neuro.me.uk

For the last couple of years, I’ve fallen more and more back in love with Macs. One of their foibles is that Apple have decided the standard British English, or UK, keyboard layout should not match that of every other computer manufacturer on the planet. Various characters are just in the wrong place, such as quotation marks, backslash, hash mark (or pound, for my American friends), tilde, and so on. In Tiger and Leopard, I used Phil Gyford’s awesome instructions and the associated .rsrc file as to how to sort this defect out, at least in software.

So now Snow Leopard is out, and it’s fab and lovely and nippy and dices and slices and so on. An immediate downside (apart from having to manually upgrade Xcode to 3.2, and reinstall MacPorts from .dmg to make that bit work again) is that the trusty icle .rsrc doesn’t work any more. Well, it works, but it doesn’t stick; OS X keeps switching back to standard British English, which means when I try to type out quotes, it comes out with at signs. This is ungood.

However, the Internet to the rescue! Some kind soul has posted new keyboard layouts for OS X to correctly map the British English key layout. Just download and extract the zip file linked to from that page, copy the files from inside the zip to either /Library/Keyboard Layouts off the root of your hard disk, or ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts in your home directory, then log out and log back in again. Go to System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources, then tick British (PC105). If things don’t seem consistently correct, try British (PC105 alt).

Bosh, sorted, and I can touch type again!

Update 2010-02-13: apparently this works on Dell Mini netbooks too, so Hackintosh people can get the benefit as well. Bonus!

Dear oh dear. The well-loved and well-respected actress Mollie Sugden has died, aged 86. In tribute to Ms. Sugden’s most famous character, Mrs. Slocombe, and to the constant running jokes about her pet pussy cat Tiddles, Jonathan Ross sent out a tweet encouraging one and all to use the Twitter hashtag #MrsSlocombesPussy in their tweets. Unbelievably rude, but also staggeringly apt! However, Twitter has decided (perhaps algorithimically) not to display search results for that hashtag: that, in and of itself, is somewhat disappointing. The hashtag became so immediately popular it appeared in Twitter’s list of trending topics, dominated in recent days by topics like Michael Jackson, and Glastonbury.

What’s more disappointing, however, is how US technology gossip blogs TechCrunch and Mashable dealt with this information. They considered it an attempt to poison the trending topics list with spam, neither bothering for an instant before publication to check and see if perhaps it was legitimate in some way.

Both sites have since been put right by blog commenters, and they’ve updated their posts to reflect that, but their knee jerk reaction was to condemn the tag as spam. $deity forbid that a territory outwith the US with a better sense of humour, and with less instinct to consider mild double entendres as nasty in some way, would gather up the power to invade the hallowed Temple of Twitter’s Trending Topics.

The blogs’ concerns were that the system could be gamed, but are we saying that those clicking through the trending topics list are stupid, and can’t tell the difference between targeted spam, and legitimate trends?

The BBC, along with BSkyB, have decided not to air an advertisement for DEC’s Gaza appeal, asking for donations to go towards essential aid from thirteen charities for those affected by the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

Not only have they linked to the bloody DEC website in a news story about how they won’t promote DEC’s appeal — and thus are promoting DEC’s appeal — they’ve now been schooled by Tony Benn, whose cachet has risen even further since yesterday. Spare three minutes and watch Tony absolutely stomp all over Maxine Mawhinney on BBC News.

[via Graham Linehan]

Is it just me, or has this furore over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross prank calling Andrew Sachs’ answerphone on a radio show been blown out of all proportion? Both men involved have apologised to Sachs, and that should be the end of it. Instead, they are now suspended from their BBC broadcasts, and Sachs’ granddaughter wants them fired (yet she waited until today to express that to The Sun, after all this publicity has kicked off).

However, this situation is entirely the making of the press — most notably the Daily Mail. Look at the figures. The original broadcast was on Russell Brand’s late night Saturday show on BBC Radio 2, on the 18th of October. Brand apologised on his show the following Saturday, the 25th. On Sunday the 26th, the BBC said it had received 67 complaints. After the press coverage on Monday morning, that number reached 1,500. By Tuesday, it was 18,000.

How many of these 18,000 people heard the original broadcast in its original context, over a week ago? How many heard it first on YouTube (in two parts)? How many didn’t actually hear it at all, but consider Brand and Ross to be the worst of the ‘elite’ and ‘overpaid’ celebs at the BBC? Only 67 actually considered it worthy of complaint at the time, and I’m not the only one to have noticed this.

And what of the granddaughter, Georgina Baillie? The Daily Mail has been horrified by all this, horrified enough to publish large photos of Baillie in burlesque outfits (plus a photo of her at 10 months old, to redress the balance, or something) which can’t be doing her career as a self-labelled “satanic slut” any harm. And just a click away, Piers Morgan calls Brand “sex-obsessed”. In the Daily Mail. Take a look their website’s front page. Look at the right-hand column, and scroll down. It reads like a cross between Heat and tmz.com, it’s the worst kind of paparazzi-driven celeb trash.

Still, I guess with the US presidential election looming, and a massive global financial crisis still ongoing, we need something else to fill our headlines. How stupid, as a society, do we have to get before we unnaturally evolve into idiocracy?

UPDATE 2008-10-29 18:25 UTC: Brand has resigned from his BBC show, Gia Milinovich is asking for your comments of support to pass back to Jonathan Ross. Hello, CNN.com readers.

UPDATE 2008-10-30 09:19 UTC: BBC now reporting 27,000 complaints. How is it possible to accept complaints about something that has (a) received such a high level of media attention, thus skewing public opinion, and (b) happened nearly two weeks ago?

I was flicking through the iTunes Store this morning and noticed something odd … some words in reviews and track titles had asterisks in them as though they were swear words (e.g. ‘b*ll*cks’). But they didn’t appear to be swear words. iTunes uses allmusic for the bulk of their album and single reviews, so luckily it’s possible to go back and ‘decode’ some of these words. They include: “porno”, “teen”, “cream”, “sexy”, “hot”. Strangely, variants like “sex”, “creamy”, “teenage” aren’t being censored. This seems to be a blanket effect on iTunes — Katy Perry’s current single “Hot ‘n’ Cold” is listed on the UK iTunes Store main page under ‘Top Songs’ as “H*t ‘n’ Cold’.

This seems to me to be really odd behaviour. They’ve done the same thing to some common swear words, but to censor “cream”? And it’s inconsistent to boot. Look at the review for Tenacious D’s eponymous album. The tracks “Fuck Her Gently” and “Cock Pushups” are censored with asterisks, but the title “Sex Supreme” in the review is not. The Roots’ track “Pussy Galore” has its title censored, but not the name of the band Pussy Galore.

And it’s not even like people at Apple don’t swear.