Via one of Tim Bray’s tab sweeps, which are always good for picking up something interesting you might have missed, I happened to click through to an article telling me all about how to publish things. The first point was “Design for Reading”, but as you will gather from the screenshot of what I saw, it didn’t seem like a worthwhile use of my time to go any further.

Update: A fine bit of investigation and a workaround.

I read that definition this morning and was immediately reminded of the chess game reproduced below. Now, I’m no chess master at the best of times, and particularly not when playing 3 minute blitz. I keep doing that though, which is quite silly because it seems to me you should only play at that speed (if at all) when you’re already extremely good. Playing like that when you’re not good makes you worse. The point being that I’m not making any excuses for my appalling play, triumphant thought it turned out to be. I just thought it was a funny game, worth preserving:

Actually, to be honest, they’ll be saying that anyway on account of it not being cut even remotely straight due to me blasting through a sheet of plywood a metre in one direction and half a metre in another with a jigsaw, by hand, without even marking a line. I might mask the curvy edges with filler, or I might not bother.

It all started when I finished reading one book and got a few pages into another I didn’t really want to read. It occurred to me that it must be about time for another Ian M. Banks book to be out (it’s been this long since I read the last), and perhaps even one of his Culture novels. Sure enough, it turned out that that Surface Detail came out last year.

One snag – after years of stubborn nay-saying, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that ebooks are good thing, for various reasons which I’ll save for another day. This shouldn’t have been a snag, of course, it should have made it easy – instead of an hour’s round trip to the bookshop, complete with the costs of petrol and parking and the need to mingle with shoppers, I could have had it there and then. Or, relatively painlessly if I was prepared to wait for the postman.

So the theory sounded good – pay for ebook, download ebook, read ebook. First stop, Iain Banks’ web site. Well it seemed like a good idea at the time. Admittedly, deeply buried within I did find a link to the publisher’s site, where I could order the book for nearly three times the price Amazon are selling it for. But as for e-books – forget it. Oh, but wait, there was a whole “Ebook News” section. Unfortunately, all that it contained was some blurb about an ‘app’ for some nasty locked-down fruit-based device. You buy the book, then you scan the QR code with your fruitphone, and you get some extra goodies. Or something. It ended like this:

So unlocking the ‘story beyond the story’ with one of the world’s leading publishers is an extraordinary project and a UK first that will quite simply transform the reading experience for ever.

After I’d cleaned the vomit off my screen, I went looking elsewhere.

Options, not many: Amazon would sell me a copy, but only if I bought one of their Digital Restrictions Management-riddled devices, or alternatively, tainted my nice device with their malware. Alternatively, WH Smith seemed happy to sell me it, but the very small print hidden at the bottom of the page before (I suppose I should be thankful for that) you buy indicates that you have to install some Adobe-crap to be able to actually read your not-at-all-cheap purchase. Waterstones were slightly better, in that they revealed the presence of the deal-breaking DRM clearly.

So, about this DRM shite. Even if I was prepared to install any of this maladjusted proprietary software, it’s not even compatible with any of the computers or handheld devices I have now, let alone any I may decide to buy in the future. Even if it was, I’d have to be prepared to jump through all the ridiculous “register your thing here”, “authorise your computer there” and “link your device to your whatjamacallit” hoops. And if I ever found it suddenly wouldn’t let me read my book, well no problem, I could just phone them up (Monday-Friday: 9am-6pm).

How does all this rigmarole benefit me exactly? Well, it means I won’t accidentally read my book on more than the maximum number of devices they’ve decided I’m allowed to ever have. Or commit the crime of reading it on a device they haven’t thought of yet. Or worse, still be able to read it after they’ve gone out of business, which will hopefully be soon. Or, and this is the worst thing of all, I might let *you* read it. In short, this is all to prevent me from ‘stealing’ the thing I bought.

I can’t help but liken this to a trip to a supermarket where they make you dress up at the door in a white pocketless suit and gloves and follow you round with a megaphone shouting at you to keep your hands on your head at all times unless retrieving (with prior permission) an item from the shelf. They need your passport, two copies of your driving license, and a letter from your long lost Aunt Sally before you can get in. Oh, and then they insist on coming home with you to make sure you don’t eat your tomatoes in an unauthorised part of the house, They leave an armed robot behind to make sure you don’t do it when they’ve gone. And they reserve the right to burgle you in the middle of the night and take the milk back if they discover you’ve put it in an unapproved brand of fridge. They never need to do this though, the milk is booby trapped – it will automatically explode if you try that.

Of course, few people shop at this supermarket. They’d like to shop somewhere else, but unfortunately the place has a monopoly on tomatoes and milk. But there’s a secret. If you go round the back, you can just pick up as much stuff as you like from the goods yard. It’s the exact same stuff, but without the armed robots and booby traps. The only catch is that you like the cows that make the milk and feel they ought to get paid, but the only way that can happen is to allow yourself to be treated like a fool and a criminal.

Ok, enough of the stupid analogy. It was quite hard to find places to buy the ebook, because search results everywhere were swamped with places I could download it for nothing. Piracy, they like to call it, although I’ve always failed to see how you can compare making an unauthorised copy of some digital data with robbery and murder on the high seas. Or let’s call it theft – I steal something from you, and you’ve still got it. That can’t be right either. Anyway, let’s stick with the pirate word, it’s funniest. After an hour of trying to hand over my money, and being treated like an idiot and a crook for my troubles, I decided to try the other way. Within twenty seconds, I had the goods. No strings attached. No slurs on my character, irritating registrations and authorisations, no technical problems, and no fear of the book suddenly becoming useless in the future.

This is a very poor state of affairs, is it not? Try and pay, and you get shat on from a great height. Or take the pirate’s way, and everything is plain sailing. Of course, we’ve been through all that with the music industry already – I went from someone who would happily go out several times a week and return with a bag full of records and CDs, to someone who wouldn’t give a penny of my money to that industry if my life depended on it. Luckily we’ve finally reached the point where musicians can do without the parasites and take money direct from me.

As for the book, don’t be expecting it to appear in my next list of what I’ve been reading. After a quick skim to confirm it was the genuine article, I deleted it. I’m sure it’s every bit as good as its predecessors, all of which I’ve avidly read, but I suddenly have no appetite for it. Until such a time as Iain Banks is prepared to accept a simple exchange of some money in return for the excellent words he’s written (and preferably without all the obsolete middlemen involved) there’s plenty else for me to be reading.

If you don’t know the address, the answer is simple – draw a map:

Obviously this worked, otherwise I wouldn’t ever have seen it. It was eight years ago, but I still suspect the perpetrator of this crime against postal workers is going to pop up in the comments and identify himself. Let’s see…

Exhibit A – it’s the packaging for a pair of scissors, or rather a pair of pairs. I have no idea when scissors started coming in packs of two. I suspect the factory misunderstood the order – number of items per packet: pair.

The warning not to cut up raw meat and vegetables with the same pair caught my attention. Who needs a warning like that? Maybe the kind of person that prepares up their meat and veg with scissors. Maybe this is just part of the War On Knives, which I understand are due to be phased out except for licensed professional chefs. All amateur food preparation will soon be done with scissors, and later (when scissors are also banned) with wooden spoons.

Somewhat horrifying is the complete lack of warning not to run with scissors, but I don’t doubt this will be added to the next batch.

My favourite bit though is the instructions on how to open the packet – yes, even that is apparently too complicated and dangerous for the average ‘consumer’ these days. So how do you get your scissors out of the packet? With scissors, of course.

P.S. As the photo reveals, I stabbed the packaging with a knife instead. It would have been easier with scissors (if they weren’t inside the packet) but nowhere near as satisfying.

The Linksys SR224G is a 24-port network switch. A bit excessive for what I needed, but I couldn’t resist the price of £4.99 on ebay. One problem – very noisy indeed. This would be fine in it’s normal environment, a rack full of other noisy equipment but I wanted it in my office, because that’s where most of the Cat5 cabling in the house terminates.

The source of the racket was the two cooling fans, so the first thing I did (once I figured out how to get the case open) was disconnect them. I decided it didn’t need all that cooling, because it wasn’t stuffed into a rack in a hot room, with lots more hot things above and below it, it was free-standing on a desk. Also I wouldn’t be putting all that much load on it. I ran it for a day without the fans, and I couldn’t detect any excess heat building up at all, but it seemed wrong to have no cooling at all.

The two power connectors on the motherboard are 5V, but the nice silent (a marketing term meaning quiet-ish) fan I had wanted 12V. I thought it might work run at 5V, albeit slowly, and it did – but only with a manual kickstart. As I didn’t want to have to be around to do that after a power failure, I needed 12V. Unfortunately the power supply in the switch only supplies 3.3V and 5V, so the power had to come from somewhere else.

I had a 3.5mm jack socket lying around – probably the worst possible option, as will become apparent, but the only option at the time. I ‘drilled’ (with my penknife) a hole in the metal case and fitted it there. Only then did I realise that the metal barrel of the socket is connected to one of the terminals, so I’d be connecting the chassis AC ground to the power input’s DC ground, which seemed like a bad idea.

