What I Learnt Today

Riding a bike to work would be way cool if it wasn’t for the pedalling bit.

In an Escher world, it could be downhill each way.

A few years ago I won this electric EasyBike in an Ansell beer promotion. I was quite fun to ride to work until our friendly neighbourhood policeman told me that the bike was unregisterable and illegal to ride on the road. Spoilt all the fun!

In New South Wales, motor assisted pedal cycles with electric or petrol engines only need to be registered if the maximum engine output exceeds 200 watts. Larger than that, and you need a motorcycle licence.

At the Manly sustainabilty fair last weekend there was a range of e-bikes from distributor Commute, http://www.commute.net.au.

Some bikes could be folded to take on public transport.

However, its not such a cheap solution. These high quality European bikes cost around $2000.

Single speed bikes (ie no gears) seem quote popular now for commuting. I understand that they can be more efficient, but you lose a lot of flexibility by taking away the gears. Any thoughts?

From now on I’m taking the stairs.

Especially if I’m Scottish.

Too much technology can be dangerous.

The lifts in the Hitchhiker’s Guide offices are called Happy Vertical People Transporters. As designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, they are meant to be sentient (enough to argue with) and have “defocused temporal perception.” The latter concept is meant to enable the lifts to see far enough into the future to arrive at a floor before a potential passenger realizes they wanted a lift, and thus remove all the tedious chatting and friend-making as per old-fashioned lifts. The ability to see even a little way into the future is apparently so depressing that they ultimately take to sulking in basements.

People, not technology, are the problem with these lifts. French people, in particular.

Can you print from an iPad or iPhone?

Do you want the good news, the bad news, or the good news.

Apple’s answer is “yes, but”.

The real answer is “yes”.

Airprint is the term that Apple uses for the technology allows you to print over a Wifi network.

Most apps (including Safari and Mail) on an iDevice have ‘Print’ as option. You usually find it in the Share menu – the button for ‘Share’ has a box with an arrow.

However, in the fine print, you find that you will need to have a Printer somewhere on the network that supports Airprint. At this time only a small set of recent Hewlett Packard printers are compatible.

Not to be deterred, the clever folk at Netputing have developed a small application that enables any printer to be used for Airprint.

And it is free!

You can download Airprint Activator from the Netputing site.

It is simple to set up, and there is even a video tutorial on the site to show you how.

Cool. Thanks Netputing.

Our poor old friend Ice Bear, who we met on June 3rd, is not travelling so well with this global warmth..

Friday morning

Friday night

Yesterday

This morning

Bye bye

What I Learnt On 7th June in other years

7th June 2021 Happy Western Australia Day

What’s new at Apple?

Steve Jobs donned the black skivvy tonight and presented the keynote to the Apple World Wide Developers Conference. This is always a highly anticipated event as it is one of the forums where Apple let’s us know what it has been working on and is ready to release.

So what did Steve announce?

1) Lion will be the next lease of the Apple Operating System for the Mac (10.7), and will be available through the Apple Mac Store in July for $30. It has ‘more than 200’ new features to make working on a Mac smoother.

2) iOS 10.5 will be releases in our Spring. This is the next version of the operating system for iPhones and iPads, and also offers ‘more than 200’ improvements, including a new notification system. iPhones will no longer have to be synced to a computer, as they do now.

And the big news was

3) iCloud. It is well known that Apple has built a huge data centre in North Carolina. All users of iMacs, iPhone and iPads will be able to have their important data, documents, photos and music automatically backed up to the ‘iCloud’, and it will then be available on all their computers and Macs. It is a giant shared hard drive available anywhere.

One cool thing about iDrive is that you don’t have to upload your music. If a song is in your library (either because you purchased it on iTunes or because you ripped it off a CD), iCloud will register that you own it, and link to it’s own version of that song. That way, every song you own is always available on all your computers and iPhones.

More information at Macworld 

What I Learnt On 6th June in other years

6th June 2021 Good to Go in WA or Tassie? Don’t forget your g2gpass

6th June 2020 Mabel and Olive have their performance reviewed