March 20th 2006, 07:03pm
I had breakfast outside yesterday morning, and sat out all morning enjoying the sun. Life is getting better.
Even more excitingly, a friend took me to the garden centre where I finally got a winter jasmine for the corner of the garden:
And a crown of rhubarb:
Too bad I won’t be able to harvest it until 2007. I’d hoped to buy a grapevine, but they’d sold out of the variety I intended to get (Madeleine Angevine). Also, here’s a pic of the bird feeder I got from the Farmers’ Market a couple of weeks ago:
It’s a kind of variation on the traditional fat ball. It doesn’t seem to have been tremendously popular yet, but I’m hoping that when news spreads…
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March 15th 2006, 06:03pm
Okay, maybe that’s a bit extreme. But I’m pretty chuffed they’ve posted this update to Office 2004 just a day after my trial of e2sync ran out (and before I bought it!)
Both the update (11.2.3) and e2sync enable Entourage to work with OS X sync services. But I’ve found the third party tool a somewhat buggy way to achieve this essential function.
Of course, I don’t actually know Microsoft’s solution will be better, I’m just downloading it now. I’ll post my findings!
Update: It’s beautiful. When you’ve installed the update, go to Preferences in Entourage and you’ll find new Sync Services and Spotlight preference options. For Sync Services, you can choose which Entourage calendars/contacts to sync. I strongly recommend you don’t try and merge these – I got into all sorts of trouble with this because I’d already been syncing them with e2sync so everything got duplicated.
In iCal, Entourage creates a calendar called Entourage, whose description tells you “This calendar is automatically created by Microsoft Entourage”. Any changes in this calendar are reflected in Entourage and visa versa – which is a nice, simple approach – and appear almost straight away, so no messing about with iSync, which is beautiful.
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March 14th 2006, 06:03pm
Take a look at Andrew Sheehy’s last comment in this Macworld article, about the WiPod to WiPod calls. What might Apple call this “Skype-like” application?
How about….iChat?
So I’m not the only one who thinks the revolution is coming…
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March 10th 2006, 09:03pm
I don’t believe it. Three series in and the BBC are still passing off stuff they’ve lifted as original drama. They ripped it off in series 1. They ripped it off in series 2. They’ve ripped off The Sting again in the opening sequence of series 3, and if it didn’t have the wonderful Robert Vaughn in it, and it wasn’t so irritatingly entertaining, I’d stop watching it in disgust.
What a con.
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March 6th 2006, 06:03pm
Excellent news in the world of local radio. BBC Southern Counties have signed up Richard Lindfield to present their drivetime news and celeb magazine. Listen out for his first show on 3rd April.
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March 5th 2006, 09:03pm
I’ve been trying for a while to get Mail.app to talk to my work Exchange server. After talking with the IT guys, it seems it’s not possible. I reckon the server has IMAP switched off. Apple have got to implement MAPI support. And we need syncing between Exchange and iCal and Address Book.
In the meantime, I tried using Entourage. It worked first time, out of the box. Great, so now I don’t have to use Outlook Web Access anymore. But Entourage is clunky and unpleasant. And I still want my Palm, my phone, my iPod and dot mac to share the same information.
Fortunately, there are solutions out there. Snerdware offer this functionality – to integrate Exchange info with Apple’s iCal and Address Book – with Groupcal and AddressX. But this is expensive and didn’t work for me. An alternative tack has been attempted by e2sycn and PocketMac GoBetween which work as plugins to iSync, treating Entourage as an additional device – allowing full syncing between Entourage and iSync (iCal, address book, dot mac and all your other devices). Having read around, the former appears more reliable, but after trying it for a week, I’ve had several problems with recurring events propogating themselves into different calendars, calendars multiplying and all sorts (which may be due to the bugginess of SyncServices rather than e2sync). But it’s settled down now, and it’s such a useful utitlity that I will probably buy it (despite the problems) when the 10 day trial runs out.
It will have to do until Apple build in full Exchange support into Mail, and iCal and Address Book.
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March 5th 2006, 01:03pm
The imaginatively named NicePlayer is er… a media player for OS X. I love it when apps are usefully named… Although actually, the name proves quite appropriate.
It uses QuickTime or the DVD Player but presents the video in borderless windows up to full screen – and without nags even if you haven’t got Quicktime Pro. But the really nice thing about it is support for plugins. The Xine Plugin brings support for MPEG2_ts files (my Freeview TV recordings) and it’s snappier and more responsive the XinePlayer which also lacks the facility to skip forwards and backwards by a user defined interval (ie for ad breaks).
Plus, Nice supports Apple Scripts, so I will be able to remote control it with Salling Clicker. Just the thing for when I get the intel mini!
It should be called VeryNicePlayer.
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March 3rd 2006, 10:03pm
I’ve long been a fan of Felix Leiter, James Bond’s best friend. Despite my admiration for Joe Don Baker especially his performance in Edge of Darkness, and even Brad Whittaker in The Living Daylights, his Jack Wade (introduced only two films later) was frankly an inadequate replacement for Leiter.
Leiter was savaged in the book Live and Let Die, as he was in the film Licence to Kill. In the books, he ends up with a hook for a hand. In the film, they set it up so he can make a full recovery. But he never returned.
Until now. I’m delighted Felix will make a comeback in the most promising Bond film for over a decade. But I can’t help feeling that it’s slightly odd that Felix will be played by Jeffrey Wright, who is black. Felix wasn’t black before, and now he is. The continuitity of Bond films has always been suspect (Leiter has been played by a different actor in every film he’s featured in, except for Licence to Kill), but isn’t this quite a big change of identity? Certainly, M is now a woman, but “M” is a job, Felix is a character. Judi Dench is not playing the same character Bernard Lee did.
Still, mostly I’m just pleased Felix is back.
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March 2nd 2006, 11:03pm
I had tempted fate, and fate had accepted.
Watching the Greene-scripted Twenty One Days, Ralph Feinnes, as Bendrix, whispers to Julianne Moore as Sarah “I didn’t write that”. And ironically, while Neil Jordan has retained a lot of Greene’s dialogue and effected a beautiful recreation of Greene’s war-torn always-raining London, this certainly isn’t what he wrote.
The performances, from the two leads, but especially from Stephen Rea as the cuckolded husband, are superb, and the cinematography (Roger Pratt) is beautiful. The pivotal scene is so incredible that on first watching I immediately rewound and played it again (it’s used twice in the film, too). So what a shame, then, that Jordan’s adaptation simply guts the plot. By removing one minor character, he removes the central dilemma of the book (“God is in the details”). The “other party” is just no longer any contest for Bendrix, and Jordan, recognising this, changes the ending of the film too.
It’s stilll a hugely better watch than the 1955 version (well, it hasn’t got Van Johnson in it). It’s fine so far as it goes as a “doomed love” story, and the first half is great. But it’s not Greene’s story and it really just tails off at the end.
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