this kind of accident but I often forget to apply it: You say aloud to the cashier what you are giving her, e.g. Here's $20.
Saturday 10 September 2011
Friday 19 August 2011
Joehoe
I first encountered Joehoe or rather JOEHOE! in a Dutch comic. Interesting character, I thought, who is he? It wasn't until I applied the rules of Dutch pronunciation that I realised that this was just YOOHOO!
And that also explains why babies go boe-hoe-hoe in Dutch.
And that also explains why babies go boe-hoe-hoe in Dutch.
Monday 8 August 2011
What I've learnt from scanning in 17 boxes of slides so far
1. I used to take worse pictures in the past. I'd see a pretty landscape and take a picture without foreground.
2. Camera shake was a perennial problem for me, especially as I liked low light photos.
3. Depth of field was also a problem, as you'd expect with 35 mm camera lenses, especially the telephoto.
4. I like difficult shots, e.g. twilight, but the film wasn't up to it. In particular Kodachrome had little latitude. Ektachrome fared better.
5. Colour balance was a problem. Sunny shots came out ok, but overcast shots were disappointing.
6. Most of my pictures are forgettable, except for some where people I know are in it, or the occasion was memorable. Perhaps 2 or 3 slides per box are really worthwhile. I should have just enjoyed the jazz concert, street fair or whatever.
7. I usually took more photos during one overseas trip than in several years of ordinary life. E.g. 12 rolls for the 1997 trip.
8. I should have taken more incidental photos. But in those days shots were expensive. Now digital photos are practically cost-free.
9. Today's cameras are so good, they do so much behind the scenes to make pictures in nearly every condition look good.
10. Slides stored in boxes fared better than those more exposed to open air.
11. The scanner is better than the film because any dust comes out sharp, but the images aren't that sharp.
Here's one of the better ones, taken at Pittwater YH around Christmas 1990.
2. Camera shake was a perennial problem for me, especially as I liked low light photos.
3. Depth of field was also a problem, as you'd expect with 35 mm camera lenses, especially the telephoto.
4. I like difficult shots, e.g. twilight, but the film wasn't up to it. In particular Kodachrome had little latitude. Ektachrome fared better.
5. Colour balance was a problem. Sunny shots came out ok, but overcast shots were disappointing.
6. Most of my pictures are forgettable, except for some where people I know are in it, or the occasion was memorable. Perhaps 2 or 3 slides per box are really worthwhile. I should have just enjoyed the jazz concert, street fair or whatever.
7. I usually took more photos during one overseas trip than in several years of ordinary life. E.g. 12 rolls for the 1997 trip.
8. I should have taken more incidental photos. But in those days shots were expensive. Now digital photos are practically cost-free.
9. Today's cameras are so good, they do so much behind the scenes to make pictures in nearly every condition look good.
10. Slides stored in boxes fared better than those more exposed to open air.
11. The scanner is better than the film because any dust comes out sharp, but the images aren't that sharp.
Sunday 7 August 2011
Tuesday 2 August 2011
Internet filter (another bad joke)
What's the difference between a very popular movie and an Internet filter?
One's a blockbuster and the other is a bustblocker.
One's a blockbuster and the other is a bustblocker.
Monday 25 July 2011
Sunday 24 July 2011
Robocook
A friend talking about how his nerdy son had detected and complained that a Thai restaurant under changed management had slimmed its portions and thinned the sauces got me thinking of the 1987 film Robocop. The eponymous protagonist is a formidable crime fighting cyborg. When we see through Robocop's eyes we are presented with running numeric displays, tracking cursors and other computer display paraphernalia.
In the current season of Masterchef mania, this got me thinking of a remake to be called, ta da: Robocook. Robocook would walk into a kitchen and his eyes would zoom in on and his computer brain would start analysing everything he sees: Ah, vanilla bean pods there, origin Indonesia. Day-old-bread there, soughdough cob. Eggs, free range. Simultaneously his search functions would bring up suitable recipes and videos of cooking processes.
Now such a cyborg would be a formidable Masterchef contestant!
In the current season of Masterchef mania, this got me thinking of a remake to be called, ta da: Robocook. Robocook would walk into a kitchen and his eyes would zoom in on and his computer brain would start analysing everything he sees: Ah, vanilla bean pods there, origin Indonesia. Day-old-bread there, soughdough cob. Eggs, free range. Simultaneously his search functions would bring up suitable recipes and videos of cooking processes.
Now such a cyborg would be a formidable Masterchef contestant!
Monday 18 April 2011
Turning a Blogger blog into a book
I had an adventure printing out one of my travel blogs for a friend who cannot read it online at the moment. Essentially I wanted to generate a PDF of my blog with posts in chronological order.
The best solution is the service Blogger partners with, blog2print. I am however a cheapskate, and besides I didn't want to wait for postal delivery. I needed it now.
Ignoring the chronological order requirement for the moment, I tried the obvious solution: print as PDF from a browser. No go. Blogger sites print badly. Chrome generated only the first entry. Firefox formatted it badly, putting an almost blank page at the beginning and more elsewhere. Konqueror cut off pieces near the bottom of the page, as did Opera.
