Ian Robinson’s Soapbox

I tried out the Nike+ iPod Sports Kit on a timed exercise session yesterday. I set it for 45 minutes. Worked perfectly. Every 5 minutes the music fades out and the voiceover tells you how many minutes are gone, or if after the halfway point, how many minutes are left. At the halfway point it [...]

I couldn’t resist. I had to put Oxygen aside and get into The Day of the Triffids. Like my post about The Kraken Wakes I found this book to be different from what I expected it to be. The Triffids are largely incidental to most of he book. The main theme is the collapse of [...]

I’ve always known that Prince of Wales Avenue from the gates of Stormont to the Parliament Building was a mile long. The reason I’ve known it is because it was perceived wisdom. Everyone said the road was a mile long. But is it? When testing my Nike+ iPod Sports Kit I walked the full length [...]

I got the Nike+ iPod Sport kit today and tried it out tonight. I don’t have a pair of the proper Nike shoes yet so I just stuck it under the insole of a pair of Caterpillar trainers I have. They have a thick insole so I was just aware of the sensor under my [...]

I noticed today that the play count for the Kate Bush song Sunset has hit 100 in iTunes on my Macintosh! I said I was listening to it a lot. This includes iPod and desktop plays but not the plays via CD in the car. Here’s a picture of my top 10 in iTunes by [...]

Did another 3 miles around Stormont this afternoon. Roger Taylor on iPod again. Also spent about 40 minutes watching the cricket and chatting to some of my ex-colleagues from the cricket club. Hopefully I’ll make it to the net practice tomorrow night.

Heard a piece on the Today program on Radio 4 last week about a new book on a sportsman called Max Woosnam. Apparently he was brilliant at everything he did. Here is the introduction from the entry on him at Wikipedia – Maxwell “Max” Woosnam (September 6, 1892 – July 14, 1965) was a British [...]

There is a new build of the Cocoa version of YAPT available. It now uses Objective-C rather than AppleScript internally (actually I’m still setting First Responder via AppleScript on application launch). See the YAPT page for more info and download. Here is a screen shot of the latest build with some data for Francium displayed. [...]

I need to get fit. Been a real sluggard recently. Not good. I’ve always been tall, slim and naturally fit without having to work at it. Funny how this changes as you get older! Well, I’m still tall! It’s time to put in some work and get rid of the “beer” belly. It’s more like [...]

I’ve created a sub-page of the soapbox for YAPT. There will always be a link to this sub-page in the side bar on the right. This sub page will have a link to the latest version of YAPT. It will say when the latest build was posted and the archive will contain the latest post [...]

So who’s won my podcast war. Or, to put it another way, which podcasts do I look forward to? There are five that I listen too. Here they are in order of preference, but I do like them all. 1) The Nature Podcast 2) Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American 3) In Our Time [...]

Watched the 1984 version of Dune on DVD today (it’s a holiday in Northern Ireland). If ever a film needed an extra hour added its this one. It’s not often you hear people asking for scenes to be added to a film. I don’t think it would be possible to understand the film if you [...]

As I said in a previous post I was switching the development of YAPT from REALbasic to Xcode. This was due to an overall slowness in the GUI in the REALbasic version. There was an irritating delay in activation and deactivating the buttons for each element when switching the application to and from the front [...]

I’ve been on a bit of a John Wyndham binge lately. Sparked off by rereading The Chrysalids. Fuelled by The Midwich Cuckoos. Just finished The Kraken Wakes. It was really good. If anything it was too short as the end seemed a bit rushed and maybe has a bit of a deus ex machina quality [...]

This is good. There are videos of the lectures given earlier this year, by Professor Richard A. Muller of UC Berkeley, for the course Physics for Future Presidents. Basically physics overviews of the important stuff you should know if you are not going to be a physicist but are going to be a CEO, Judge, [...]