MildMannered Industries

with Clark Cox’s handy cheat sheet.

A subject dear to my own heart.

Still sticking with the 15″ MBP for now though …

I’ve been looking for a new digital camera for a while - my current camera is a venerable Canon Digital Ixus 400.

Sadly, the iPhone’s built-in camera isn’t up to much.

Nikon have just announced a new range of compact digital cameras.

My priorities are good performance in low light levels, in something that’s compact enough for me to carry it around. The Nikon CoolPix S630 looks like it might just do the trick, with a 7x optical zoom, and up to ISO 6400.

I keep on finding myself temporarily hacking NSLog(@"Font families = %@", [UIFont familyNames]) to my applicationDidFinishLaunching method, to check whether a particular font is available.

Details on the iPhone fonts can be found at Late Night Code and at Daring Fireball.

Sadly, Oliver Postgate, co-creator of charming children’s television programs such as Bagpuss, the Clangers, Noggin the Nog and Ivor the Engine, passed away on Monday.

As a long-time Bagpuss fan, I’ve named my machines after Bagpuss characters for nearly eight years now. So far I’ve been through yaffle (an original TiBook), gabriel (a Bondi Blue iMac), bagpuss (a 12″ Powerbook), small wee hamish (a SunFlower iMac, although I guess it should have been the 12″ PB), emily (a PowerMac G4 or G5), and madeleine (a 15″ MBP).

iPods and iphones tend to get named after the mice: williemouse, charliemouse and eddiemouse (all boy mice so far, for some reason).

There are five more mousenames for future iPhones and iPods (or netbooks, hint, hint): Janiemouse, Jenniemouse, Lizziemouse, and Millymouse and Tillymouse (the last two were only in the books, apparently), but I’m pretty much out of Bagpuss character names (although I’ve killed lots of those machines by now, so some are available for recycling).

My current main machine, another 15″ MBP, is named noggin.