Next I tried the web2pdf conversion service. This didn't generate any extra blank areas, but put page breaks right across photographs. No good.
More searching turned up various browser plugins or tools, which didn't work well. Also there were suggestions to customise the CSS of my blog to handle print media, which looked like too much work, but may be worth pursuing when I have time.
Eventually the solution I came up with was to install a local instance of Wordpress on my machine, run the Atom XML export from Blogger (which I always have on my machine anyway, for backup) through this converter, inport the XML, then print from the Wordpress page using the browser's print function. The output is acceptable. Now I only have to get Wordpress to display in chronological order. I've found a plugin that works with Wordpress 3.1 called default-sort-ascend.
Another advantage of Wordpress is that the reader has control over the number of posts to show per page. I can therefore set it to a large number to get the whole blog. In Blogger, only the blog admin can change this.
There is an online service called ljbook, but this requires me to make my Wordpress site public. I'd rather do it all on my machine privately.
There are various Wordpress plugins for printing one or a group of posts as PDF, but I think they don't do any better than the print as PDF function of web browsers.
One tip I want to explore when I have more time is a toolchain converting the Atom XML to Docbook using PHP+XSLT and then FOP to PDF. Apparently this can generate very good quality output.
At this point I'd like to insert a gripe about Chrome 11. I can see no way to tell it to generate A4 PDF output. The "paper" size dropdown is disabled so I can only get Letter size PDFs. Print A4 to printer, yes it takes that from my environment settings. Someone please prove me wrong, otherwise I'm surprised that Google could miss this.
The next adventure, which isn't really to do with blog import was when I tried to print the PDF. It really is my problem because I have an old Lexmark E312 Postscript printer. When I tried to print the PDF from Okular, it would abort on a complicated page. I fared a little better with Acroread by selecting Level 2 Postcript but eventually a too-complex page would stymie the printer. I think it's not because my printer doesn't have enough memory; I have 12MB installed, which should be sufficient for a page at a time. I think it's because my printer only handles Level 2 Postscript and even then, splutters on any slight deviations from the standard, or perhaps has some implementation deficiencies.
Eventually my solution was to generate and print the Postscript a page at a time from the PDF using pdftops from Poppler. I don't really understand why this works. I surmise it's because pdftops makes sure to generate only standard Postscript and filters out any quirks in the PDF. Thank goodness there's more than one way to do things on Linux.
The best solution is the service Blogger partners with, blog2print. I am however a cheapskate, and besides I didn't want to wait for postal delivery. I needed it now.
Ignoring the chronological order requirement for the moment, I tried the obvious solution: print as PDF from a browser. No go. Blogger sites print badly. Chrome generated only the first entry. Firefox formatted it badly, putting an almost blank page at the beginning and more elsewhere. Konqueror cut off pieces near the bottom of the page, as did Opera.
Next I tried the web2pdf conversion service. This didn't generate any extra blank areas, but put page breaks right across photographs. No good.
More searching turned up various browser plugins or tools, which didn't work well. Also there were suggestions to customise the CSS of my blog to handle print media, which looked like too much work, but may be worth pursuing when I have time.
Eventually the solution I came up with was to install a local instance of Wordpress on my machine, run the Atom XML export from Blogger (which I always have on my machine anyway, for backup) through this converter, inport the XML, then print from the Wordpress page using the browser's print function. The output is acceptable. Now I only have to get Wordpress to display in chronological order. I've found a plugin that works with Wordpress 3.1 called default-sort-ascend.
Another advantage of Wordpress is that the reader has control over the number of posts to show per page. I can therefore set it to a large number to get the whole blog. In Blogger, only the blog admin can change this.
There is an online service called ljbook, but this requires me to make my Wordpress site public. I'd rather do it all on my machine privately.
There are various Wordpress plugins for printing one or a group of posts as PDF, but I think they don't do any better than the print as PDF function of web browsers.
One tip I want to explore when I have more time is a toolchain converting the Atom XML to Docbook using PHP+XSLT and then FOP to PDF. Apparently this can generate very good quality output.
At this point I'd like to insert a gripe about Chrome 11. I can see no way to tell it to generate A4 PDF output. The "paper" size dropdown is disabled so I can only get Letter size PDFs. Print A4 to printer, yes it takes that from my environment settings. Someone please prove me wrong, otherwise I'm surprised that Google could miss this.
The next adventure, which isn't really to do with blog import was when I tried to print the PDF. It really is my problem because I have an old Lexmark E312 Postscript printer. When I tried to print the PDF from Okular, it would abort on a complicated page. I fared a little better with Acroread by selecting Level 2 Postcript but eventually a too-complex page would stymie the printer. I think it's not because my printer doesn't have enough memory; I have 12MB installed, which should be sufficient for a page at a time. I think it's because my printer only handles Level 2 Postscript and even then, splutters on any slight deviations from the standard, or perhaps has some implementation deficiencies.
Eventually my solution was to generate and print the Postscript a page at a time from the PDF using pdftops from Poppler. I don't really understand why this works. I surmise it's because pdftops makes sure to generate only standard Postscript and filters out any quirks in the PDF. Thank goodness there's more than one way to do things on Linux.
Saturday 19 February 2011
Cassette sales in 2010 in Australia
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