Red Five standing by

Am I the only one excited by the current goings-on in orbit, where experiments are underway to make sure that the freighter Jules Verne can dock itself safely to the International Space Station?

You have to look at this footage of the practice manoeuvres. It’s so exciting! Jules Verne (or Automated Transfer Vehicle, to give it its proper, dull name) is a remote-controlled cargo truck built to take useful stuff to the astronauts on the Space Station. It’s controlled from Toulouse, it carries tonnes of food, water and supplies, and - AND! - it looks like an X-wing!

Look, see:

Now they must have done that on purpose.

Current work

Here’s what’s on my plate right now…

• I’ve been asked to do a session on Writing for the web in front of an audience of journalists and editors employed by Informa Healthcare; my head’s spinning with thoughts on what to say and what to leave out
• Planning to attend Bristol Barcamp 2008
• I’m trying to persuade someone to let me write something about self-replicating machines
• Need to write my PA column for next Monday - it might well be about What do they know?
• Trying to get my hand in on a travel writing gig

You’re in the garden now

I’ve always been a reluctant gardener. Which is a pity, because K loves gardening and would happily spend hours out in the garden every weekend. But I just find it boring, most of the time.

Some years ago, though, I successfully grew some potatoes. I know they were successful because Matt Biddulph said they were the tastiest spuds he’d ever eaten, quite a recommendation from a man of experience and taste such as he.

Anyway, this year my family have suggested I grow some spuds again, and I’m quite keen on the idea. So keen that today I actually went outside voluntarily and during a break in my working day to dig over the veg patch concerned and get rid of some weeds.

And I enjoyed it. Blimey.

Bet you’re excited at the thought of me posting regular vegetable news alerts here aren’t you? Eh?

Cold-calling is SPAM

ME: Hello?

NORMAN: Hello is that Mr Turnbull?

ME: Yes.

NORMAN: And are you the only Mr Giles Turnbull at that address?

ME: Yes.

NORMAL: I’m calling today to tell you that as one of our most valued and loyal customers, you’ve been pre-selected for our amazing new credit card—

ME: I don’t want it.

NORMAN: You don’t want the card… may I ask why not?

(At this point, you see, Norman is looking at a computer screen and he’s got a checkbox to tick that says “Customer declined card”, or something similar, and then he’s got a text box that he must fill in with a reason for the loss of business. It’s not Norman’s fault, it’s that of his clueless employers, who make his job - and my life - a misery by forcing him to ask these stupid questions.)

ME: Because I don’t want any credit. I’ve got plenty of credit already. I don’t need more credit.

NORMAN: OK sir, that’s fine, thank you for your—

ME: Look Norman, this isn’t directed at you personally, I’m sure you’re a lovely person; this is directed at your employers. If I’m such a valued and loyal customer, why does your company keep cold calling me? I’ve been getting loads of calls from your colleagues over recent months and its driving me crazy. I just want it to stop.

NORMAN: Certainly sir, I can take you off our list - that’s the list for the credit card department - but if you want to opt out of all marketing you’ll have to pop into your local branch.

(Funny, that. You’d have thought that computers would make it easy for Norman to switch off all marketing sent to me with the click of a thingy. I’m sure, if I were coming along as a new customer, he’d be able to pass information about me to all the other departments in an instant, so that they could all cold call me too. But when the information has to go the other way - from customer to supplier - it seems the internet’s tubes get all blocked up.)

Bloody computers

The computer was on my lap, and I was halfway through reading a PDF document, when I noticed an odd beeping and ticking noise. At first I thought there must be a browser window open in the background, playing some irritating Flash content. But it was immediately apparent that the whole machine was locked up and the strange mechanical noises continued from within.

I knew right then that something serious had happened. I know my way around minor Mac problems because I’ve seen loads of them. But this is the first time I’ve experienced a serious hardware failure.

Which of course it turned out to be. After half an hour on the phone with the delightful guys at AppleCare, the MacBook (not yet a year old) was diagnosed dead and will be picked up tomorrow for repair.

