LaTeX3.1415926 on Win7x64 = pain, on Ubuntu 10.10 = pleasure

I can’t be bothered ranting…title said it all. I wasted a good 2-3 hours setting stuff up on Windows (and didn’t get there), it was like 2 commands on Ubuntu Linux Maverick Meerkat (10.10). Those two commands were discovered by typing the commands found at:http://www.ringlord.com/publications/latex-pdf-howto/ Basically typing latex and thumbpdf, and following the Ubuntu command prompt …

Google and social, go together?

So here’s one experience I’ve just had – and an insight into why it’s sometimes said Google doesn’t get social. Social is about conversation and interaction – here’s something I can do for you, would you mind doing this for me? So here’s why – the first comment on this blog, 3 months ago. Discovered by …

First house move, memories and moving on to future opportunities

Moving house for the first time in 22 years takes a phenomenal amount of time. Time to clean, to prepare, to pack, to decide what to take, to decide what to box and put in storage, to decide what is important and what is junk. Sorting, sharing, helping the rest of the family, cleaning, washing, …

Water prices should be trending downwards, not upwards

http://twit.tv/gtt18 – Green Tech Today 18: Oasys Water.Aaron Mandell, CEO’s aim is to get the price down to as low as $0.25 per cubic meter. He says current processes (where energy costs are often subsidised) range from $0.65-$1 per cubic meter for current desalination. How? Using some clever thermodynamics and chemistry at scale.Why? The Oasys process in practice …

Carbonite – Workarounds to back up executables, videos and other files

Carbonite is the online backup service I’ve ultimately decided to use to protect my data off-site against those proverbial theft/fire/flood events. Unfortunately a Windows Home Server box, as awesome as it is, just isn’t off-site (so it gets destroyed or stolen with everything else). For me, Carbonite does a great job out of the box …

Electronic Voting’s Issues

Just another part of my extended memory, someone said we should be going to all electronic voting machines in Australia. For one very good reason, I believe the majority of electronic voting machines are fundamentally flawed – it is hard to give a reasonable guarantee that: electronic records are written once and from that point …

Google Wave killed to focus on the Aussie NBN?

Opinion It is well known that Google recently killed their implementation of Wave. It is also well known that Australia’s current Labor government has currently promised to build a $43 billion Fibre-To-The-Home National Broadband Network (NBN). The first nodes are now operational in Tasmania, with (hopefully) much more to come. It has recently been announced …

Why the Coalition’s $6.3bn broadband plan is a waste of money

According to The Australian, under a Coalition broadband policy, we’ll be getting: “$6.31 billion over seven years” “$2.75bn to the construction of an optic fibre backhaul network but also relies on at least another $750 million from the private sector” “$1bn in grant funding for a rural and regional wireless network” “$1bn to build a …