Colin Manning

I thought it was a really clever idea. Many people publish content on the internet as PDFs instead of HTML pages. Thanks to schemes such as Google Ads, content publishers can make some money from ads embedded in their HTML pages. Publishers of PDF content could not do likewise until Adobe developed Ads for PDF. Imagine you download a document on how to build your own PC. When you view the document an ad in one of the panels is downloaded from Adobe and displays information about an electronics store near where you live. It's a very clever idea. But Adobe has abandoned this technology as of today. That's a pity because I think it could have worked with a bit of imagination and some elbow grease. Oh well. Not all brilliant ideas make it. Google's plan for world domination is back on schedule.

The recently bought an Elgato digtal TV decoder for my mac. I bought it bundled with a hardware accelerator for video compression. Both products worked very well but were a few things that disappointed me. The digital TV decoder does HDTV only on Intel Macs. I have a G5 with 2 PowerPC chips and buckets of RAM. I expect it would have been able to handle HDTV. But the software didn't even try. The website did say that performance would vary from machine to machine depending on spec, but if it had said flat out that it wouldn't work on my G5, I wouldn't have bought it. The box did actually say this up front. But it was in my living room at that stage. The hardware accelerator worked well but had some frustrating limits. Elgato's EyeTV software stores captured TV in an uncompressed format. The hardware accelerator did an excellent job of converting this to MPEG4. However the dimensions of the compressed video were limited. So even if I captured HDTV the accelerator woul...

Delicious Library is a really great product for Mac users. It is a library application that allows books, DVDs, CDs and the like to be cataloged using their bar code numbers. The really cool part is that if you have a webcam you can just show the application the barcode and it will do the rest. After it reads the barcode, it downloads track listings, author details, and cover art, and what not. I felt very cheated that I was expected to pay to upgrade from version 1 to Version 2. I'm sure Version 2 is great. But I don't want to pay again for something I already bought.

I finally canceled Sky today. In fairness the service is excellent and is good value. But Sky pissed me off just one time too many. I have been angry at Sky ever since the data privacy fiasco when the company wrote to all its Irish customers telling them it had changed the privacy policy and would be selling on customer details after all. This morning I got a letter saying that I was going to have to pay 75c extra per month because I was paying by credit card instead of direct debit. That kind of pettiness really annoys me. Americans have a great term for it. It's called "nickel and diming". Sky was keen to keep me. I was offered a 10% discount for the next 6 months. That more than makes up for the 75c. But I was pissed off. So now I have 31 days of Sky TV left. I wonder what programs I'll miss?

Los reyes magos left a digital TV decoder under the siñorita's Christmas tree as they did in many homes across Spain this year. It was a Philips decoder and was slightly more expensive that the others but was nice and compact. It very easy to set up. It prompted me for a country (Ireland wasn't there) and then a postcode. I hope the postcode was to make it more efficient in some way and is not part of some rights management issue that would prevent viewing of otherwise available channels. I was impressed. There were some twenty-odd channels and most of them were useful. Spanish networks are in the habit of broadcasting programmes both in Spanish and in the original version. That usually means English, although it was briefly entertaining to watch manga in 日本語. I visited my sister in France over the break. Digital TV has come to France also. There, however, the programmes seem seem to be only in English. This is a wasted opportunity. A buddy of mine called to the house today...

I was in Munich last weekend for long weekend and visited the Christmas market in the old town. It and the shops nearby were mobbed. There's no sign of an economic downturn in Munich. It is a very clean and organized city. I was struck, however, by just how many shops didn't have lifts. That's not something I would have noticed until I started going places with the buggy. Eating out was about the same or slightly less expensive than in Ireland. But I guess there are very few places left that are actually more expensive than home. There's lots of shopping to be done in Munich. But I wasn't really in the mood and so came away empty handed. But the Christmas market did fill me up with Christmas vibes.

We went to Isaac's on MacCurtain St tonight for the first time. I was surprised. I really don't know what all the fuss is about. Apart from an interesting tempura, the menu was very boring. The siñorita's tempura was fun and as far as I'm concerned wasabi is the new black. But we were hard pressed to find anything else interesting on the menu. I opted for a goat's cheese salad. The salad was boring and the goat's cheese very thin on the ground. The siñorita, for want of anything interesting, opted for lamb. It was nice, but not special. I had some stuffed chicken. Again, nothing wrong with it. But very uninteresting. The atmosphere at Isaac's is casual. Too casual. It hits that sweet spot that lies somewhere between cafeteria and bus station. Atmospheric 18th-century warehouse my arse. There's nothing screams not-atmospheric-18th-century warehouse like Formica. I thought the food was over-priced. Isaac's certainly is not special enough to warra...