Just a quick note to wish everyone that visits here, whether you are a good friend, or just stopping by for a tutorial or some software, a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

I hope 2010 will be prosperous and productive.

If you don’t like Marker Felt, the default font used when writing notes in the Notes application in iPhone OS, you can actually write in a different font. It’s not a feature that is exposed via the user interface — in fact it seems to be something that is an unintended side effect rather than a feature.

First, you need to enable the Japanese QWERTY keyboard. From the home screen, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboards. Now scroll to Japanese, tap it and switch on the QWERTY keyboard.

Now fire up Notes and make a new note, or edit an existing one. Press the globe button at the bottom left of the keyboard to switch over to the Japanese keyboard.

Then type a character — doesn’t really matter which one — and immediately press the globe again to switch back to your default keyboard. The rest of this note will be beautifully typeset in Helvetica.

I love tiny little details, even if they’re not ever intended to be seen by the public.

The screenshot above is one I took in Need for Speed: Most Wanted (while looking backwards). What I find interesting in this is the detail written on the cardboard box texture on the left.

» Read the rest of this post…

A dual keyboard setup! Unnecessary? Perhaps. But it does prevent you from straining if you are typing ‘at’ something on the second monitor, which you want to look at whilst typing.

It’s also useful if you want to have something open for reference and glancing at up on the white MacBook screen (*cough* Twitter *cough*). Just don’t need to type anything on that machine. And if you do, you hook up the wired Apple keyboard to that machine instead.

Happy epoch to all fellow Unix geeks.

UPDATE: I’ve given them all out now – no more left. Sorry!

Thanks to Agile Web Solutions‘ American Thanksgiving giveaway, I have two one free licences for 1Password to give away.

If you want one, comment here, leaving the email address you want on the licence as the email field (not in the comment body) and the name you want on the licence. First come, first served, and this ends on the 30th November.

So yesterday and the evening before that we had a little bit of snow here in Reading. It’s very unusual to get snow here in October, so quite a novelty.

This is a photo I took with my phone from outside the window of my room here in Bridges Hall, on the university’s Whiteknights campus.

wwwFAIL.

Enter a URL, and it will be displayed, with FAIL written on top. Simple, and, may I say, quite brilliant. It made me laugh anyway.

I got an opportunity recently to play around with some old iMac DVs (late 1999 or early 2000 by the looks of things) that had been lying around unused for a while at college.

So now, instead of lying around with no system software loaded on them, they are being put to use. Two are running OS X 10.1 and the other one that is up and running is running OS 8.6.

It’s always good to play with older stuff, and it’s nice now that they can be put to use (which I imagine will involve reinstalling Mac OS lots of times as part of the Operating Systems unit).

I was pleasantly surprised to read that The Times Magazine for the 9th February includes a section on the latest internet meme of FAIL (page 12, left hand box if you’re interested).

I was not so pleasantly surprised to notice that half way down, you are invited to “Visit timesonline.co.uk/microtrends for an epic shipment of fail”.

Why? Well, in my opinion, FAIL is subject to special grammar requirements. It should have been “a shipment of epic fail”, not “an epic shipment of fail”.

The lack of capitalisation also concerns me, but it might be a little harsh to be critical on that point as well – and the capitalisation of the word isn’t necessarily a set-in-stone rule, either.

You can read the article that appears in print over on their site.