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Swimming and iPod

by | Jan 10, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Uncategorized

Normally you can’t go swimming with your iPod. (Pedants will point out that you could – it’s just a one time thing.)

Grania swims a lot during the summer (when the bubble roof comes off the pool) – and last year we saw some cool headphones and a small MP3 player that worked under water. We thought this would be good if you could use your existing iPod.

I just found this:
iP3G H2O Audio and iPod

It’s a soft neoprene cover for your iPod. It caught my eye because they support all sizes of iPod – even the new Nano; also they have partnered to offer ‘flood insurance’ for the iPod itself.

Now that’s cool.

Mail, spam and viruses – update

by | Jan 9, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

I experimented several times during the holidays on various configurations of SpamAssassin and the like. I finally settled on something I liked and was easy to manage.

I found an addition to IPcop that added these services in a controllable manner – CopFilter – http://www.copFilter.org.

CopFilter plugs into IPcop and adds (for me) an SMTP proxy, ClamAV, SpamAssassin – as well as giving me a really simple web UI to manage things. Best of all all of the components are GPL.

I’ve trained the anti-spam – and it’s really working better so far than my own manual tweaking on a seperate server. 🙂

So far so good – I’ll keep track of the performance and post the results later.

Audible redux

by | Jan 6, 2006 | Books, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I rejoined Audible a few months ago.

I first tried it out about three years ago when I got my first iPod (wow! three years!) and found it – somewhat clunky. Audible support was patchy on my old iPod, the software didn’t work too well – and the content was somewhat sparse.

Things have changed dramatically in the last couple of years. I am now listening to several books a month; mainly on plane journeys, also on my commute into the office.

I am currently listening to Michael Palins “Around the World in Eighty Days” – I first read this at University many years ago (1992!). Turns out the whole book is now available online.

Coffee disaster!

by | Jan 5, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Uncategorized

We’re down to less than two days worth of coffee beans!

We buy coffee in bulk from a friend.

Not like this:

Illy small tins

but in cases of two 7kg drums. Like the ones your favourite espresso store has.

I’ll take a picture when we get a delivery. Hopefully tomorrow.

On presentations

by | Jan 3, 2006 | Evangelism, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Following on from my earlier post on presentations – here’s a great site that I culled from Guy Kawasakis blog – presentationzen.com.

There are so many good tips in there – it’s a pleasure to just dive in and look at some of the ideas.

I don’t want to “name and shame” people who give death by PowerPoint – but I will try and adopt some of these ideas in my own work.

The end of an era

by | Jan 2, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I finally threw away hardware that was part of my old test lab – I’ve not had use for this for a long time:

WAN and network emulation:
2x Cisco Catalyst 4500
Fitted with ISDN, FDDI, Ethernet and Serial (X25)

Cross platform testing:
Sun Sparc Enterprise 2
Dual Sparc, 512MB RAM, mirrored 4GB SCSI!

Wow – that was old and crufty.

I also threw out and shredded a lot of old documentation and notes from the late 90s and early 00s.

Guy Kawasaki blogging

by | Jan 1, 2006 | blogging, Evangelism, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Guy Kawasaki (author of such titles as “Selling the Dream” – another must read book) has a new blog.

One of his first posts really rings true – about the use (and abuse) of PowerPoint.

I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Nice. I hope I try to keep to this rule during 2006. I’ve certainly been trimming my slideware dramatically in the last year; talk and interaction (traditional “conversations”) are much more effective than the Dilbert-esque death by PowerPoint.

Guy is a renowned technology evangelist – I’ll be following his blog with interest.