Random thoughts
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Nostalgia
After several months of battery problems I finally had my Nikon D80 repaired; late autumn seemed like the perfect time, not much outdoor activity and photo shooting opportunities any more, and we had most family visits in October already and I definitely wanted the camera repaired while still covered by warranty. I recently got my camera back with the electrical system repaired, and so far it has been working nicely again.
Today I picked up some photographs which I had taken with my old Minolta Dynax 7xi SLR on November 1, and what can I say, I was very pleased with the results. Not that the D80 is a bad camera, it is an absolutely fantastic piece of technology, fast and easy to use and absolutely suitable for taking great pictures, but there is something about photography the old-fashioned way too besides the differences in resolution, dynamic range, depth of field, etc.
First, with film you don't end up with dozens of very similar pictures because you only take the one or two that look most promising. There are probably as many good pictures in the gigabytes of digital cruft accumulated on my hard drive, only they are harder to find and who really goes through and cleans out all the not-really-that-great-but-still-acceptable pictures taken digitally?
Second, there is the lack of immediate feedback which helps. Yes, that's right. Admittedly, I did miss the nice bright screen showing me what the picture looks like when I shot on film, so I had to make an effort to get everything right instead of going through several iterations, trying to judge picture quality from an LCD screen.
Third, picking up photographs at the store, flipping through prints which bring back recent memories is a ritual I have become so used to after more than two decades of doing it that I do miss it.
(If you want to know more about the technical aspects, Ken Rockwell has written a great article Film vs. Digital explaining pros and cons, with some eye-opening crops of analog and digital photos. Norman Koren has even more technical details in Digital cameras vs. film although the Website has not been updated in years.)
Back in 1998 John Patrick, then IBM's Vice President, Internet technologies, in his keynote speech at the WWW7 conference in Brisbane talked about how Internet technology impacted our lives and would change expectations. If memory serves, one of the examples he mentioned was the 1 hr photo lab and that people would not be willing to wait for a full hour to see pictures, they would want them right away (and students asking for a T1 at work, too).
Less than ten years later, broadband connectivity is widely available and is cheap, or sometimes free, photography is mostly digital and there are few labs offering decent film developing these days.
Neither would I want to go back to 56K dial-up at EUR 30 per month plus charges per minute, nor would I want to pay per picture (prints for a single roll of film cost another EUR 30), nor would I want to miss the convenience of my digital camera, despite my nostalgic, misty-eyed views.
Today I picked up some photographs which I had taken with my old Minolta Dynax 7xi SLR on November 1, and what can I say, I was very pleased with the results. Not that the D80 is a bad camera, it is an absolutely fantastic piece of technology, fast and easy to use and absolutely suitable for taking great pictures, but there is something about photography the old-fashioned way too besides the differences in resolution, dynamic range, depth of field, etc.
First, with film you don't end up with dozens of very similar pictures because you only take the one or two that look most promising. There are probably as many good pictures in the gigabytes of digital cruft accumulated on my hard drive, only they are harder to find and who really goes through and cleans out all the not-really-that-great-but-still-acceptable pictures taken digitally?
Second, there is the lack of immediate feedback which helps. Yes, that's right. Admittedly, I did miss the nice bright screen showing me what the picture looks like when I shot on film, so I had to make an effort to get everything right instead of going through several iterations, trying to judge picture quality from an LCD screen.
Third, picking up photographs at the store, flipping through prints which bring back recent memories is a ritual I have become so used to after more than two decades of doing it that I do miss it.
(If you want to know more about the technical aspects, Ken Rockwell has written a great article Film vs. Digital explaining pros and cons, with some eye-opening crops of analog and digital photos. Norman Koren has even more technical details in Digital cameras vs. film although the Website has not been updated in years.)
Back in 1998 John Patrick, then IBM's Vice President, Internet technologies, in his keynote speech at the WWW7 conference in Brisbane talked about how Internet technology impacted our lives and would change expectations. If memory serves, one of the examples he mentioned was the 1 hr photo lab and that people would not be willing to wait for a full hour to see pictures, they would want them right away (and students asking for a T1 at work, too).
Less than ten years later, broadband connectivity is widely available and is cheap, or sometimes free, photography is mostly digital and there are few labs offering decent film developing these days.
Neither would I want to go back to 56K dial-up at EUR 30 per month plus charges per minute, nor would I want to pay per picture (prints for a single roll of film cost another EUR 30), nor would I want to miss the convenience of my digital camera, despite my nostalgic, misty-eyed views.
Labels: photography, technology
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Rain, rain, rain
So we came to Vorarlberg to see my family and go for walks in the mountains, but with the exception of Monday it has been raining heavily every day. Too bad we didn't get a chance to go for walks, there are some nice and easy walking trails from Dornbirn-Bödele which I walked many times as a kid. At least we managed to spend a few hours outdoors on Monday, walking over to the Hochälpele ski lift (a drag lift so it is not in operating currently :-)) and back to the Meierei, an alpine dairy serving huge cheese boards. Elias had a good time with the cows and calves, he even offered them his bottle of apple juice, and saw (and smelled!) turkey and pigs for the first time.
