John Hawkins



Dr John Hawkins

Welcome to my bit of the Maison de Stuff, home to a huge load of pictures, and my daily blog.

My email address is as above - I've put it in an image in a vein attempt to reduce the amount of spam I get.

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Recent Entries:
Even More RSS
Socks
Porridge
We Just Put Up The Tent
PDA Finally Useful!
Das Photo Studio


Even More RSS
I've just syndicated my pictures page, meaning you can be informed when new sets of pictures are added, in the aggregator of your own choosing (or maybe with the main MDS aggregator), with this handy RSS feed.
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Socks
The unmatched sock count in my socks drawer has now risen to six. I am beginning to suspect some sort of government conspiracy is afoot.
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Porridge
I got up early this morning to make porridge for me and Chie. It wasn't as nice as I'd anticipated. I wonder if it is a location dependent thing. As in, eating it in a storm battered cottage on a remote Scottish island with an open fire and panoramic views probably gives it something of a mystique. The South East fails to be evocative in most senses, and as such porridge eaten down here is just... well... porridge.
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We Just Put Up The Tent
I was working at the BBC today. After I'd finished everything I needed to do, I was taken to the exit by one of the BBC's engineers. He was making idle conversation about the many echelons of organisation within the BBC, which I guess applies to just about any large broadcaster. Whilst explaining how it all works, he came up with a really nice metaphor. I'm paraphrasing slightly, but here goes: "It's like a circus, but we're not the clowns and we don't do any tightrope walking. We just put up the tent." The more I think about this, the more I like it - it actually works pretty well as a general metaphor for any engineering discipline. Although I think he meant it as a joke, it feels oddly profound to me. Thanks, Mr. BBC Engineer.
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PDA Finally Useful!
This week I finally got hold of the cable (evocatively titled CE-PCK1) that would allow me to transfer files to/from my PC. It wasn't at all straightforward to set up given that, as always, all the instructions were in Japanese. There was clearly no intention ever that the Zaurus MI-L1 was going to be used outside of Japan. I'm using Windows 2000 at home, and I had to change the default code page to Japanese (which means a reboot) to get the PC side of the software working... Still, after a certain amount of messing about, we did get the PC connection up and running, and I could finally get at all those files stored in the PDA's memory. Including the pictures stored on there, which surprisingly come out as GIFs, so are immediately suitable for the web. I have already uploaded the first article I wrote with it to the main 'maison weblog, which includes a picture I drew using the Zaurus. Also using the cable I was able to transfer some of my photos from my PC to my PDA, which is very cool indeed - it makes a really neat little slideshow pad. Why I can't do this directly with the CompactFlash card though, I don't know. (Perhaps this is possible, and we still have to work it out). Still, at least now I have a decent solution for writing articles whilst on the move...
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Das Photo Studio
Thanks very much to the nice folks over at digitalkamera.de, who have made a very attrative page all about Photo Studio, kind of a review I suppose. There are lots of screenshots and stuff, which is nice. It even mentions features I'd forgotten were in there.
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