Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

But it is not being produced by RTD or even the BBC. I’m not even sure how to receive Jetix (Fox Kids?) or whether I will want to…

This may be a bit far out - a suggestion that Apple will be able to let users run Windows XP apps under OS X without Windows and with, unlike Wine, 100% compatibility.

It’s an interesting idea. It would certainly piss a lot of people off (not least Microsoft, but probably many OS X developers as well) but the only major drawback is there is no way to take it forward - to bring Vista compatible apps over. But if Vista doesn’t take off (and there’s every chance an overdue resource hungry reheat of Tiger won’t be everyone’s cup of tea) it might make OS X Leopard look a very attractive upgrade route even to Windows only users… A faster machine capable of running five years worth of XP apps plus the latest software for Mac.

You can now visit the website of Torchwood House website (like the Leamington Spa Lifeboat Museum they also sell Millingdale’s Ice Cream). It’s actually considerably slicker than its real counterpart. And I’ve no idea of the password to scan for heavenly bodies in the observatory.

Oddly, the history of Torchwood House suggests Lady Isobell was 37 at the time of the story. The actress Michelle Duncan is (and appears at least) 10 year younger. I liked Lady Isobell. Show ▼

Meanwhile, doing a little housekeeping I’ve created a Doctor Who subcategory (RSS feed).

And Doctor Who has been picking up awards at the BAFTA Cymru awards.

Update: From whoisdoctorwho.co.uk I see the password for the observatory at Torchwood House is “Victoria”.

In the pond tonight a total of 9 frogs visible at once. Sadly there was also a dead fish.

I fear that there is a connection; frogs and fish do not combine well. If you have spawn/tadpoles the fish will eat them (or possibly somethimes visa versa?); if the frogs survive they will try to…er…embrace the fish when they get amourous and I fear that may have been what happened today. And with the frog:fish ratio apparently over 2:1 this may well happen again.

It looks as if I may actually be faced with the hypothetical choice investigated on annA rydeR’s website for real.

Several times recently I have sensed a presence in the pond, a movement in the corner of my eye that left only a few bubbles when my gaze was turned upon it. But tonight, following an audible splosh, I fetched the torch and found:

There may not be spawn, but they haven’t deserted me!

New New York turns out to be the Gower Peninsula. It may have been the Galaxy M87 but I thought it looked familiar…

The name New New York is familiar too, since of course RTD nicked it from Futurama.

I think New Earth was the first episode of Doctor Who since the ’80s not to have been filmed on, or in the orbit of, Earth (that’s “old” Earth of course).

It turns out, after much trialing and errors, that the buzzing my interlocutors can hear whilst I’m iChatting with them from my G3 iBook is caused by the Airport card in my G3 iBook interfering with the microphone in my G3 iBook (goddam G3 iBook!). So this also affects Skype, X-Lite or anything that uses microphone and the network at the same time (unless I use the ethernet to connect).

The solution seemed to be to get a bluetooth headset. But the OS X bluetooth stack turns out only to support headsets if you get the D-link DBT-120 (not the DBT-122 as I found to my cost).

When I finally got a DBT-120 I dutifully tried to update the firmware using Apple’s Firmware Updater which kind of appeared to be doing something for a bit and then said idle. And when I tried to quit it said “firmware not updated”.

Well, it seems the trick is to zap the PRAM, folks. Then the firmware update will work and you can happily iChat away secure in the knowledge you’re not inflicting buzz on your buddies.

So I’m happy wandering round like a nerd with a dongle-thing (HBH-600) in my ear (the range is abysmal though, so I don’t wander far), but what a lot of hurdles I had to jump through!

Charlie Brooker was unduly harsh. It wasn’t quite up the standards of The Christmas Invasion (few things are) but it was great, and the 10th Doctor is still my favourite. Looking forward to Tooth and Claw…

25 minutes to New Earth, but the time will quickly pass thanks to the news (from my sister’s boyfriend) that Tom Baker will speak any text you send to a BT landline. This is going to keep me entertained for weeks…

Another day, another way to run Windows on your Mac. Parallels Workstation 2.1 (free) beta for OS X will let you run any OS “virtualised” so you can run it in a sandbox along side your other OS X apps. But because the Mac uses an Intel processor it’s nearly as fast as running natively (ie with Boot Camp), especially on the iMac and MacBook Pro which have Intel’s VT support enabled (on the Mac Mini it’s all done in software - but it’s still no slouch).

As I’ve said before this is my preferred solution (although Apple say they have no plans to include this in Leopard and Microsoft aren’t committed to Virtual PC).

But I can now see the point in Boot Camp: Half Life 2 (the virtualised solution doesn’t support 3D graphics). And there is of course still a danger in virtualised Windows support in OS X: will developers bother with OS X versions of their software when the Windows versions already run in the Mac environment?