Post consumer waste

This is what I found on the bottom of a Subway "Kids' Pak" bag.


'This Bag May Contain On Average 30% Post Consumer Material'

Note they're not saying its made out of recycled material.
They're saying that the bag contains recycled material.

So what exactly did I just feed to my kid?

the Wii browser meets Microcontent

I recently visited Simon's house for a poker night — tournament-style Texas Hold'em. Losers had to go downstairs to play Wii.

After I got bored coming last in Wii tennis, we fired up the Wii's web browser to see how it handled the much-loved microcontent wiki, TiddlyWiki. It's Opera, apparently, so we were cautiously optimistic.

Here's the results. Sorry about the terrible photography; I had to chose a slow shutter setting to get a good picture of the TV screen.

tiddlywiki.com:

Nice, huh.

The Wii browser has a zoom mode to actually read text:


Dropdowns etc worked fine:


To enter text on the Wii, you fiddle your pointer at a full screen keyboard:


MonkeyGTD alpha works nicely too:


A new project in MonkeyGTD. Here you can see the keyboard fading into view:


typing gets boring quickly..


Proof that the project's notes "tttt" went in. I wish I had've taken a zoomed in photo of this.


In summary:

• viewing worked perfectly
• didn't try to download (or save locally)
• couldn't upload to tiddlyspot (seemed like the password field wasn't being stored, or something)

Overall, I give the Wii browser a C+ for TiddlyWiki support. Saving to tiddlyspot would have pushed it up to a B at least..

Why indeed?

I saw this truck today:

"Why pay more for a truly quality service?"

I can't tell if these guys are claiming to be the ones doing the "truly quality" job, or if they are saying their competitors do that, and these guys do a cheaper, less good job.

But I am pretty sure they're saying I probably shouldn't pay the extra that a quality job would cost me.

Either way, they probably shouldn't have written it on their truck.

Wet school

My daughter started school last week. It also rained a lot.

This is the path in to the school:


There are covered pathways, mostly, so we didn't actually get rained on. That's not always enough, though:



Not much chance of playing outside:


She was a little nervous but once she found a desk with her name written on it, she felt much better.


On the way home, I had to drive through this:

Did anyone ever want tile-able windows?

Today I realised that having overlapping windows in an operating system is stupid.

I was looking at this Firefox extension that lets you split your browser window into separate panes. That lets you see multiple windows onscreen at once. Firefox has tabbed windows out of the box, which lets you have multiple full-screen pages that you can easily swap between. I suddenly realised that I want to organise all the windows on my computer into panes and tabs. I've never in my life wanted to "cascade" windows.

If my operating system let me nest tabs within panes, and panes within tabs, in any reasonable way, that would be great. Here's my list of pros and cons:

Pros:

• windows that should be as big as possible, would be
• windows that don't need to be big, would be exactly the size I needed them
• no pixel on my expensive screen would be wasted

Cons:

• with no desktop, where would you put the photo of your ugly basset hound?
  

Come to think of it, maybe that last thing is a pro, not a con.

In any case the conclusion is clear - the overlapping window GUI revolution that started at PARC in the 70s and spread through Macs then PCs in the 80s, got the whole thing wrong.

You can all start rewriting your OSs now. By the end of the year I want tabs and split panes on my desktop. Go!