Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Amusingly, today is the 111 anniversary of Tolkien's birth on the 3rd of January 1892, in Bloemfontein...

Worried about adding colours or special formatting to a LJ entry, without having them lost in someone's CSS driven style?

No need to worry, for you can work around this problem using the W3C provided miracle that is inline styles.

Inline styles are CSS elements that are added to a standard HTML tag. There also easy enough to add to your posts...

So that something like this:

blue

is done using the following HTML:

<FONT STYLE="color: red; font-family: 'New Century Schoolbook', serif; background: yellow; font-size: x-large">blue</FONT>

Et voila! That's all there is to it. You can find out more about which properties you can use here.

I used to have a Psion Wavefinder digital radio receiver attached to my PC. To be completely honest, I actually still have it stuck to the wall like a piece of 60s pop art, except it's now an almost orphaned product, unsupported on my current generation of hardware, and as flaky (when you can actually coax it into working) as an apple turnover on the OS I use on my main desktop PC.

Thanks to a recommendation from codepope, yesterday I took delivery of a Modular Technology PCI DAB receiver. It's an excellent widget, dropping straight into my PC and working fine with the bundled antenna - there's enough cable provided to place the antenna for optimum reception in most rooms.

The bundled software may be a little ugly, and not really designed for use on dual monitors - but it does read the BBC core EPG broadcast, and allows you to use it to set timed recordings. It'll also record straight from digital radio to MP3, ideal for sticking Late Junction on the iPod, or for capturing the next few weekends' dramatisations of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. It also appears that the third party Wavefinder applications are starting to port themselves over to the PCI receivers - there's already a beta of DABbar that allows you to stream digital radio over a small local webserver...

An excellent widget, and all the more important now there's BBC Radio 7 and 6Music...

Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka has pointed out a worthwhile charity that needs help now to get a rural wireless network up and running in Laos before the monsoon.

The Jhai Foundation has been working with one of the original hackers, Lee Felsenstein to develop the tools needed to put five remote Laotian villages in contact with the rest of the world via wireless networks - for just $25,000. Danny's gone into a lot more detail, but this is important work

As a result of Danny's articles, I dropped them $25 via their PayPal donations page (make sure you indicate that you're donating for "Remote IT").

Why don't you do the same? And then, as Danny suggests, write about it in your blog, and let's turn this into a whole new meme - but one an awful lot more effective in the real world than all those quizzes. It'll only take a 1000 $25 dollar donations to make this project a reality...

Growing up a science and technology oriented kid in the 1970's it wasn't suprising that the Thursday evening showing of Tomorrow's World, the BBC's science and technology news programme, became an important part of my life. Today the BBC announced that the 38 year old programme was finally being axed...

It was originally a live programme, and became known as a place where there was a curse on demonstration equipment. Demos that worked well in rehearsal would fail during the actual broadcast - sometimes catastrophically. I'm still proud of that fact that a project I was involved in, when it was demonstrated on a live Tomorrow's World not only worked, but it actually exceeded its usage rating - quite amazingly, seeing as it was a one shot device, and they tested it in rehearsal...

It was also one of the first web sites I reviewed, on one of my first writing gigs, back in the early days of the web and the UK's first Internet magazines...