Taking a look around PC World yesterday, I was quite happy to see how cheap inkjet printers have become, specifically wireless inkjet printers (which are great).

You can get a decent looking inkjet for c. £30, and a wireless inkjet for c. £50.

The problem with printers are their size, and not everyone has enough desk space for them (nor do they use them enough to want to have them on their desks). Plus, getting up and going to get freshly printed documents is good for the health.

Everyone wins!

I’ve been using it loads, now that it’s well integrated into Spotlight on OS X.

What I really, really want is Dictionary.app for the iPhone. I would pay for that.

Absolutely loving the comments on this first post of The Guardian’s new blog by a 19-year-old North London boy going to India.

I think it’s great when the comments are more than the sum of the article; you can sort of see the Web 2.0 model in action at a basic level, and it’s rather gratifying. They’re especially good when they’re negative, too.

Add Adobe Kuler (social colour pallet thing) right into OS X colour-picking windows. With coverflow!
http://www.lithoglyph.com/mondrianum

Drupal 6.0 is out! With amazing time-saving features such as drag-drop menus and CSS-only theming… rejoice!!
http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0

Konigi is to usability freaks what ‘design galleries’ are to design freaks… (I think?)
http://konigi.com/interface/latest

Blueprint CSS gives you a neat array of CSS ‘building blocks’…
http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/

Designers? Check.
Developers? Check.

Strategists, project managers?… erm…

I’ve booked a few hotels with this site recently and it’s very clever!
http://www.booking.com/

There. Something for everyone!

Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard is one of the most configuration-free pieces of software I’ve ever used.

It has three options: the disk to hold backups, folders you don’t want to back up and ON/OFF.

Marvellous, simple and very effective.

But that said, it would be great if (all user requests must start with ‘it would be great if’) you could limit the amount of space Time Machine consumes on the backup disk.

By default, it consumes all space available on the volume eventually. This is a very sensible default, but is not necessarily desirable.

I keep lots of downloaded TV shows on my external HD, and want to add them as I wish without having to wipe my Time Machine backup archive from scratch whenever I have no space left.

Also, there must be some sort of code in place for Time Machine to do this already. It must have a subroutine which, when the disk is full, says ‘Ah, I’ve reached my limit. I need to delete the oldest backup.’ All Apple need do is expose a variable which defines that limit, rather than making it ‘the size of all disk space available’.

Finally, as this is one of those user requests, I need to get this line in:

It can’t be that hard to do, surely?

Rob Scoble was only trying to get names, birthdays and email addresses out of Facebook when they decided to remove his access from the site.

Facebook are now not only preventing people trying to get this data off of Facebook, they are aggressively blocking such attempts.

Very, very, very bad.

Nintendo are bringing out a new Wii input device and game aimed at fitness… very clever stuff.

Well timed, too.

Just a throught: I really do think Apple should fix up some sort of anonymous ratings feedback system for iTunes.

It could be pretty useful. iTunes could take your rating data anonymously, which could be used for:

1. iTunes music store popularity (popularity is probably disproportionate to ratings)
2. music industry album feedback (I bet artists would love to see what their audience likes and lothes)
3. podcast track popularity (again, podcast producers could nail down the episodes which their audience likes most and do more of the same).

I think that would be great. Last FM almost does this, but even there track rating ≠ how much you listen to a track.

This Christmas we had a brilliant time in a superb chalet from Ski Daktari and company in Chamonix. I couldn’t possibly fault it.

Le Tour was absolutely fantastic, too.

Thanks Bill!

When I got my iPhone, the one place I didn’t expect it to perform well was on the fair slopes of the French Alps.

I actually took it as a granted that it wouldn’t work there at all when buying it, and accepted that it’d either have to take an old phone with the current O2 sim, or just be without phone while on the slopes.

This assumption was based on the fact that the screen is the main input device, and would be difficult to use with your bear fingers in the cold (and probably very difficult to see).

Well, after conducting a bit of a field test over the holiday season, that’s actually not so true.

Screen clarity

Because there’s a reflective coating behind the LCD screen, you can actually see the screen rather well on top of a mountain where the sun is shining very very brightly.

Handling

You just can’t ski and use a mobile phone at the same time. Even if you’ve got a handsfree setup, it’s difficult; I find it distracting to talk to others while skiing full stop, let alone having an all-out conversation.

The only way you’ll be able to use the iPhone while on a slope is to stop and take your gloves off. This isn’t really as bad as it sounds - if anything, it means you’ll keep the call length (and so cost) down to a minimum, because you’ve got to get you hands inside those gloves as soon as possible.

The iPhone’s call-answering earphones might actually make it even easier than any other handset to deal with calls. If you’re listening to music, it’ll fade it out and with a click of the button you’re talking away. Since you can do that with gloves on, there’s no faffing about involved. Click to end the call, and the music resumes.

That’s an excellent way to receive a call when compared to removing the iPod, removing the gloves and then fiddling about with your ski jacket as you try to get out your phone.

Additionally, the iPhone is also a bit of a style icon; perfectly suited to the (questionably) fashionable pistes of Europe.

So, all-in-all, the iPhone turns out to be a pretty ski-friendly phone.

Yes, according to Mr. Duncan Riley (of TechCrunch fame), Doris Lessing OBE (and Nobel Prizewinner for Literature) is a bit thick(!).

Absolute comment-based hilarity ensues. My favourite:

Duncan, congratulations! You have succeeded yet again at writing an arrogant and at the same time highly ridiculous post, which has sadly garnered the attention of TC readers — myself being one of them.

TechCrunch has been caught up in quite a bit of scandal recently. I hope they can sort it out; as it’s reputation grows so do people expect it to be increasingly respectable… something we’re clearly not seeing.

Within Terminal you can launch a file with the following command:

mate file.txt

You can open the current directory as a project with:

mate *

Or you can open up particular directories with

mate directory1 directory2 directory3

…which is incredibly useful. Wish I knew this five months ago.

Open up a shell/Terminal and type things like:

cal

cal 2007

cal 4 1988

Sweet.

A very nice addition.

Way to mess up my plan for the day; I was going to get it from the Apple Store on Regents St., but I’m not sure I’ll be in a position to do that now… Boo!