We spent the rest of the week sleeping, reading, eating and meeting with family. On Tuesday afternoon we met with my mother and grandmother at a café in Dornbirn. The next day we went to see the Inatura exhibition, a kids-friendly museum of nature with stuffed animals you may actually touch, living insects, tunnels to crawl through, beautiful koi carps, and last but not least bouncy bounce. Afterwards we said hello to my other grandmother, Elias was tired from the exhibition and slept through for a while before walking around and opening all cabinet doors within reach, mumbling "no, no" all the time to remind himself that he wasn't supposed to do that.
On Thursday we had lunch with my grandmother again and enjoyed a traditional Riebel, then went for a walk in the city despite the heavy rain and finally went swimming in the Hallenbad Dornbirn, which was recently renovated and looks much nicer compared to when I was a kid. Elias was equally impressed and frightened by the fast water slide ("black hole") and the water fountains in the playground. Andrea and I were mostly impressed that a floor as slippery as this one would ever get approved for an indoor pool area, and indeed we struggled to get back to the changing room without slipping.
We had dinner at our hotel Berghof Fetz every night, and on most days Elias decided he wasn't tired enough or too hunger to go to bed, so he joined us several times, much to the amusement of the staff and other guests who smiled at the appearance of Elias in his pajamas and a sweater. And I finally managed to read Donna Leon's book about Venice and a good part of Thomas Glavinic's "Arbeit der Nacht", which is about a man living in Vienna who wakes up one day only to slowly discover that he seems to be the only living being in the world. The story is simply but quite exciting and the style is unique, fresh, simple, quick, not sure how to best describe it, but at almost four-hundred pages the book does have some lengthly parts too. Still, I am curious to find out what's behind all the occurances throughout the story and will continue reading as time permits.
Now time to pack, tomorrow we will head back to Salzburg for the christening of my niece Theresa.
We spent the rest of the week sleeping, reading, eating and meeting with family. On Tuesday afternoon we met with my mother and grandmother at a café in Dornbirn. The next day we went to see the Inatura exhibition, a kids-friendly museum of nature with stuffed animals you may actually touch, living insects, tunnels to crawl through, beautiful koi carps, and last but not least bouncy bounce. Afterwards we said hello to my other grandmother, Elias was tired from the exhibition and slept through for a while before walking around and opening all cabinet doors within reach, mumbling "no, no" all the time to remind himself that he wasn't supposed to do that.
On Thursday we had lunch with my grandmother again and enjoyed a traditional Riebel, then went for a walk in the city despite the heavy rain and finally went swimming in the Hallenbad Dornbirn, which was recently renovated and looks much nicer compared to when I was a kid. Elias was equally impressed and frightened by the fast water slide ("black hole") and the water fountains in the playground. Andrea and I were mostly impressed that a floor as slippery as this one would ever get approved for an indoor pool area, and indeed we struggled to get back to the changing room without slipping.
We had dinner at our hotel Berghof Fetz every night, and on most days Elias decided he wasn't tired enough or too hunger to go to bed, so he joined us several times, much to the amusement of the staff and other guests who smiled at the appearance of Elias in his pajamas and a sweater. And I finally managed to read Donna Leon's book about Venice and a good part of Thomas Glavinic's "Arbeit der Nacht", which is about a man living in Vienna who wakes up one day only to slowly discover that he seems to be the only living being in the world. The story is simply but quite exciting and the style is unique, fresh, simple, quick, not sure how to best describe it, but at almost four-hundred pages the book does have some lengthly parts too. Still, I am curious to find out what's behind all the occurances throughout the story and will continue reading as time permits.
Now time to pack, tomorrow we will head back to Salzburg for the christening of my niece Theresa.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
PHONETIC.FON
The amazon.de Web site has had a problem which has bothered me for some time: The search field on the homepage rendered at about half the usual height and text appeared invisible or white on white, so it was impossible to see text:
It wasn't that bad, I am a pretty solid typer and got the search terms right without seeing what I was typing, most of the time; still an inconvenience when trying to modify a search term, especially when the site starting redirecting search responses to addresses that no longer contain the search term, but not bad enough to spend time figuring out what was causing this.
Today one of my colleagues mentioned that he had found a solution to the problem: the PHONETIC.FON file seems to be the culprit, and indeed renaming that file has solved the problem nicely:
(A quick search for PHONETIC.FON sure enough turned up a page Why Do My Fonts in Netscape Navigator Look Funny? in the Netscape Unofficial FAQs.)
It wasn't that bad, I am a pretty solid typer and got the search terms right without seeing what I was typing, most of the time; still an inconvenience when trying to modify a search term, especially when the site starting redirecting search responses to addresses that no longer contain the search term, but not bad enough to spend time figuring out what was causing this.
Today one of my colleagues mentioned that he had found a solution to the problem: the PHONETIC.FON file seems to be the culprit, and indeed renaming that file has solved the problem nicely:
(A quick search for PHONETIC.FON sure enough turned up a page Why Do My Fonts in Netscape Navigator Look Funny? in the Netscape Unofficial FAQs.)
