Monthly Archives: September 2003

general September 8, 2003 posted by

Mobile Karaoke revisited

Ferret reader Dysfunksional Monkey mentions that there is an alternative to the karaoke Nokia mentioned below, in the form of the Karaophun! program which gives karaoke type features on a range of phones. Only problem is that the software doesn’t seem to be available as yet on the Web site. Promised soon. Update: available here (thx DM!).

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general September 8, 2003 posted by

Door to door DVD

Interesting little flyer came through the letterbox the other day. 4FilmFans is a new London service offering to deliver your choice of DVD movies to the door every week. That’s right, a sort of sneakernet video on demand. Free delivery, free membership and you pay just �3.00 for 1 film a week, up to �6.00 for 3 films a week. Not sure whether it’ll ever rival the NetFlix kind of service (when you coming over here guys?) but it’s a…

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general September 8, 2003 posted by

Gimmickry ahoy!

The Photo-3D gizmoid strikes me as being just a teeny weeny bit….well….gimmicky. Sure it’s nice to be able to take stereo 3D shots (‘snap,slide,snap’) by moving the camera a few inches to one side on the tripod attachment, but the red/blue glasses thing? Who’s got the time? Or enough headache pills? Still, $129.00. Bound to be an Xmas stocking filler, eh?

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general September 8, 2003 posted by

Watertight case

How do you market yourself into a litigious corner without really trying? Why, advertise your new digital camera thusly: “Just add water….” …then insert some small print – ‘The Optio 33WR should not be operated underwater.’ Silly peeps.

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general September 5, 2003 posted by

Broadbandbox

The Swedish Broadbandbox is a kind of unprepossessing looking doohickey which ships with some rather grandiose pretensions. ‘The system replaces all old home electronic equipment including the conventional PC….[providing]…home theater system, TV/ Radio (both conventional and Internet broadcasts), video conference, photo archive, music archive, home control/security, Internet surfing, e-mail, and a vast amount of broadband functions – on demand.’ Can anyone spell the word ‘ambitious’?

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general September 5, 2003 posted by

Moving home?

The ultimate in mobile homes? The Canadian Habitaflex provides ‘multi-purpose, all weather, collapsible and portable housing that takes only hours to set up.’ Two bedrooms, bathroom with shower, kitchen, heating and all for around �16,500.00. Bargin’.

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general September 5, 2003 posted by

The rand ‘virus’

The rand function. Nope, not another nasty doing the email rounds, but a rather useful and undocumented MS Word feature which lets you quickly enter dummy text into a document. type =rand() in the Word document where you want the text to appear, press enter and �The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog will magically appear. Numbers – e.g. =rand(3,4) – specifies how many paras and sentences appear. Cool.

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general September 5, 2003 posted by

EasyRGB

One for the web designers. EasyRGB provides a simple way to work out a set of harmonic colours for your web site. A sort of colour scheme creator. Enter your original colour and it will output a full scheme for you. Might even be useful for home decorating, eh?

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general September 5, 2003 posted by

IKEA revealed

So now we know. The weird Scandinavian names given to IKEA products come from a selection of tight categories. Want to know? Well… Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs – Swedish place namesBeds, wardrobes, hall furniture – Norwegian place namesDining tables and chairs – Finnish place namesBookcase ranges – OccupationsBathroom articles – Scandinavian lakes, rivers and baysKitchens – grammatical terms, sometimes also other namesChairs, desks – men’s names Trivia, doncha love it?

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general September 5, 2003 posted by

Bandwidth Junkies

The Twelve Steps of Bandwidth Junkies Anonymous is worth posting up in a cubicle near you. 8. Made a list of all hard drives we had filled, and became willing to make amends to them all.

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general September 5, 2003 posted by

The Ultimate Boot CD

Actually the Ultimate Boot CD is not quite that, for the simple reason that it cannot for legal reasons contain things like Windows boot images. But it’s a pretty good start, and there are instructions on how to add to the collection of utilities on the disc. Worth a geek download for emergencies.

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