Book Reviews


[Day Permalink] Friday, May 28, 2004

[Item Permalink] Some personally astonishing things: Minolta XG-1, Macintosh, Nokia 8110i -- Comment()
I thought a bit more on the first astonishing, now commonplace things. What were things that personally affected me a lot?
Minolta XG-1, a SLR camera
This was my first camera, which I bought when I was about 15. I used the camera a lot, and the aperture-based auto-exposure taught me a lot about photograpy. (Update: info about XG-1.)
Macintosh
I started to use a Mac at Helsinki University of Technology in 1986. Later, in 1987, I bought a Mac Plus. The first software which I bought was Turbo Pascal. The Mac and Turbo Pascal taught me much about using computers.
Nokia 8110i mobile phone
This was my first mobile phone. The banana-shape model is familiar from the first Matrix movie. I like this phone a lot, although the battery was problematic, especially the standard one which you had to charge rather often. But I still fondly remember this phone.


[Item Permalink] The Hen (An Appreciation) -- Comment()
I tracked down the story on raising chicken which a K5 story reminded me of. The text was indeed written by E.B. White, my favorite essayist (and also writer of children's books such as Stuart Little). Here is an extract from The Hen (An Appreciation), which appeared in 1944:
Chickens do not always enjoy an honorable position among city-bred people, although the egg, I notice, goes on and on. Right now the hen is in favor. The war has deified her and she is the darling of the home front, feted at conference tables, praised in every smoking car, her girlish ways and curious habits the topic of many an excited husbandryman to whom yesterday she was a stranger without honor or allure.
Perhaps the conflict in Iraq has once again raised the hen into favor at the home front?


[Item Permalink] More on testing Office 2004 for Mac -- Comment()
I have continued testing Office 2004 for Mac. Yesterday evening I managed to get Entourage to crash when I tried to print a message. Perhaps this was an isolated case, but it was not too encouraging.

Entourage lacks badly in the spam filtering department compared to Mac OS X Mail for example. It classified at first some of the messages I sent to myself as spam. But I have to test this a bit more, because the spam filtering on Mail has been learning my preferences for a long time, and thus functions well.


[Item Permalink] Wireless printing at home -- Comment()
I have been happy user of WLAN and a bubble jet printer at home. My setup is as follows: an iBook with an AirPort card, an AirPort Extreme Base Station, and a Canon i455 printer connected to the AEBS. Thus I can print wirelessly from the iBook. Also, when I got a new battery for the aging (over 2.5 years old) iBook, the battery life increased dramatically from 1.5 hours to between 3 and 4 hours.