I posted these last week on facebook/twitter, but neglected my home page. So, a couple of videos from British Pathé that highlight moments from my family history:

• Snail Eating - An excerpt from a 1965 report about my Grandfather's restaurant in my home village of Priddy. My father's the chef in the background, and my mother is at the table wearing the awesome glasses. Watch out for the great expressions and listen out for the great music and utterly bizarre sound effects when the snails are put in to salt. Oh, and the receipe didn't feature garlic, but butter and herbs (my grandparents rather famously hated garlic) 
• Bus House - If you ignore the misspelling of my family name, I loved this 1949 report on my grandfather's solution to how to move about with the work he was doing at the time (this was before he built rockets or ran the restaurant). Love the expressions again (particularly on my Uncle Jeremy's face) and the scope of my grandfather's ambition, for what he squeezed in to the bus.

Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

I've been using Evernote for some time now, but was suffering from an occasional crash when working with attachments. Sometimes double clicking, other times just right clicking, would cause Evernote to keel over horribly.

The latest upgrade (3.0.6), released yesterday, sadly appeared to make my problem worse, so much so that I opened a ticket with Evernote support and hoped for some guidance on some easy resolution.

A prompt response brought with it access to a pre-release version, but alas that didn't seem to resolve the problem.

So I applied some thought, and a bit of judicious googling, on the stack trace. A few references to functions like "CFURLCopyResourcePropertyForKey" and I stumbled on a mention of contextual menus in Finder, and old plugins perhaps being to blame, with similar sounding problems in various applications or users.

Poked about about and found I had an old SCFinderPlugin.plugin buried away in /Library/Contextual Menu Items - I removed that, rebooted, and as if by magic, the crashing problem went away.

So, Evernote users, if you're suffering from attachment crash related problems, have a look at your Contextual Menu Items. Note you may need to look in both /Library/Contextual Menu Items (system installation) and the one in your home directory (/Users/you/Library/Contextual Menu Items).

In my case it was the Subversion Finder client, but could be another perhaps pre-Lion, or just plain old, plugin you've long since forgotten about. 

We're currently having our old windows replaced with nice new double glazing. Many of our windows are old wooden sash windows. Out of the blue, I got called down by the fitters to say they'd pulled a newspaper from the wall cavity. It's dated Monday 28th August 1944, right at the end of the Liberation of Paris.

Attached a couple of snaps. I hope to get the paper pressed and tidied up to allow me to do a proper scan, but it's fascinating to think back to (presumably) a comparable moment just over 67 years ago, and how hugely different the world is now, to then.

Fitters have replaced the paper with a copy of yesterday's newspaper (Scottish Sun). Seemed only apt, and I've still got a few more articles to read on my copy of the Guardian iPad edition... ;-) We've replaced it with a printout of this page, the BBC news page, and a note with everybody's name on.

(download)

Click here to download:

surprise-time-capsule-HesyjCzfIlyfrDdGbAsy.zip (409 KB)

So much has been, and is being written, about Steve Job's death, and I know I'm not enough of a writer to add anything substantially new or different to add to what's been written, other than a few asides. Naturally my sympathies go to his family, friends, and colleagues.

I've spent my working life so far with technology, and much of it over the last 10 years or so has had the Apple logo on it. I use their products because they work (for me) exceptionally well, and let me focus on what's important.

I look at the people behind the technology I encounter on a daily basis, and it's fair to say he's head and shoulders above the great many other innovators and technologists in our industry, whether that's household names like Bill Gates, or technology pioneers like Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google's founders), Linus Torvalds (Linux), and Tim Berners-Lee (the 'web').

It wasn't so much that he helped lead a company to create a great product, but that he did it again and again and again. Both Apple and Pixar are household names. The Mac, the iPod, iPhone. Toy Story. Monsters inc. Somehow he drove the people he worked with to create great things.

The great things he helped create were powerful because of their elegance, their simplicity, their coherence. It's almost a shame that seems so unique, and not standard, in technology circles. But that's because elegance and simplicity is hard, and so it's a real mark of his personal determination that it's now such a hallmark of Apple's products.

One video captures so much of Steve Jobs' character, and I tweeted earlier that if you're going to watch one video about him today, make it this. It's inspiring to the future, and shows Steve Job's legacy is far more than a well known logo and well-engineered products.

*nom*

I'm off on holiday later this month, and one of the primary goals for me will be to go entirely offline. That means handing over the iPhone to F (I'm actually minded to leave it behind, but have a few useful navigation apps on it that might prove useful), and chilling with books, walks, and restful easy runs. I picked up a few books the other day: the 3 for the price of 2 offers are... tempting. Went in for 3, came out with 6. Turns out I'm already 1/3rd of the way through them too, way before going away. 

Anyway, I digress. Slightly. Leaving the phone behind, I'm hoping to find some time to work through a few things, and that process means I need to spend some time writing. I adore the simple delight of a high quality notebook, and a nice ink fountain pen with good ink flow. I love the feel of it all, and the process of manually scratching out lines of ink, and the way it forms the letters, then words, and so with it my thoughts, and the care it requires, particularly compared to anything computer based.

With a fountain pen my handwriting is usually far neater than my biro based note taking scrawl. I do find though the actual process of writing what I want to say quite hard. But then, even if it's not exactly booker prize stuff, and is entirely for my own pleasure, that's what that matters: it's the process of 'serialising' (to borrow a techie phrase) things out that proves so therapeutic, whether or not it makes sense, or even looks nice.

So I've just ordered a few notebooks (moleskin ruled, my preference), and I'm going to go treat myself to a new ink fountain pen this weekend, spending just enough money on it to garner the disapproval of F when she asks :-)