Each year the Washington Post’s Style Invitational asks readers to pick a word from the dictionary, to add, remove or change a single letter and then to submit a suitable new definition. Below are this year’s winners. Brilliant!

Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realise it was your money to start with.

Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

Read More

Go to <http: www.musicplasma.com=""></http:> and type in the name of your favourite band. Explore a bit!

Read More

Yes, I am exceedingly happy with my laptop. More about this later.

In the meanwhile, read this for the low-down on the care and feeding of your Lithium-Ion batteries (in most modern laptops). In short: partial charging is better than fully discharging and recharging, although a full discharge-recharge cycle every once in a while is good for calibrating the digital fuel gauge. Lithium-Ion batteries hate high temperature, especially the temperature in your laptop. If you’re going to be running on wall power for a while, remove the battery. Ideally, store it in a cool place at between 30% and 50% charge.

Read More

Once again, I’ve succumbed to my inner laptop-fanboy and ordered a new laptop. The previous one is now two years old and thoroughly out of date. Add to that its 3.7kg weight (on a good day) and its battery life which is somewhere between 1 and 1.5 hours (on that same good day), and it’s obvious that it’s time for a new one. Or so I rationalise, at least.

After months of searching and researching, I settled on the HP NC6000. See the ZDNet review and the Ars Technica review. It’s a goodie. Especially pay attention to the 5 hours and 42 minutes battery life under MobileMark 2002 productivity load (i.e. running Office, Mozilla, Virus scanner, Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Flash and doing stuff the whole time) and the more than luggable 2.3kg. To make it all that much sweeter, HP decided to equip it with an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600: that means I’ll be able to play around with those neato shader thingies.

Read More

I just saw this in a signature of a mailing list posting:

_There are two rules to success in life.

Rule one: Don’t tell people everything you know.

_

Read More

This is how you can configure your OpenOffice installation to use A4 size (or any other size) by default for your page format and print paper size: http://www.jca.umbc.edu/FAQ_Computing.html#1.3.

In short, edit /path/to/OpenOffice/share/psprint/psprint.conf and change the value of PPD_PageSize.

Read More

Because I am supposed to be writing my thesis, the WAB-side has been calling very insistently. Well, every so often, it’s just too much and I have to WAB for an hour or two. A great place to WAB is my baby^H^H^H^Hsoftware, called DeVIDE, which is a kind of a thingy with which you can do visualisation and image processing thingies easily. That is, if it doesn’t crash. Oh wait, it never crashes. *cough*

Read More

I’ve determined exactly what I want in a laptop (he he he).

It shouldd weigh 2kg or less, it should sport a battery life of 3.5 hours at the very least, its processor should perform at at least the level of a 1.5GHz Banias, it should have a 5400 RPM, or faster, hard drive (in any case no Toshiba, thank you very much, they’re dog slow, even the ones with 16MB cache), the 3D graphics should support pixel and vertex shaders and should rack up at least 7000 on 3D Mark 2001, it should have at least 512MB ram at at least 333MHz DDR and the screen can be anything from 12″ to 15″.

Read More

This weekend, I started playing around with CoolTabs. This really useful little program attaches to the side of your desktop somewhere and is always available when you need to drop a URL, document or directory. In the same way, it’s always there when you need to access the files, applications and URLs that you dropped, but without being obtrusive. See the animated screenshots at the bottom of the CoolTabs page.

Under *ix, there’s BasKet, but that’s not quite ready yet. The fact that CoolTabs attaches unobtrusively to the side of the desktop is one of the things that makes it so useful and BasKet does not do this yet.

Read More

Today is the day that I officially begin writing up my thesis.

Read More