Author archives: Moses Hoyt

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.’

Any Given Thursday!

I really really didn’t know what to think about this album when I first got it. Fair enough John Mayer is a superb guitarist, but I had got into him through listening to Continuum and not his earlier more Pop orientated works. In truth, I had got round to buying Heavier Things and Room For Squares, but I got them at the same time as this album so didn’t really give just one my attention. I also find listening to a live album when you don’t really know the artist’s music not great, especially so in this case, as the amount of long intros and extended solo parts, while very good, would not be of much interest to someone just getting into the artist.