Yearly Archives: 2008

Colour management on Windows

Posted on January 28, 2008 by acb

About fourteen months after I realised there was a problem, I have finally reached a system which allows the faithful reproduction of colours when printing digital photographs on windows. I’m not saying this is the only one. But it works, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Pictures | Comments Off on Colour management on Windows

The final failure of Thatcherism

Posted on January 18, 2008 by acb

A really excellent piece by Andrew Leonard in his Salon blog. Key quote: The root of Wall Street’s woes leads back directly to their own strategic missteps, greed, speculation-run-amok, and lack of appropriate supervision. The brightest minds in finance had … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in USA | 1 Comment

I hate IBM/Lenovo, almost everyone this morning

Posted on January 18, 2008 by acb

Over at the Guardian there is a vigorous discussion of the new Apple Airmac, on which someone mentions that the IBM competitor, the Thinkpad X61, is on sale in the states for $1349 right now. Well, I love the X … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in nördig | 4 Comments

uncelebrity gossip

Posted on January 16, 2008 by acb

So to a party to celebrate Granta’s 100th issue. I arrive late, having started at the wrong tube station and walked from Queensway to the Portobello Road in pouring rain. On the stairs up to the auditorium is Martin Amis, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Productivity notes

Posted on January 10, 2008 by acb

Three nice bits of software to help me work this year: Launchy, which I have used before on the laptop, is primarily a way to avoid the Windows start menu: it works rather like Quicksilver for the Mac. Once it … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in nördig | 2 Comments

An Evil thought

Posted on January 10, 2008 by acb

Why is everyone so convinced that it was Hillary’s tears which swung the vote in New Hampshire? It seems to me at least possible that there is a certain reluctance to vote for black peopple. This is understood to be … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in USA | 7 Comments

All you need know about heresy

Posted on January 6, 2008 by acb

This morning I found in a bookshelf the copy of Volume 2 of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall which I had been reading 22 years ago, when appointed the Independent’s religious affairs correspondent. It might seem absurd now to prepare for … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in God | 3 Comments

Godly Snippets

Posted on January 3, 2008 by acb

An interesting piece of spontaneous ritual here, "from the Guardian:":http://www.guardian.co.uk/transport/Story/0,,2234023,00.html a story about a boy who woke up in hospital after a car crash and had to be told that three of his friends, who had been in the front … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in God | 4 Comments

Making OpenOffice tolerable

Posted on January 2, 2008 by acb

One of the incidental irritations of using OpenOffice is that it uses its own, eccentric python installation. OOo is almost completely scriptable in Python, but the mechanism was put together many years ago by one programmer in his spare time, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in OOo | 1 Comment