Below Belief

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable – Clay Shirky’s really intelligent thoughts about the future of newspapers, summed up by this one:

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem

And similarly on changes in the book shop industry

Fascinating.

After a lot of hunting, I finally found a fix for the various issues which plague the dell mini 9 after hackintoshing to Snow Leopard using Netbook Installer 0.8.3 RC4.

The issues were:

* Sound worked from the speakers, but not via the headphone socket
* Internal microphone wasn’t available/didn’t work and consequently Skype would crash when making an outbound call (presumably expecting a mic)

Solution:

* Get the AppleHDA.kext file from this post: http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-os-x-discussion/15380-sound-mic-working-applehda.html

* Open Finder. Press Ctrl + Shift + G and type /Extra
* Paste the kext file above into the Mini9Ext folder
* Run UpdateExtra (which is in the Extra folder) and click Update Extensions.

Now if you reboot you should find the Internal Mic is visible in the System Preferences Sound panel and sound works via the headphones!

Last problem is that whenyou put the Mac to sleep sound doesn’t work after the restore.

To fix this you need “SleepWatcher” a daemon that allows some control before and after sleep to kick the kext into shape. Follow the instructions here http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-os-x-discussion/15380-sound-mic-working-applehda.html and make sure you swap the path for the kext to /Extra/Mini9Ext/AppleHDA.kext and add “sleep 3″ like shown here: http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-os-x-discussion/15380-sound-mic-working-applehda-5.html

The only minor glitch is that when no sound is playing the headphones have a periodic hiss – but when playing sound it sounds great

So sound is possible, that’s pretty much all the functions working now.

Posted via email

So I read today that the Times plans to begin making “24-hour subscription” payments for access to it’s current daily edition online.

The Guardian reported it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/17/times-editor-james-harding-online-charging

The decline of newspaper economics has been well reported and I guess I’m one of newspapers’ “worst customers”. I occasionally buy a Sunday Times – almost never a daily paper – but I read the Guardian UK pretty much every day because they are “enlightened” enough to publish their full content via RSS feeds. I read these feeds on my phone – whilst travelling or otherwise in need of content – and the good thing about the Guardian feeds is they are complete (not just a synopsis, requiring a visit to the website to read the rest like most other papers) and don’t contain any advertising.

I was thinking though about the Times’ editor’s comments – that it costs money to do high quality reporting and despite the “democratisation” of journalism in the form of blogging and amateur reporting online, this will never fully replace high quality newspaper journalism for reach, depth and fact-checking. I’ve never really thought about paying for my daily news, but after his comments I figured, maybe I would be happy to pay for my Guardian (or Times) RSS feed access – a small fee per day – to go towards keeping the high quality and unbiased reporting.

After all I happily pay the BBC license fee which covers my (well used) Radio 4 Today programme daily listening, amongst others.

Posted via email

Last night we joined The Infidel Boat Club (TIBC) – the drinking arm of the Girton Alumni Rowing club at their annual dinner – mainly as a warm up for Mr Beeley’s stag.

Venue was the Oxford and Cambridge club – one of those stuffy ex-Gentlemen’s clubs on Pall Mall which always look attractive to begin with until you find out the various archaic and idiotic rules that make them totally impractical in the 21st century. Like you have to be wearing a jacket to order at the bar, you’re not allowed to use your mobile in the building and the barman is a complete jobsworth…

http://www.oxfordandcambridgeclub.co.uk/

Posted via email

Halloween is big in GG – there must have been 30 or 40 kids who descended on us over the course of the evening – all dressed up proper. And they were polite this year too. We cooked chestnuts and marshmallows on the chiminea and met our new neighbours. Was great.

Oh and we made good pumpkins.

As promised a few photos from our fab holiday in Italy – doing a photography course in Orvieto and a cookery one in Perugia

You can see them best on Flickr, but a few below too:

 

Few favourites:

More from the course itself, coming later…

Posted via email