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Monthly Archives: June 2010

An unexpected hedgehog

I’ve been sitting on this a while, trying to coaxe out some prose worthy of the subject, but coaxing doesn’t seem to be working and the thanks grow ever more overdue… So, plainly and simply: Alan Brignull of the Hedgehog Press very kindly sent me, more than a month ago, a package of his letterpress [...]

Tagging, and missing the point

Blowing off a bit of steam here… Both Amarok and Thunderbird support adding custom “tags” to the collection items (mail and music, contra-respectively).1 Which is lovely: tags let you apply non-hierarchical non-exclusive categories to your collection, which is a wonderfully flexible way of organising it. But neither application lets you search/filter on tags.2 Of course [...]

Doubletalk

Them: Please accept my apologies for the difficulties encountered when attempting to resolve your issue. I assure you that your situation is not indicative of the quality service [company name redacted] is capable of providing. Me: you’re quite right. That’s why I’m complaining.

Ubuntu on Dell Precision: driver problems with easy fixes

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”) on my brand-new Dell Precision M4500. Not everything went smoothly: I had driver problems that left me with a blank screen and no wireless. There are simple fixes for these problems but Google was only giving me more complicated technical ones. Maybe this post will help someone in [...]

Shaun Tan short film!

Shaun Tan has made a short film of his picture book The Lost Thing. There’s a trailer on youtube: it seems like the art direction has perfectly captured the style of the book1 but the animation looks a bit clunky. Despite which, I am running to see this … when I find out how/when I [...]

Upcoming: great Balkan music

Ok, short notice: tomorrow night at Pakhuis Wilhelmina there’s a fantastic lineup: Amsterdam’s Caspian Hat Dance at 9 then Kočani Orkestar at 10 (and Serbian dj Cigan at 11:30, apparently). That’s gonna be a party. It’s part of a three-day festival (there are films showing at Kriterion and De Brakke Grond too, and more more music, [...]