January 2006

Trim tracks in iTunes

Back in December I wrote a Tip about editing iTunes track information: Edit iTunes track info, Mac Tip #225/21-December-2005: I download a lot of podcasts and often want to make small changes to the name of the track or the genre or other fields. One way to do this is to select one or more [...]

Read the rest of this article ※

650 years of skulls

We’re used to reading about evolutionary changes that occur over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, but it seems that a mere 650 years has brought us modern humans differently shaped skulls. We have higher foreheads and less prominent features than our ancestors from the 1300s. Researchers have found that the shape of [...]

Read the rest of this article ※

Spots and stripes

We don’t have poisonous animals and insects in New Zealand, with the exception of the Katipo spider (I’ve never seen one) and the white-tailed spider, which I think is an Australian import, and which I’ve also never seen. There are no snakes at all, no scorpions. In fact, we can generally relax. It being summer [...]

Read the rest of this article ※

Spam problems hit home

My main email address, miraz at firstbite.co.nz is one I’ve used for years and published all over the place. It attracts a lot of spam — I clear about 250 per day from that specific address. Fortunately these are trapped by the spam filter on my server and it takes only a few moments to [...]

Read the rest of this article ※

Solid planet in our galaxy

Stuff.co.nz reports on a new planet: It is nearly 25,000 light years away, with a ground temperature of minus 220deg, but it looks more like Earth than any other planet found so far. … The planet, with the tongue-twisting name of OGLE-2005-BGL-390Lb, is outside our solar system but within our galaxy, near the centre of [...]

Read the rest of this article ※

A summer day in Wellington

By the quirks of the calendar today’s a holiday in Wellington, New Zealand: Anniversary Day. It’s such a strange little day off, coming as it does only a brief time after everyone’s started back at work from the summer holiday. Today’s a fine example though. It’s 8 am and I’m sitting on the front deck [...]

Read the rest of this article ※

← Previous Entries