Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Author: Geoff

Wrestling with a Leopard

This so called upgrade to the iMac operating is causing me real problems:-

  • The brand new Lexmark X4580 printer failed to work with the 10.5 OS. Fortunately the user forums suggested removing the printers PDE directory.
  • I then discovered that Leopard doesn’t work with Firefox or at least not the drop down menus on the sites that you visit. No cure as yet 🙁
  • Tonight I discovered that Safari and WordPress connive to remove the paragraph formatting when trying to make posts from within WordPress. Now using Opera 🙂
  • The Airport utility is useless . When I try to change wireless networks it fails to see any of the other neyworks in my house.
  • I’ve yet to get it to connect to my Freecom network hard drive.
  • Time Machine trashed my external hard drive when it failed to notice that the drive was full.
  • The provided mouse scroll button has packed up after 8 weeks.

On the bright side:-

  • Yummy ftp client is brilliant.
  • MacSimpleGPS pulls in the data from my Garmin etrex legend easily.
  • The DVDto MP4 converter worked well.
  • The 24″ screen and audio are brilliant.
  • iMovie works well with Youtube.
  • Grab works well.

Or as Philip Dowsett says in The Guardian . “So what should you do if a leopard gets into your house? “Don’t run. They will chase you down like prey. Try to give them an escape route, make loud noises and wave your hands around. I wouldn’t recommend going for the scruff of its neck”

Addendum: Dave Winer is not happy as well

Power, Sex, Suicide the meaning of life…..

Tonight after the fireworks I took myself off to a biosoc talk by Dr Nick Lane , with the very provocative title of Power, Sex, Suicide: the title of his latest book.Nick LaneThe small print Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life was a better description.

The first part was way way over my head and I just marvelled at how he could rattle of all those long names. I have put a few of his slides on Flickr

The fundamental point is that mitochondria were once bacteria and that it was their entry into cells that made possible complex life. They are essential in converting Oxygen for cell respiration and that they retain their own DNA to maintain respiratory control or as another website says “Within each of your cells are many mitochondria, tiny biochemical power plants that convert chemicals from food to ATP, the basic fuel molecule used by your cells to provide energy for life” here it gets way above me in that free radicals alter ATP production.

He then went onto describe why sex is odd and requires 2 parents thus meaning you can only mate with 50% of the population (apparently Physarum Polycephalum has 13 sexes!) Also the oddity of how the female passes on mitochondria whilst the male mitochondria is eliminated from the sperm. Which is a good way of defining what sex you are apparently.

Also higher mitochondria density in your cells is a good indicator of longevity, birds have a density 2.5 higher in their wing muscles (flight is very energy intensive compared to running) and live correspondingly much longer lifes that animals of the same mass. So how can humans improve their mitochondria density:-

  • Have mitochondrial DNA that exists in some of the Japanese population.
  • A calorie restricted diet.
  • Drink red wine.
  • Use Viagra 🙂

Pretty fascinating stuff and a great lecturer. Pity that so few attended.

Clone town Britain

As an aside to my previous post about mapping the world. Here is a slightly different slant:-

Home Town or Clone Town?
“The Clone Town Britain Survey II is designed to determine whether your town has be-
come a Clone Town increasingly indistinguishable from dozens of others around the
country; or whether it survives as a Home Town, distinctive and recognisable as a
unique place.
The Clone Town Britain Survey II is simple. It should take no more than 30 minutes and
can be completed while strolling along your local high street. “

The survey can be downloaded from the New Economics Foundation here the survey needs to be returned before the end of December. Their website is at neweconomics.org

One of the things that is very noticeable when walking abroad is the immense diversity in the high street shops in mainland Europe. Whereas here in the UK every town has had its Woolies, Boots, Marks, Coop and Smiths since I was a kid in the fifties.

So the recent Tesco desertification of the UK is nothing new, In fact the protestors on Mill Road, Cambridge conveniently forget that Tesco used to have shops on Mill Road, Fine Fare (taken over by Tesco), Fitzroy Street and Regent Street back in the 1970’s.

Free those maps

Steve Coast presentationLast night I was up in London to listen to Steve Coast’s 36th talk on the Open street Map project he created (slide show is on slideshare). This is the Wikipedia of the map world. Currently 15,000 people around the world are using their GPS systems to upload tracks and create maps.

The aim of OSM is to have maps, down to street level, that are free of copyright, Open so you can create mashups and Current so that the data is up todate for ALL of the world.

I first met Steve at Reboot8 in Copenhagen, where we had a few beers prior to the infamous boat trip 🙂 but for whatever reason I didn’t pursue the project.

However, recently I came across this great article by Dair where he found “examining the road network shows 89 “errors” in Google Maps:” in just Hayward Heath. So I was inspired to join up. David Earl

I did my first geomapping cycle ride (35miles) with David Earl last Thursday. David has mapped the whole of Cambridge on his own and his now tackling the surrounding area. I have still to get to grips with JOSM (the editor that converts your tracks to map elements that can be rendered so your data looks like a real map) although last night I heard about Potlatch which is a much simpler solution that is available when you upload the gpx files to the OSM website.

Last Sunday on my walk with Sally and Caroline I collected the street data for Perry and Grafham and the walk we did. I then used Mac Simple GPS to upload the data from the Garmin GPS upto my iMac and create a gpx file. This gpx is then uploaded to OSM as a trace . The street names etc can then be entered from my notes using JOSM.
Hours of fun to be had and another example of Coase’s Penquin at work