In a flight of fancy on Sunday afternoon, I ordered a Nabaztag/tag from ThinkGeek.

Partly from gadget addiction, partly because [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] think it’s neat, and partly because any company that thinks rabbits should be connected to the Internet deserves my financial support. And because Henriette has one.

Watch our rabbit fly home.

The Genealogy of Influence website is exactly what I was looking for. It’s a “a visualization of the connections between the most influential writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians of Western culture.”

What I want now is exactly the same thing, except for Prince Edward Island. Something like this ^*:

Link from boingboing via Fabrica.

* Note that this is a random selection of politicians “back room boys” and should not be taken to indicate actual spheres of influence.

CBC Archives celebrates the life of Peter Gzowski, who died five years ago today. Please go an listen to A ‘sleeping’ cricket right now; it’s among the best bits of radio ever.

This year is also the 10th annivesary, on May 30th, of the last episode of [[Morningside]]. I know this in part because it’s also the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Confederation Bridge; we listened to the entire final [[Morningside]] while lined up on the Trans-Canada Highway on our way to Borden for the opening. I can’t drive that stretch of highway without thinking of that day and the show and its host.

My own last appearance on [[Morningside]] was two years earlier. Listen to the MP3 — more details here.

I’ve recently become addicted to re-runs of the old CBC drama Street Legal (I think I’ve won [[Oliver]] over; [[Catherine]] has her doubts about the utility of reliving the 1980s); last week there was an episode that guest-starred both Peter Gzowski and Gordon Pinsent. I dare say there’s never been a more Canadian moment on television.

What Does 200 Calories Look Like?. Very interesting. Link from Tasty Thinking, interesting in its own right.

I’ve been using MacFamilyTree this week to try and make some order out of the various email messages, scraps of paper and family histories that together describe my father’s side of the family.

I’m new to the arcane world of genealogy, and one of the things that strikes me as odd is that there’s no was to enter non-related people in MacFamilyTree; I assume this means that, in genealogy in general, the notion of “friends” isn’t considered; it’s all about family.

Given that genealogy is “a line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor,” I suppose this makes technical sense. But if my goal is to understand the context of my ancestry, surely the people that were friends, acquaintances, shopkeepers, neighbours and otherwise a part of my ancestors’ lives are important, aren’t they?

I wonder if anthropologists, or perhaps sociologists, have digital tools that are MacFamilyTree-like, but not so rigid in their rules about who matters.

In theory, I should be able to use the Address Book application on my MacBook to send SMS messages from my [[Nokia N70]] phone. The phone and the MacBook communicate with Bluetooth for all other purposes — sending and receiving files, syncing calendar and address book entries, Salling Clicker — quite well. But I can’t get Address Book’s cell phone-related features to work properly.

My N70 is paired with my MacBook, and the MacBook is set as “authorised” in the N70’s Bluetooth settings so the two should be able to communication back and forth without further intervention. When I open Address Book, I see the Bluetooth icon in the toolbar as I should:

Clicking on the icon, however, I get prompted to pair with a Bluetooth device, even though I’m already paired with my N70:

When I select my phone — ruk.ca in the list — and click Pair, I get prompted “Please enter a Passkey to use with this device:”

No matter what I enter for a passkey — 0000, 1234, anything — the pairing appears to work, and the Bluetooth icon gains a blue “halo:”

However the “halo” soon disappears, and any attempt to use the “SMS Message” or “Dial with Cell Phone” options that appear when you right-click a telephone number show these options as “greyed out:”

Watching the Bluetooth connection between the MacBook and the N70 while this is happening (using Bluetooth Explorer, which is part of the OS X Developer Tools), the connection appears, then disappears after about 5 seconds. Even during that period, the contextual menu options for using the cell phone are disabled.

I spent an hour on the phone with Apple support this morning trying to sort this out. After going through the usual zapping the PRAM, creating a new user, running disk utility, etc., I was no further ahead; I suspended things when they wanted me to launch into a non-destructive reinstall.

I’m posting this here just in case anyone else encounters the same problem. Or, better yet, has a solution.

