Creepy This American Life story

I particularly enjoyed this Dave Eggers story on the "This American Life" podcast - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/448/transcript

Empty trash - Mac

The dreaded 'The operation cannot be completed because the item "...." is in use' message. This is the remedy (from http://www.lancelhoff.com/cant-empty-trash-on-a-mac/):

1. Drag the file from your Trash bin to the Desktop.
2. Launch a Terminal Go > Utilities > Terminal and type the following into the terminal window leaving a space after f:

cd ~/.Trash && sudo rm -rf

3. Drag the file from your Desktop to the terminal window and then press Enter
4. Enter your password when prompted and press Enter

Kindle a year on (almost)

As Christmas approaches, it's also the anniversary of my getting a Kindle. For a long time I'd eschewed such devices, thinking that a real life book was "better". But as I have digitised my music, photos and videos, this was the next step.

It's probably fair to say that one of the nice things about physical books is the ability to quickly flick back to an earlier section. However, the Kindle is in some ways better due to its search options, so it's easy to find where Dr So-and-so was previously mentioned.

Going on holiday was much easier with a Kindle compared to filling a large amount of space with heavy books. Reading on the beach was not an issue at all, and by having a Calibre set up to send me newspapers by Wi-Fi, I was able to see the news each day as well (and not have to wait for the British papers to arrive).

Being able to send articles from the net to the Kindle to read later (through such facilities as Send to Reader and Klip) is also very useful.

So, what have I read in this last year? Well, here goes:

The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan (The Strain itself starting on Christmas Day!)
The Naked and The Dead - Norman Mailer
The Snowman - Jo Nesbo
The Big Short - Michael Lewis
Handling the Undead - John Ajvide Lindqvist
Zombie Survival Guide
The Redbreast - Jo Nesbo
What The Dog Saw - Malcolm Gladwell
Be My Enemy - Christopher Brookmyre
Boiling A Frog - Christopher Brookmyre
Quite Ugly One Morning - Christopher Brookmyre
Country of the Blind - Christopher Brookmyre
Born Standing Up - Steve Martin
Solar - Ian McEwan
Nemesis - Jo Nesbo
Prey - Michael Crichton
Congo - Michael Crichton
The Lonely Dead - Michael Marshall
Blood of Angels - Michael Marshall (actually read on Android Phone using FBReader App)
The Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan

And I've just started The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Analysis of the picture below can tell us a lot about how different people think.

Analysis of the picture below can tell us a lot about how different people think.:

- For young men, it’s a picture of a lady with a nice bum but only the most observant will notice that she is crossing a street.
- The really observant will notice that she is wearing a thong.
- For older men, she appears to be a respectable woman – with a nice bum – on her way to work.
- The perverts among them will imagine her naked.
- Wiser men will ponder the presence of mind of the photographer to take the shot in the face of such beauty and be grateful that they shared it with humanity.

- For half of the women, this is an ordinary woman who should not have left home dressed that way.
- The other half will think she is a slut but wonder where she bought that blouse.
- Older women will imagine the misery that the woman’s bum will cause by the time she reaches 50.

- But only children, the extremely intelligent and the celibate will notice that the taxi is being driven by a dog.

Gotcha’ , didn’t I. :-)

Grey London in Color

Grey London in Color:

Another From the Class

We worked on this one during the class (see the Photography Course) as an exercise in composition. Students took their images and saw how many different photos they could make out of it. I saw lots of very nice new compositions that I never though of! When done, they posted their versions to the Clubhouse… and it is still fun to go through there and look at the various versions that are made!

Daily Photo – Grey London in Color

It’s so hard to carry a tripod with a big camera AND an umbrella. The number of ways you can severely pinch yourself must be in the thousands.

There is the right-hand-hold-the-umbrella-and-camera-together method. This keeps the left hand free to zoom, but there is no hand left to secure the ballhead. So, that only kinda works, but you have to do the strange reach-around. It’s about as much fun as using your left hand to get exactly 45 cents out of your right pocket.

Another method is using your neck to secure the umbrella, but that gets out of control very very quickly in the wind.

The last method is usually the one I do — and that is just to let myself get soaked. I feel only a tiny bit miserable, but I can sometimes be so focused that I can push that discomfort away while I’m focused on the photography bit.

Giant schools of swarming squid surround fishing photographer

Giant schools of swarming squid surround fishing photographer:

Photographer Jon Schwartz [blog] writes in:

"I was kayaking in La Jolla last week and saw a red frothing ball of squid on the surface. I jumped in with my underwater camera and had an incredible, surreal encounter with the huge swarm of squid."

Jon shares photographs from that encounter with Boing Boing, below, and he has a blog post with details here.

More otters

Otters

Baby pandas need a nap

Baby pandas need a nap:

Giant panda cubs lie in a crib at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Chengdu, Sichuan province September 26, 2011. (REUTERS/China Daily)

Baby Photo Bombs Its Own Photo

Baby Photo Bombs Its Own Photo:

Via Das Otterhaus

Via Das Otterhaus:

Via Das Otterhaus

Target: Epicurean Encephalitis!

Target: Epicurean Encephalitis!:

Not only are you the most beautiful woman on the face of the Earth, but your cooking knows no rival! Your voice is angelic, you smell like jasmine, and you… uh… oh, dear!

Startling photo of volcanic lightning

Startling photo of volcanic lightning:

No, this is not a still from the Radiers of the Lost Ark scene when the ark is opened, but an absolutely magnificent image of southern Chile's Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano spewing lightning-topped ash. Wow. Ricardo Mohr's photo was selected as one of National Geographic's "Pictures We Love: Best of October."

And why aren’t the deer reading the sign?

And why aren’t the deer reading the sign?:

Ubuntu - black screen of death? Er... not *really*

I had the extreme frustration recently of applying some recommended updates in Ubuntu, only to find, on restart, that post login I went to a screen with the desktop background showing, but no icons, no panels, and no right click functionality.

Hmm...

OK, well let's not muck about with that, let's try an upgrade anyway and that may fix it.

Upgrade ran.

Outcome, post login, a black screen - nothing at all.

It appears others have had this issue too, based on using that search criteria. Then, by pure chance, I saw this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1643651 and in particular the comment "select "failsafeX", and reconfigure graphics to default"

Somehow this option had passed me by. Plenty of attempts to get to a terminal and waste time from there, but never this.

Of course, it worked immediately.

The downside was I now had a screen with ridiculously large fonts and windows (is this high or low res? Low, I think). Anyway, I needed to upgrade to 11.04, and when I did the magic 1024* 768 setting reappeared - hooray!

And now I've gone one stage further and fully upgraded to 11.10.

All is still good. For now....

What kind of bird is that?

What kind of bird is that?:

Pandas

Giant panda cubs lie in a crib at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Chengdu, Sichuan province September 26, 2011. (REUTERS/China Daily)