Friday, December 5, 2008

Developing your alter-ego online

I spotted this in a strange place, but Computer Shopper report that "psychologists have carried out studies that suggest that people are using social networking websites to develop an alternate identity, and are gradually growing into the personas they create. They explained that social networking sites are beginning to serve as a self-development tool for young people discovering their own identities."

From this I found a link to the papers from the Children's Digital Media Center at UCLA, for the academic reports behind the news.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Settlement of the lawsuit against Google for its Book Search program

Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities blog reports his first impressions of the Google Books Settlement. The agreement focusses on in-copyright but out-of-print books and on access to the Google Books collection via libraries ...

The Text Technologies blog focusses more on the authors' side of things ...

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Gender analyser

This site lets you test whether a blog has been written by a man or woman.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Windows to Mac tips part 2: internet shortcuts

I've been used to dragging the icon to the left of the URL in a web browser to a folder and it gets stored as an internet shortcut on Windows. You can do the same in Safari on the Mac and it is saved as a webloc file. However, the URL part is stored in the resource fork. In order to get a more portable webloc file in which you can view the stored URL as plain text, you should drag the full text of the URL to Finder. This still results in a webloc file, but the URL is readable as plain text so that you can open the webloc file in a text editor. 

Sunday, October 19, 2008

How not to make PowerPoint slides

There are a large number of these on You Tube, but this one is funny.

Thanks to Adrian for spotting this ... 

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

BBC Magazine: Midweek quiz: Old computers

You can test your knowledge of old computers at the BBC Magazine site. 

Windows to Mac tips part 1: screen grab

Since there is no handy "Print Screen" or "Prt Sc" button on a Mac, you need to know the following:

Command + shift + 3 = whole screen
Command + shift + 4 = select a section

The results are dropped onto your desktop in PNG format.

Friends have also recommended utilities such as "Grab" and "Onyx", but I haven't tried those yet.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Bash foreach equivalent

I can never remember the bash equivalent of tcsh's "foreach", and now I need to remember it having moved over to my nice new shiny MacBook (did I mention that?). 
There's a quick reference here at Mike's Blawg.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Instructions about moving Windows Outlook PST files to Mac OSX Mail

After becoming the proud owner of a shiny new black MacBook recently, I've been reading up about switching email from Windows Outlook (2003) to Mac OSX Mail. Demdike has some done some research on switching from Outlook to Mail via Thunderbird. My plan A for now involves using VMware Fusion to get Office 2007 running on the Windows virtual machine that I've installed. This seems to be the most pain-free way of switching email over for now. Plan B (medium term) is to actually move over to using the Mac proper for email.

Friday, September 5, 2008

About the end of the world in 5 days

... when we all disappear into a man made black hole!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7548994.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7468966.stm

The schedule is here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/programmes.shtml

The switch on is due at 8:30 BST. Andrew Marre will be the first to go if a black hole is created.

Have a look at the Q&A on:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/asktheexpert.shtml

The answer to the question “Black Holes and matter” doesn’t fill me with confidence!

Monday, June 9, 2008

Chinese translations

Today, I've been mostly reading and correcting glosses and translations of examples for the forthcoming Chinese Frequency Dictionary.

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