Tag archive for ‘shopping’ at bioneural.net

Tag archive for 'shopping'

The MacBeep Pause

Published by Bruce on July 15, 2009 in Rant. 10 responses

Potential buyers of Apple's new (June 2009) MacBook Pro should be cautious about specifying a configure-to-order faster and larger hard drive 'upgrade'. The drive supplied by Apple, a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 (model number ST9500420ASG) appears to be operating improperly, with some users experiencing random pauses in disk activity associated with disturbing clicks and beeps. Apple are telling some of us that their top-of-the-line laptop is supposed to lock up frequently, and that the beep is normal too (so I guess my previous Macs were all defective as they lacked such 'features').
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Tooling up to read, write and cite

Published by Bruce on October 7, 2008 in Musings. 6 responses

It's not taken me long to rediscover that a major facet of the student experience is the reading of lecture notes, journal articles, reports, book chapters, and other material. When much of this material is available in electronic form (notably Office documents and PDF) you need software that lets you work with and manage those formats effectively and efficiently. Sometimes this necessitates ditching your preferred tools in favour of de facto standards for the sake of compatibility: function must take precedence over form. And don't forget to shop around.
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New Zealand tipping over the edge?

Published by Bruce on August 19, 2008 in New Zealand. 1 response

Are New Zealanders, the People on the Edge of the World, about to tip off the edge and into cultural homogeneity with the United States? I was surprised to read in The New Zealand Herald that the a new edition of the Lonely Planet travel guide is advising visitors to leave a tip of about 10% for good service. Tipping was not part of the culture when I was growing up, and nor was it an overt practice during my last stint at home during 2006–2007. It would be unfortunate if visitors to Godzone came with the expectation that they had to pay over and above the advertized price.
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ATMs should be avoided. The Internet too.

Published by Bruce on March 13, 2008 in Rant. 9 responses

Some cretin recently cloned our debit card, in reflection of rising UK and international rates of card fraud despite technological countermeasures like "chip and pin".
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Unravelling Amazon link formats

Published by Bruce on February 25, 2007 in Internet. 9 responses

According to Mint, most of my blog visitors are American. To reflect this I decided to change my default Amazon Associates links from the UK to the US. In the process I got confused over the link syntax I should be using, but now have this sorted. For managing links to specific items on my site (automatically tagged with my Associates ID) I use Amazon Media Manager. AMM is a WordPress plugin that will randomly show a specified number of product links, categories of which can be matched to categories on your blog. AMM development is not active, however, it is easy to hack the plugin to use the more recent link syntax.
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Hold off on that upgrade to Vista

Published by Bruce on February 13, 2007 in Quicklinks. 1 response

PCWorld says Windows Vista is incomplete; expensive; wants a new PC; is time-consuming; doesn't obsolete Windows XP; and may be the best reason to buy a Mac.