And I’m not in any kind of panic, because I am confident that my Time Machine backups will save me.

I have discovered a problem with them, though. What I wanted to do was restore my MacBook backup to my ancient (and spare) PowerBook; but doing a straightforward restore-all was not possible because the PowerBook’s hard disk is that much smaller. It doesn’t have room for everything that was on the MacBook.

What’s doubly irritating is that there appears to be no way of restoring just a selection of the MacBook’s files. It has to be a complete full restore, or nothing.

The next step was obvious - plug the MacBook’s backup drive into the PowerBook and just drag over the files needed. But that fails too, because of a permissions problem. My user account on this spare machine does not have permissions to read and open the files on the backup.

I’m not going to panic, because I can cope. I’ve managed to rescue a handful of files that are most essential for day-to-day work, and with a text editor and a browser I can get along just fine for a few days, until the MacBook is mended and I can fully restore it.

Still: bloody computers.

Ten web memes that failed

1. lonelyblokeinswindon39
2. My Favorite Frameset
3. Lolhats
4. The Hampstead Dance
5. Shot or not?
6. 100 things about me you already knew
7. Ze Frank’s Daily Accounting
8. 45things
9. Macs in dresses!
10. International Talk Like a Banker Day

Thinking about the weather

Some of you might be familiar with Rising Slowly, the weather weblog I’ve been writing on and off for a while now.

I’m pondering a plan to re-boot it under another name and another domain, and with some Adsense ads down the side. If I did, would you still read it? Would you start reading it, or stop reading it? Do you, in short, give a damn either way? I’d like to know.

There’s more rain coming tonight. More rain, and more wind. Newspaper editors up and down the nation are praying for devastation, or at least a few fallen trees.

My stubborn mini

I have a Mac mini. I want to run it “headless”, and manage it over the network using Screen Sharing. It runs Leopard just fine. But there’s one minor problem that brings the whole plan crashing down around my ears, and having spent two whole evenings trying to fix it, I’m flummoxed.

The idea, you see, is for the mini to be a testing machine. I’ll install weird shareware on it and play around; some of these apps might get written up as reviews for MacUser magazine, to which I contribute quite regularly. MacUser magazine has rules about the screen grabs that appear on its pages. Reviews must have an orange backdrop on the desktop. Features get a yellow desktop image; how-to guides get a green one. It’s all part of the colour-coding they’ve used to make navigating the magazine nice and easy.

So, back to my headless Mac mini. Here’s the problem:

When plugged into a monitor, I can change the desktop image on the mini to the orange backdrop I require and everything works fine. The moment I unplug the monitor, the backdrop disappears and is replaced by a plain blue backdrop. Not even the blue image that’s the default Tiger desktop, but something much plainer and bluer than that.

Nothing I do over Screen Sharing will remedy this. The blue backdrop remains, even if I delete the desktop preferences file and restart.

So, plug the mini back into a monitor and - oh! - the desired desktop picture is there!

Remove the monitor again, look at Screen Sharing, and - gah! - it’s gone again.

The issue seems to be something to do with Screen Sharing.

Normally a misbehaving desktop background wouldn’t be cause for much concern, but it’s driving me mad because in this instance, and for the MacUser reviews reasons outlined above, the display of the desktop background matters a great deal. Without being able to run this machine headless, it is rendered useless.

I’ve tried re-installing Leopard (erase and install, since there’s no data stored on the mini), but even that does not fix the problem. Which suggests to me that it’s a bug in 10.5.2, perhaps, or 10.5 generally because I’ve had the same problem before updating to 10.5.2.

Gah, gah, and triple drat.

Sign the e-petition to

SAVE JODRELL BANK RADIO TELESCOPE

Not that signing these petitions seems to have any effect on government policy. If we really want to save the telescope, we’ll probably have to all go and sit inside it. For a week.

Current work

Here’s what’s on my plate this morning:

• Writing reviews of Meander and Leap for MacUser
• Planning a Writing for the web seminar for editorial professionals
• Researching the Phorm story for possible inclusion in a forthcoming column for PA