This compact single-purpose web page is a useful tool for finding your antipode — the point on the earth that you’d hit if you poked a stick through the middle of the earth from where you’re standing. Here’s mine:

To find your own antipode, simply load up Google Earth, search for your street address, and then right-click on the map once it’s zoomed to your location and select “Get Info.” You’ll see something like this:

Next, enter the values for latitude and longitude into this conversion tool and you’ll get a new latitude and longitude as a result:

Finally, go back to Google Earth and enter these values in the “Search” field, latitude first followed by a comma and then longitude. You can enter this using positive values for northern latitudes and negative values for southern ones (i.e. “-46.23576” for “46.23576 degrees south”) or you can append “N” or “S” to a positive value as appropriate (i.e. “46.23576 S”). Same thing for longitude: use positive values or “E” for “eastern” longitudes and negative values or “W” for western longitudes:

If all goes according to plan, the globe should spin around a half-turn and you’ll end up about as far away from where you’re standing as you can possibly get.

VisualHub is a Mac OS X application that, says its website, can “Fit up to 18 hours of video on one DVD. Play it in any standalone DVD player.”

This is one of those claims that, on the surface, seems preposterous: we’re used to DVDs holding a 2 hour movie at most. Just like we’re using the CDs storing 74 minutes of music. 18 hours!? That’s absurd.

Or not.

It seems that the “DVD Video” standard — the standard that allows us to create DVDs that can be played “in any standalone DVD player” — allows for more video to be stored at lower quality. The “two hour movie” we’re used to is simply the approximate capacity when storing so-called “DVD-quality” video. In other words “high quality.”

But it you’re willing to accept lower quality video, you can squeeze more on a standard DVD. A lot more.

This is where VisualHub comes in:

You just drag digital video into the main window, select the “DVD” tab and “Burn When Done,” click “Start,” and after lots of re-compressing and DVD magic, you end up with a DVD with lots of video on it. There are no complicated settings to choose from: it just works.

Indeed the user’s manual says “The 18 hour limit is a soft limit. You can actually make longer DVDs, but quality will really start to suffer.”

I ran a test yesterday just before I left the office: I dragged seven 44-minute long TV episode AVI files into the application, clicked “Start” and when I came in this morning I had a DVD burned containing all of them. While I haven’t tried looking at it on a standard DVD player, the Apple DVD player has no problem with it, and the video quality is at least “VHS quality” if not better.

While I’m wary of crowing about it, lest my bravado lead to some sort of rupture in the time-space continuum, this week represents one month of the new “early to bed, early to rise” lifestyle that I started when I returned from Italy in mid-December. Here’s what my early rising afforded me the opportunity of seeing this morning:

Province House is one of my favourite buildings: I like its no-nonsense way of just rising up out of nowhere; I like its symmetry; I like how it’s a building that’s at once regal and understated. I walk by Province House at least twice a day, and I see something new every time.

The key to the “early to rise” part of the lifestyle, I have discovered, is the “early to bed” part. Previous attempts to move my day earlier have all failed, I think, because I just kept on going to bed at midnight and tried to will myself up earlier. Willpower is no weapon against tiredness, and so it didn’t work.

For the past month it’s been a rare day that I haven’t been in bed by 10:00 p.m., and often it’s earlier. This makes Saturday night dates with [[Catherine]] more challenging, and defeated any hope of staying up to see the new year on December 31, but the upsides are worth it.

Not only do I get to the office earlier and get a lot of work done before anyone else comes in (I’m generally here by 8:00 a.m., which is 2 hours before my [[Yankee]] colleagues start work), but I’m also sleeping a lot better, eating a lot better, and I’m home for dinner about 98% of the time (my former success rate was in the 50-70% range).

This morning I found myself going back and forth on a possible trip to the west coast in part because I was worried about the implications for my sleep schedule. Perhaps I’m taking things a little far.

In light of this now-famous Steve Jobs quote about the iPhone as an open platform (from this Newsweek interview):

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

…I find it worthy to note that the “telephone” in my [[Nokia N70]] is simply another application running on what is, in essence, a small computer: