Posts by Ralph

GPS, swipe cards to monitor Welsh school kids

Re: Not far enough

Good idea there, Mr. A. Coward. Perhaps it would lead to an improvement in attendance, and hence an improvement in literacy standards?

Sony PRS-505 Reader e-book

Light / Cost of books

To respons to a couple of comments above - it doesn't have a backlight as eInk displays cannot have such a thing - the whole display is opaque. If the light is good enough to read a normal book, you can read this. What is less commonly noted in reviews is that it works the other way too - in really bright light, an LCD would wash out, but this is perfectly readable, just like a sheet of paper.

There is a "lighted cover" available for it for about £40. This is a replacement cover for the book and has a lucite square designed to fit perfectly over the screen and illuminate it. I don't have one yet, but apparently it does the job well.

As for book cost, rule number one is not to buy from Waterstones. Check out Fictionwise.com - they supply a lot of books in LRF (Sony reader) format and they are much cheaper, being of course a supplier to the USA. A bit of net trawling and you'll work out how to convert just about any other book format readily available for sale (apart from Kindle) into LRF.

PC World pips Asus to UK Atom sub-laptop premier

Mad idea

Here's a mad idea. Those who want a small laptop with XP can buy this. Those who want a small laptop which has Linux can buy the EEE PC.

If you want a Linux Advent/Wind, then buy the XP one, format it, and install Linux. The saving the Advent offers over the Wind RRP is more than the XP license anyway. Write it off. Or dual boot.

Because there are now quite a few options here in this market, there should be something to suit everyone.

Firefox 3 makes up world record to set world record

Youtube missed a trick

By making the Wii Fit Girl video a download only, they would have held the record first.

Amazon buys into Lovefilm

Oh ****

Well, there goes the last decent DVD rental service in the UK, assimilated into the general poo that is Lovefilm.

Google turns Irish town 3D

Finish what you've started first!

Here is a section of Google Maps satellite pictures (at maximum available zoom) near where I live:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=52.985185,-3.367567&spn=0.03431,0.06815&t=h&z=14&om=1

Marvel in the 5-10 metre per pixel resolution. Gasp in awe as you can just about make out the River Dee. And is that brownish smudge a town? Gosh!

Rather than render a town in ~centimetre accurate 3D, can we get some of the poorly covered regions filled in with higher resolution images first?