Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Posts

You Tube powering ahead

Great analysis of the youtube phenomeme by Jay Meattle who has posted the graph below. (Thanks to Techmeme and ZDnet for the link). It makes Myspace look really pedestrian. My guess is that Murdoch must be getting a bit rattled. Hence the reason for yesterday scare stories in The Times (also owned by Murdoch) about the  TV Without Frontiers Directive. For what the directive is really about see this page and you can see its that old chesnut “aimed primarily at protecting children” because parents are singularly incapable of doing that as how can you expect oldies to understand technology! The directive also seeks to encourage diversity and basically making it a right that everone in the EU can access the same material (stopping censorship by individual governments).

Palm datebook record cleanup.

Today I bit the bullet and finally cleaned up the date book on my Treo 650. I’ve been hotsyncing the calendar data for the past 6 years and had accumulated 25,509 records. I got this dire warning in my HotSync log:- “Some handheld records were not copied to your PC. Your computer may be full or you may have reached the maximum allowed records on the desktop. To correct this situation, delete some records and perform a HotSync operation again.
Desktop = 25509, Handheld = 25508″

The question was how to archive the old records and clean them up. I discovered the Dimex application by LinkeSOFT this takes the Palm .dba file and converts it into a .csv so that all the records can be read by Excel and Google desktop. After cleaning you can re-import the .csv back into a .dba file. The DIMEX application sits in the Palm Desktop under Tools/Addins.

Worked brilliantly well (cost $22 USD), my 25,509 records are now down to 385 for the past year. So HotSync errors should be a thing of the past  and when I do desktop searches Google will pull in calendar data too. Also if I do succumb to the Treo750v (although I’m tempted to wait for the Treo680) I can import all the records into Outlook from the .csv file.

Bonds and signs

For those of us  who are interested in brickwork bonding and can tell the difference between Flemish and Stretcher bond. Here is a bit of a challenge discovered in Bury St Edmund’s today.

 

And for all you roadsign buffs here is the first illuminated road sign in the UK put in place in 1935 (by special decree as it didn’t conform to the MOT standards of the day). Note the capitalisation a big no no these days.

Many thanks to Judith for a pleasant couple of hours wandering around her home town of Bury  St Edmund’s.

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