Not that smart

Not that smart
Originally uploaded by Mooganic.

It must have been an interesting meeting when they came up with this branding. Surely the typical purchaser of fish fingers doesn't care or know about Omega 3? A more profitable group to aim for might have been frustrated parents who do care about Omega 3 and have to deal with obstreperous children. The "We've added Omega 3, just don't tell them" approach may have worked better.

Wave your small blue sheep with pride!

There's no stigma attached, only a puncture repair kit. (No really there is a repair kit for er, over excitable Bluebird fans).

"The South Wales Echo will be in Cardiff week commencing 12th May to support Cardiff City on its road to the FA Cup Final at Wembley.



There will be lots of activity each day with a chance to buy a colour souvenir brochure and your South Wales Echo each day at the unit, with each purchase you will receive an inflatable Cardiff City/South Wales Echo branded blue sheep!

Monday 12th May – 10am to 4pm sited at the top of Churchill Way.
Tuesday 13th May – 10am to 4pm sited at the top of Churchill Way.
Wednesday 14th May – 10am to 4pm sited at the top of Churchill Way.
Thursday 15th May – 10am to 4pm sited at the top of Churchill Way.
Friday 16th May – 10am to 4pm sited at the top of Churchill Way. James Fox will be performing his City song on the unit.
Saturday 17th May – 6am at Cardiff City Car park to see the fans off, then back to Working Street (opposite Giles Sports) at 10am."

See the light

See the light
Originally uploaded by Mooganic.

On the packaging for some disposable lighters:
Going through Dream and Success, Witnessing faith and Passion

Photographers being stopped from taking pictures in UK

Interesting piece on Saturday PM Radio Four news programme, about people being stopped from taking pictures in public due to the incorrect or over-zealous application of anti terrorist laws in the UK...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ipm/2008/04/youve_been_framed.shtml

You should be able to listen to the programme on the BBC Listen again service - it would be the 26 April 2008 edition of Radio Four's PM news bulletin.

How to quickly launch preferences for volume or screen brightness in Mac OS X

To instantly launch the preferences controls for audio or screen/display settings, simply hold down the Option key (between Control and the Apple command key, i.e. the Alt key) then press one of the keyboard shortcuts for either volume or brightness control. Newer Apple keyboards have re-mapped these keys, so exactly which keys you press depend on the age of your keyboard; the controls are usually marked on the keyboard.

Some more keyboard volume tips:

• To move the volume up or down in tiny steps, hold down Shift and Option when you tap the volume keys, this will move the volume in quarter steps. (Possibly this is Leopard 10.5 only, I can't remember it in Tiger 10.4).
  
• To silence the volume feedback "blips" noises which trigger at each step, hold down the shift key when adjusting the volume. The noises can also be turned off completely on the Preferences Sound controls window, uncheck "Play sound effects"

Does email encourage insanity?

Merlin Mann on the nature of email to make people behave like sociopaths...

http://www.43folders.com/2008/04/24/taking-crazy-out-email

Robot typing 02

Robot typing 02
Originally uploaded by Mooganic.

Strange how a Gorillapod tripod is a very handy gadget, yet is also slightly sinister.

How to keep those cables tidy

Lifehacker has a good list of ten ways of tidying those errant cables. The bulldog clip as a cable organiser is the most snappy (sorry) idea.

Tidy those cables

These velcro re-useable cable ties are good, but a little pricey (Amazon UK), for a huge list of cable harnessing and organising widgetry, try StudioSpares (UK).

Nobody said every post has to be exciting, did they?

Engineer's Guide to Cats

Funny video from Paul Klusman

Max - a powerful multi format audio converter

Max for Mac OS X is now at v0.8 and Leopard compatible. A great open source project that can convert in batch mode and rip CDs. Handles a huge range of different audio file formats and meta tags.

Handles multiple processors such as the Core Duo type elegantly with good multi threading to speed up conversion.

Recommended.

http://sbooth.org/Max/

from the main site: "Once the audio is extracted, Max can generate audio in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, AIFF, and WAVE.

If you would like to convert your audio from one format to another, Max can read and write audio files in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats at almost all sample rates and and in most sample sizes. For many popular formats the artist and album metadata is transferred seamlessly between the old and new files. Max can even split a single audio file into multiple tracks using a cue sheet.

Max leverages open source components and the resources of Mac OS X to provide extremely high-quality output. For example, MP3 encoding is accomplished with LAME, Ogg Vorbis encoding with aoTuV, FLAC encoding with libFLAC, and AAC and Apple Lossless encoding with Core Audio. Many PCM conversions are also possible using Core Audio and libsndfile."

Welcome to the Tagfest, Top applications for finding and tagging your files.

Punakea screenshot

You are desperately trying to find that document that you worked on last month, but you can't remember it's name or where you saved it? Spotlight can help, but by using tags or labels, you can help classify your documents and find stuff faster.

By applying a tag or metadata your documents will be easier to classify and sort. You can use this approach whether to just dump everything into one folder or have a neurotically organised uber-directory structure of hierarchical folders. Either way, you will benefit from applying tags.

More resources:

For everything to do with tagging on a Mac try http://tagamac.com/

Finding stuff (paid for, but with the option to try):

HoudahSpot http://houdah.com/houdahSpot/index.html

Leap http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/index.html very iTunes like, lots of features. Leap allows you to search for files and quickly tag them. Leap can be heavily customised and offers a logical way of searching and grouping your documents. When Leap is running there is a menu bar feature with a clickable "bread crumb trail" of filters to find and isolate files and a pop-out window for quick tagging on the right side of your screen rather like Yojimbo, this is a very slick application with many customisable features. The typical default file types (Word, Keynote etc.) recognised by Leap can increased to any particular file type you wish to allow for fast searchign of files that are important to you. Leap handles tagging and searches, but gets close to being a Finder replacement with copy and move commands. Definitely worth experimenting with in the trial period of the demo download.

Free applications that make Spotlight more powerful:

Easyfind from Devonthink, the publishers of powerful organising and cataloguing software, fast and simple interface, uses multithreading for speed http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/

Punakea, a versatile tagging utility, free application, but please give a donation to the developer if you find that you rely on it. Has a tag cloud like many Web2.0 sites (think flickr) which helps visualise your content. Allows you to manage, apply and search tags quickly. Simple iTunes style interface. Much simpler than mucking around with scripts for tagging multiple groups of files. Punakea can also move files into a managed folder if you wish.

Spotlaser from Frovil Heavy Industies takes a little practice with the interface but yields good results allows you to narrow down your searches applying various filters. Results are displayed in a normal finder window, which means you can then use QuickLook if you're running Leopard.

For the latest versions of dozens of applications which use or enhance Spotlight check this list from MacUpdate

Another good idea is to add the Spotlight plugin for searching inside zip files. Try the Spotlight plugins section of the Apple Downloads site for the latest version. BetterZip provide a good free QuickLook plugin to show the contents of zip archives for Leopard users.

Quicksilver can also be used for tagging and searching if you're a keyboard orientated person. Quicksilver, is a minimalist but very powerful application but this is one of its many features (freeware). You'll either love it or hate it.

Metadata: this is data that describes other data, such as a library filing system grouping together "fiction" or "reference" books. The tag or label "fiction" is the metadata for a type of book. This principle can be seen in iTunes where songs can be labelled by genre.

Obsolete skills

http://obsoleteskills.com/Skills/Skills

Refilling a fountain pen - obsolete? Surely not!