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I have just discovered a great app for your iPhone or Android smartphone. It’s a full-featured satnav for cyclists and pedestrians. This means it will navigate a route on cycle paths and quiet roads and use bike-friendly cut-throughs and short-cuts where available. It even avoids hills if possible, and will show you A to A leisure routes from and back to a specified location. It’s free from Bike Hub thanks to a voluntary bike industry levy. When I was growing up, there was only one phone in our household … Well, I could go on. But who would believe me? If I went on to describe it as weighing two and a half kilos, wired in, and rented to us by the State-owned post and telephone monopoly people would think I was making it up. So I won’t mention that it didn’t even have a screen, for that would be unimaginable. I upgraded to Internet Explorer 9 this morning. It looks nice – lean and uncluttered. A really cool feature is that you can easily open two tabs next to each other. So you can for example highlight a piece of text on a website and drag it into an email you are composing. So far so great! Then I opened up Google Calendar, to receive this message: Your browser does not support all features of Google Calendar. If you are having problems, try Google Chrome. Why have Microsoft made something which doesn’t play nicely with Google Calendar? Or have Google made their Calendar deliberately incompatible with IE9? Whatever the reason, I would like these two internet superpowers to sort it out please. The recent discovery of two bombs hidden in computer printers sent from Yemen, and my earlier ramblings about passwords, got me thinking. How likely was it that a Chicago synagogue would be expecting to receive a printer from Yemen where half the population are illiterate and most people are Muslims employed in agriculture? I’m not suggesting that parcel companies make that kind of value judgement before accepting consignments. However, what if the sender were required to show in advance that the recipient was expecting the item? Some kind of authorisation barcode could be generated and fixed to the parcel. Not foolproof of course, but better than the current situation where effectively anyone can send an unsolicited parcel to anyone else. I was one of those kids who sends off for free stuff from companies. You know – samples, information packs, promotional material, posters for my bedroom wall. One such firm was Adana (Printing Machines) Ltd in Twickenham, England. I could not resist the coupon for a free sample of printer’s type. They sent me nine characters which spelled the words ADANA TYPE wrapped in a plain piece of paper, together with brochures for their printing presses and accessories. I took these curious shiny rods of lead (exactly 0.918 inches or 23.3172 mm high) with the mirror-writing letters on top to primary school with me, where I would carefully unwrap them and show to friends and teachers. At first that was the extent of my interest in printing, but
… more → If you use Gmail, you will know all about organising conversations using labels. To find all conversations with a specific label, select ‘Show search options’ and choose the label you want from the dropdown list called ‘Search’. Easy. But what if you want to find conversations with multiple labels? For example you are interested only in messages labelled ‘Sales region 2′ and ‘Quarter 3 2010′. Instead of going into ‘Show search options’ simply type your search into the search box at the top of the Gmail screen thus:
and click Search Mail. This will return a list of conversations containing both labels. Note that the label names are case insensitive, but you must replace spaces with a hyphen. What if you are interested in messages with either label? Then you would use:
The OR operator must be uppercase. Alternatively you can use the pipe operator ‘|’ (shift+backslash on your keyboard) like this:
You are probably three steps ahead of me here, and wondering about other compound searches. In fact you can choose from a long list of “query words” to build up a very specific search. In Gmail see Help articles › Using advanced search for the (almost) endless possibilities! Somebody recently asked me why I drive an automatic car. It’s a strange question, to me. A bit like asking why I have a colour TV. The roads would be safer if all vehicles were automatic, of course. No risk of stalling half way out of a junction. No need to take one hand off the steering wheel all the time. More attention available to deal with hazards and to control the speed and direction of the vehicle. … more → On 31 October 2003 I was one of 10,000 spectators who waited patiently in the cold at Manchester Airport to watch Concorde G-BOAC land for the very last time. Today I went on a Technical Tour of that same aeroplane which, after five years standing out in the open, is now housed in the Concorde Centre. (Whilst this purpose built hangar protects the iconic plane from the wind and rain, it is unheated. The seven of us on our tour were bitterly cold for most of the 90 minute experience. If you are considering a tour, wait until spring!) … more → We have been getting used to our new central heating system since the controls were all wired in a fortnight ago. I took a wrench to the hall radiator valve and adjusted it right down, which has solved the issue of a hot hall triggering the new wall thermostat and consequently preventing the boiler from warming the rooms. I thought that was the end of our problems, but
… more → We had a new gas boiler installed today. The old Vulcan it replaced was simple and reliable but it sent a lot of heat up the flue (more on the flue later). It also heated up the cellar which did at least give us a laundry drying room. The hot water storage cylinder in the loft also got replaced – with one encased in foam lagging so we no longer have to have a pile of old blankets and duvets on top of it. The flue was attached to the back of the house and ran right up beyond the eaves. Being made of asbestos,
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