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Here's a nice animation from the idealists (or maybe complete fantasists) at Monocle magazine. I'd be happy if Woolworths came back to Cambridge...

Yesterday I discovered what looks like an excellent new magazine in Borders. It's called Monocle, is on it's second issue (of 10 a year) and covers global affairs, business, culture and design (although apparently shops don't know quite where to put it) and seems to be chock full of interesting articles and very nice photography. A dense collection of random but very interesting articles. I'd be surprised if they can keep it up. It costs £5 an issue and is on sale globally. Looks like quite an ambitious venture by the guy who created Wallpaper. I hope they succeed but I imagine founding a magazine is one of the riskiest ventures you could take on. The website seems to be a big part of their idea - it contains interviews and micro-documentaries.

A while ago there were just a couple of ebay sniping services and they were pretty cheap to use. Now they're kind of expensive. But I just discovered Gixen which is simple and free (a least for now - it's ad supported).

One this that I'm really glad I bumped into, and that I'd recommend to anyone else battling with CSS layouts, is Yahoo's baseline stylesheets. These are three, quite small stylesheets that try to create a level playing field between all modern browsers and they do a pretty good job. The most sophisticated and clever of the three is a set of column layout classes that provide you with indestructible column layouts both fixed width and fluid! No more 'popping under' on IE! No javascript involved either like other solutions I've seen.

If you, like me, have lost your activation key for your miglia tvmini, you need not despair! You can get a new code from miglia's support people via email (instructions here). Apparently people have trouble finding this (I am apparently the first person to follow their instructions in 3 months).

Miglia really have some nice products. I noticed they have a nice looking iChat (and Skype) compatible cordless phone. Uses a USB dongle and it's own radio communication rather than bluetooth to get better range.

A guided bus - in Cambridge they will not
look this cool or this yellow.

Cambridgeshire county council have always for a long time obsessed with traffic planning. The thing they're most excited about though, is their planned super-futuristic 'guided' bus system that will link Cambridge and St Ives. During my two years in Cambridge I've never actually heard of anyone going to St Ives but apparently there are lots of people who do indeed go there. The council thought that re-opening the train line that exists between the two was far too dull an idea and decided to go with something a little more exciting! Well, as exciting as a bus on a concrete track can be. Anyway, the reason I was posting is that, after recently talking about the guided bus, a strange coincidence occurred.. Hugo was down on the river the other day and a guy started talking to him. His name was Arthur Henderson and he mentioned that he was an inventor. Turns out he invented the guided bus! Back in 1965! I found a posting he made on a mailing list where he explains where the invention has been used in the past and why he believes the scheme is a "wasteful deployment of a future asset" and a "gross interference with the infrastructure for Cambridge's transport strategy for the future". So not even the inventor thinks it's a good idea.

Oh I found some other examples of guided bus systems around the world on Wikipedia.

Just found out about the so-called secret form that allows you to transfer domains away from uk2:

http://amail.co.uk/moveaway.htm

I have several older domains hosted by uk2. I always assumed that you have to pay a fee to transfer away but I believe the registrars have to offer this service for free (at least that's what the terms and conditions for being a .uk tag holder appear to state). I'll probably consolidate all my domains on 123-reg who appear to give total control and are very cheap.

A while ago, I had real trouble getting a domain transferred for a client. The existing registrar was a small isp that really couldn't give a monkeys. Actually, they probably just didn't know how to change the tag. So it turns out that for .uk domains you can bypass the registrar and have nominet change the tag for you. Costs £15 for one domain and a flat £20 quid for more than one.

This was pretty much an impulse buy from Apple's online store as they were offering a third off the price and I thought that if I have to buy a TV licence, I may as well get all the channels I'm paying for. I'd read a lot of reviews and come to the conclusion that the included mini aerial was unlikely to work here in Cambridge. I plugged the thing in, fired up the configuration assistant, and sure enough, not one channel! I tried two 'amplified' indoor digital aerials from Maplin and neither helped so I took them back. After some fiddling, I actually managed to get the included aerial to tune in 65 channels by pointing it out of the kitchen window. This is obviously not a practical solution so I've ordered a proper exterior aerial, a DAT-45 (seems to be the one to get for weak signal areas). Hopefully we can rig it up in the loft and won't have to put it outside but I'm not going to hold my breath.

I have to say, when I've had it working, this thing is awesome! The software, EyeTV, really is superb. Really well designed and well written. The TVMini appears also to be capable of handling HDTV broadcasts when they arrive. I guess that's true, because the device just passes the MPEG stream straight to software.

...one day later...

With Markus' help I have now installed the DAT-45 in the loft and it works fine! Just requires some fiddling to get it in the right direction for tuning all channels. It's still not quite perfect (on one set of channels/frequency) but it's getting there.

I've also discovered in deinterlace settings in EyeTV. If you really want the movement on screen to look like a real TV you need to choose the 'Progressive scan' type of deinterlacing. Double-buffering/v-synching is then turned on and you get something that looks a lot more like the high refresh rate of a television. Uses a lot more CPU but makes World Cup football look a lot better! It would be great to have the option to make EyeTV always switch to progressive scan in fullscreen mode.

It would also be nice if EyeTV would mute the sound or hide the video window altogether when it is making a scheduled recording. I don't think I've seen an option for that.

Full OS X compatibility has been somewhat elusive when it comes to consumer VOIP handsets, but it seems to be arriving at last! If I had my own network connection (too much congestion on our house network) I would probably get one of these posh phones from IPEVO.

Apparently USRobotics 9600 phones can function as an audio device os OS X with these drivers. The IPEVO looks very nice though. Seems to be £25 here in the UK which I think isn't a bad price considering some actual design appears to have gone into it.

Lots of Stanford related digital content is now available on the iTunes music store. For anyone searching, Steve Jobs' 2005 Commencement Address lives next to four speeches by His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama...