May 10, 2005

I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released. It’s a 12” Combo-drive Powerbook; when closed, it’s small enough to hide under an A4 sheet. Oddly enough, it weighs the same as my old 14” Dell. It’s been a pretty good experience so far. I’ve moved my iTunes library, and I’m now looking for a decent Mac RSS reader. Mail.app is picking up all my mail; I can access my shared files on my Windows server (after a bit of work), and Remote Desktop is installed so I can remotely run Outlook on my desktop.

Mar 14, 2005

How to use a Motorola Razr V3 as a Bluetooth GPRS modem with your PocketPC - placed here in the hope that someone will google for it and find it useful. Pair the PocketPC and the phone; if you’re using a Windows Mobile 2003, the procedure is this: Enable Bluetooth on the phone and PDA, then go into the Bluetooth Manager and under the New menu, select Connect to Internet via Phone.

Jan 1, 2005

Every year, the National Archives of Australia releases secret government documents from thirty years ago. These are always released on January 1st, and tend to be nothing more than an interesting insight into the mind of the government of the day. Not this year. Read on to find out why. According to this morning’s Age, 1974 was the year that the Labor government under Gough Whitlam “lost its grip on reality and its own conduct”, and “the year Treasury lost its influence on Government decision-making”.

Nov 21, 2004

Zac showed me an experiment this morning. It works best on the morning after a wild party, when there are a few half-inflated helium balloons floating around. Hold your hand over a balloon, palm to one side, then rapidly fan your hand from side to side. The balloon rises - and as you fan faster, the balloon rises higher. Why is it so? Scientific explanation after the jump. The principle at work here is Bernoulli’s Principle - it states that in fluid flow (which includes a moving current of air), an increase in velocity occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure.

Nov 9, 2004

Or, to give this article its full title, I Want But Am Absolutely Not Allowed To Buy Because It Would Be Utterly Pointless… If you’ve read Gizmodo or Engadget in the last month or so, you’ll have seen at least one article devoted to drooling over this: This is the Motorola v3, aka “Razr”. Its shell is anodized aluminium; it weighs 89 grams; and in this tiny clamshell, it packs Bluetooth, a digital camera (only VGA resolution, unfortunately), an MPEG4 video player (despite having only 5.