This picture shows it up and running, using a Sinclair ZX81 power supply, which happens to (insanely, if you ask me) also use a 3.5mm jack. This was good for a test, but a) I need that PSU for the ZX81 (no, really!), b) it’s only 9V, and c) I don’t want a another hot energy-wasting thing taking up yet another mains socket.

There is a perfect source of 12V nearby though, in the form of a PC that’s always on. I bodged together a cable and hooked it up. The first problem was that the ATX power supply in the PC immediately shut itself down in an act of self preservation when I connected it up. This was quite puzzling, until I re-opened the switch case and noticed that the inside of the plastic front panel was a strange non-plasticy copper colour. I tested it, and it was conductive – some kind of spray on stuff, which I scraped off from the area surrounding the socket.

The only other problem is the 3.5mm jack – it’s almost impossible to insert one of these without momentarily shorting the contacts on the plug. I guess the ZX81 power supply doesn’t mind this, but an ATX power supply does, and instantly shuts down. That means that as it stands I can’t take that plug in or out of the switch’s front panel without rudely powering off the server, which is not ideal. At some point I might use a different kind of socket, although another idea I had in mind was to power the switch entirely from the ATX power supply, since it already supplies the 3.3V and 5V needed for the switch itself, as well as the 12V for the fan.

Anyway, the end result is that the switch, which previously sounded like a hoover, is almost completely silent.

Getting rusty nuts and bolts off things is a recurring problem for me. I once had so much trouble getting the downpipe from the fuel tank off a car that ended up having to remove the firewall and drag the whole tank out from the top with the pipe still attached.

The latest rusty things to make me graze my knuckles on things and curse a lot were the nuts holding the wheel on one of my wheelbarrows. My standard techniques for dealing with this, apart from the cursing, are as follows:

• Brute force
• Hit it with a hammer
• Heat it with a blowtorch, then repeat the above. Unfortunately, this isn’t always an option – e.g. you’re near a fuel tank, or as with the wheelbarrow, the stuck thing is next to something plastic
• Spray with WD40, wait, then repeat the above. This can be effective if you’re patient, but the it didn’t help with the wheelbarrow even after a week of continuous spraying. WD40 does claim to be good at loosening rusted parts, but I’ve heard several reports that disagree.

So, out of options, I headed to the local hardware shop where I picked up some PlusGas. “Works in seconds,” it said on the can, “just spray it on and turn the nut.”

“Wheel see about that,” I said to the guy in the shop, although he didn’t get the joke because it wasn’t written down and he didn’t know it was for the wheelbarrow anyway. But I laughed, which is all that matters.

Back at home though, something amazing happened. I just sprayed it on, grabbed the spanner, and the nut came straight off as if it was brand new. So there’s my tip of the day – WD40 is good for lots of things, there’s no denying that, but for rusty things, get some PlusGas.

What did you think? A crossbow? A box of hand grenades? An assault rifle? Close, but no cigar…

Argh! Do the people responsible for this nonsense know how ridiculous they are?

So why work standing up? For one thing, supposedly it’s much better for your body than sitting all day, or as a completely different Steve puts it, in this entertaining video, you never see a chimpanzee in a chair. Mind you, I’ve seen chimpanzees sitting in chairs, and I tend to suspect the only reason they don’t in the wild is because they can’t make chairs themselves. They’re certainly happy enough to sit in ours though. Anyway, the point is that the human body is allegedly not designed to adopt a chair posture for 8 hours a day.

In my case, I don’t even sit in a chair. I might start the day sitting in it (sometimes) but give it an hour or two and I’m more or less lying down with my feet propped against the wall and my arms having to twist to reach the keyboard. Luckily this hasn’t caused me any problems yet (other than horrified looks from wiser people) but I suppose I might be storing lots up for the future, I don’t know.

I think you can tell I don’t take posture or the threat of back trouble very seriously (at least not yet), but there’s more to working standing up than that. The part that really interests me is more psychological – you’re bound to feel more alert and thus be more productive when you’re standing. Now that I think about it, this is definitely the case for me in my morning kitchen working, although perhaps the vast quantities of tea also play a part.

Another thing is that you can move around. I like to use multiple computers, and in a chair you can only possibly have one keyboard in a convenient place. My solution to this, other than unpleasant stretching, tends to be putting keyboards on top of each other or moving them around, which doesn’t really work. Propelling yourself in your chair (assuming it’s on wheels) is also a silly idea. But if you were standing up, a quick step to one side would be no problem at all.

As a bonus, machines that are set up for a standing adult to use are out of reach of toddlers, which would save me an awful lot of exasperation. “Oh, but she’ll just stand on a chair,” you say? There is no chair! This is pure genius.

So, my project for the weekend – somehow reorganise the office so all keyboards and monitors are at standing height.