A while back, 4 days out of 5 I would get back from work, have dinner and the next thing I would do would be to watch the Geek Brief podcast. It was required viewing, it was as simple as that!
Sadly, a lot of things changed (all for the worse) and I didn’t like what it had become, so I un-subscribed.
Fast forward to today and we have Gadget Report TV, the real successor to Geek Brief.
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Geek Brief is back!
Tabletifcation
This week I got to ‘play’ with OSX 10.7 Lion on a a 27 inch iMac and this got me thinking about the tabletifcation of operating systems.
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Stop the suing!
<sigh> At the moment, everyone is suing Apple and in return Apple is counter-suing everyone. It’s not just Apple, Google, Nokia, Sony, you name the company they are probably suing someone for some sort of patent breach.
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Bus Origami
Wow, I saw this on the bus yesterday morning.

Yes, it’s an origami ‘swan’ made from a bus ticket. Someone was board (it’s a bus after all!) and very good with paper.
The new style bus tickets in Bristol are 7 by 9 cm. To make something like this from one of these seems an impossible feet. It might have been made from 2 or more, tickets, I don’t know, I wasn’t going to take this work of art apart to work out how it was done. And yes I left it there for the next passenger to enjoy! It certainly brightened an otherwise grey and dull morning for me.
Breast implants, photoshop and makeup
Well theres a title for you!
I am here, of course writing about the current controversy about sub-standard silicone rubber used in some breast implants.
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My Secret Project
In the last few blog posts, I’ve made mention of my new secret writing project. The time has come for the big reveal…
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Themes in my writing
In my quest to find ideas that I can use for my BSSP entry next year, I have been going through my various ‘idea’s files’ and looking at the many, many fragments of stories I have started.
While doing this I’ve started to see a some definite common themes it my writing.
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Patch panel growth
Over the last few months, the facilities department, at our studio complex has been reworking the telecoms patch panel.
This panel happens to be located in the IT office, so I’ve been able to watch grow and evolve (hopefully not in to a new life form!) I was (unexpectedly) at the studios yesterday and the project was finally done.
So here is the evolution of the panel over many months.
The rack in the early testing phase (way back in June)

Nothing happened after this for a long time, but then come early December and all of a sudden we have this.

A day later, the growth has gone exponential and chaotic!

Two weeks later, finally it is done!

Looking at this, I have just one thing to say, I am sorry very, very glad that IT doesn’t manage the phone system!
Rainbow
No, I’m not talking about the children’s TV program from the 70′s here
, although I do remember watching it!
No this is a rainbow I managed, just, to capture on my phone a week or so back
I was a much brighter and complete double bow, just moments before I took this shot. However I hesitated to try and get the photo because I wasn’t sure I could get the whole thing in the frame, but then I decided I could use Autostitch, the panorama making app I have my iPhone to get the complete rainbow. However I the few moments I spent thinking about this, the next shower was moving in behind me and the sunlight faded, so this was all I could get of it. Maybe 20 seconds before this was taken the primary bow was bright and complete and the secondary bow was about 60% and as bright as any secondary I’ve seen before.
This was a good lesson to me, that when it comes to photo’s, take the shot as soon as you see it, don’t wait for a better one, there maybe nothing better coming, and if there is you can take as many shots as you like and pick the best ones.
And in fact generally in life, you should grab and hold on to what you have here and now, don’t wait for something better coming down the line. It might never arrive!
Little and large
We have a large delivery of new Dell machines at work in the last few days and these new machines come from both ends of scale as far as size goes!

An Optiplex 980 next to a Precision T5500 workstation, which is probably the fastest ever machine we have ever had, with twin SSD’s dual quad core i7 processors! It’s also huge, to give you some idea of scale, here is it next to a ‘normal’ sized workstation.

See, huge. The Optiplex 980 is a particularly tiny machine, only slightly bigger than a Mac Mini.