Author archives: Moses Hoyt

Musical Recommendations!

Though I am presently unable to update the small album of the week selection at the top right of the page (my Wordpress plug-in writing knowledge does not extend to such heights as writing user interfaces, or at least text boxes where one can insert the name of the album and a link to the picture. So I have to wait till I go home and am able to edit the actual plug-in file. Oh well…), I really do have a few ideas as what the next album of the week may be.

Driving tests…

Quite a while back on this site I happened to post a picture of me and the car that I had at the time – a Peugeot 106. One that I was hopefully going to learn to drive on and pass my test in. Unfortunately this didn’t turn out to be the case due to a few small reasons… a) I’m not particularly lucky or skilled at driving tests (yeah, some of it is due to luck), and b) The bodywork didn’t reallyl last too long…

Logic and dialog boxes…

Though the title of this post may seem fairly complex and all confusing, I assure you it will not be so. It’s merely a collection of thoughts that I decided not to name ‘More thoughts’ or something along those lines…

As for the logic part, while looking around Waterstones (that would be a bookstore) in Edinburgh early last week, I found a very interesting book among the ‘… for Dummies’ and computing books – ‘The Fundamentals of Logic Design’ by Charles H Roth Jr. When leafing through it then, I realised that though a lot of the information contained in it may be really quite obsolete, and not necessarily relevant in these days of computers and so on, it is very fundamental to the understanding to all of the current technologies. To be honest, ever since reading iWoz (Steve Wozniak’s autobiography) and reading about how he managed to redesign computers with fewer (and a more optimal number of) chips, I’ve wanted to be able to learn how this was done, and essentially work out how to do this myself – as it would undoubtedly lead to better understanding of logic systems (which are just slightly fundamental to lots and lots of things!).

Interesting things noted over the past wee while

This will comprise pretty much of a list. They’re essentially things that would be silly if they had their own post. Something like Twitter would probably be better for this… Oops! Enjoy.

-The Eels are pretty awesome music to listen to. Mildly depressing at times, but I’ll get over it. I currently have Beautiful Freak (a steal at £4 no?), Shootenanny and Electro-Shock Blues! All pretty awesome to be honest.

-The VOIP app for iPhone/iPod Touch is awesome – if only the mic worked with the iPhone! Not entirely sure that I understand the whole SIP thing… isn’t Skype good enough for everyone? Somehow though I managed to make calls through this SIP service (OMG, it works!) but all the other person gets is some silence, a nasty shock. I’ll just have to wait and see how it goes!

MacBook Thoughts

Once upon a time I used to go ecstatically crazy over a Macworld launch and write all sorts of stuff about it and so on and so forth. These days I find it easier just to sit back and look at all of the cool things unfurl.

If you’re very new to the internet, or never really look at newspapers or take part in any other forms of communication between people, then you might not be aware that firstly, Apple has launched a new laptop (or notebook (which I believe is the more generally accepted term (at least in the US) these days)) and secondly, it has received lots of criticism.

OLPC, it should really be OCPF – One car per family!

There was recently a big deal made of the whole OLPC program, which produced a sub $100 laptop to help children (aswell as adults actually, should have thought about that Negroponte! Oh wait, the keyboard is too small and rubbery for adults to use…) learn and play and so on and so forth and do what ever they want to do with computers. Yes, this is probably a good idea, I’m not going into the ethics at all behind it, but in general, education (if these laptops help promote such a thing) is good. As Sir Francis Bacon once said, ‘Knowledge is power.’