Labels: technology, webdevelopment, windows
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Smart advertising
Samsung deserves credit for smart advertising. Countless times I have spent hours at an airport, desperately crowding around the few power sockets in the wall with a bunch of other folks charging their cell phones, laptops and media players. I even got to the point of bringing warning signs to place around the cable since for some reason the chairs were never closer to the power sockets, and sitting on the floor typing for a while made my wrists hurt.
But now relief is here: I am sitting at JFK airport now, as usual traffic on the SPB was light and I am here way too early, but no more sitting on the floor, looking for power. Throughout the terminal, there are Samsung mobile recharge stations, well-designed poles with power sockets and even a small round table to put the power supplies and other equipment on. No more tripping over wires, no more fierce looks when using power for more than a few minutes ... there is plenty of power now, for everyone. The poles are effective for promoting Samsung products too: The latest Samsung mobile products are featured on the poles, at eye height, not just printed ads but real devices behind a glass cover.
When was the last time you saw advertising that was useful and looked that good?
But now relief is here: I am sitting at JFK airport now, as usual traffic on the SPB was light and I am here way too early, but no more sitting on the floor, looking for power. Throughout the terminal, there are Samsung mobile recharge stations, well-designed poles with power sockets and even a small round table to put the power supplies and other equipment on. No more tripping over wires, no more fierce looks when using power for more than a few minutes ... there is plenty of power now, for everyone. The poles are effective for promoting Samsung products too: The latest Samsung mobile products are featured on the poles, at eye height, not just printed ads but real devices behind a glass cover.
When was the last time you saw advertising that was useful and looked that good?
Labels: advertising, innovation, technology, travel
Sunday, July 15, 2007
iPhone update
So after nastiblogging about the iPhone yesterday I managed to get my hands on an iPhone when I was at the Westchester mall yesterday afternoon. What can I say, I still think that the poor battery design, the lack of high-speed Internet connectivity and the limitation to one carrier per country make me think that this isn't a cell phone I would want. But it does feel very, very good. The user interface is amazingly simple and straightforward, no long-winded multilevel menus, no key sequences to remember, the browser works well and rendered www.ibm.com nicely, including the recently added dynamic components. The touchscreen keyboard works pretty well for text thanks to error correction (but otherwise requires some practice and probably even then it won't match the speed of a tactile keyboard).
Labels: technology
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Customer support at its best
Shareware and open source software have been said to lack official support. This may be true for some products but certainly not for my favorite editor, EditPlus, for which personal support by the developer is second to none.
Hats off to Sangil Kim, not only does he write fantastic software and respond to feature requests and (rare) bug reports almost immediately, he is also the most organized person I can think of. When I tried to reinstall EditPlus on my new computer, I managed to locate the original registration email which had the version 1 registration key, but couldn't find the upgrade key; so after searching all places where I typically keep this type of information I sent off an e-mail to the EditPlus support address, and within a few hours received a copy of the original e-mail from 2000(!) that contained my registration key. Thank you!
Hats off to Sangil Kim, not only does he write fantastic software and respond to feature requests and (rare) bug reports almost immediately, he is also the most organized person I can think of. When I tried to reinstall EditPlus on my new computer, I managed to locate the original registration email which had the version 1 registration key, but couldn't find the upgrade key; so after searching all places where I typically keep this type of information I sent off an e-mail to the EditPlus support address, and within a few hours received a copy of the original e-mail from 2000(!) that contained my registration key. Thank you!
Do I want an iPhone?
The New York Times has two entertaining videos by David Pogue about the new iPhone, the pre-release The iPhone Challenge: Keep It Quiet and I want an iPhone.
What is all this hype about? I guess it holds true that good design is still good business, and Apple certainly knows good design, at least when it comes to user interfaces. Not allowing the user to extend the device or even just change the battery may follow the Apple philosophy that users don't need to care what's inside, but requiring customers to send in the phone, wait three business days, pay $85.95 to get the phone "repaired" as Apple calls it and have all your data deleted during that process is not good design.
Dear Apple folks, please try harder!
What is all this hype about? I guess it holds true that good design is still good business, and Apple certainly knows good design, at least when it comes to user interfaces. Not allowing the user to extend the device or even just change the battery may follow the Apple philosophy that users don't need to care what's inside, but requiring customers to send in the phone, wait three business days, pay $85.95 to get the phone "repaired" as Apple calls it and have all your data deleted during that process is not good design.
Dear Apple folks, please try harder!
Labels: technology
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Luncheon at Le Château
After two days of hot and humid weather, the thunderstorm and heavy rain last night had worked miracles and today was a beautiful day, just perfect for a luncheon at Le Château in South Salem, New York, to celebrate the successful launch of our latest Website design and the Virtual Business Center in Second Life.
It was good to meet so many colleagues and friends, including some people who I had worked with for a while but never met in person. We started with drinks and hors d'oeuvres in the garden, followed by short talks by our executives and an awards ceremony before we went on with lunch. Well, actually, since we were running behind, lunch didn't quite start after but during the business session. It was kind of weird to see restaurant staff squeeze through between our executives with soup bowls while they were still handing out awards and congratulating award winners. The lunch was excellent though, and we all had a good time at Le Château.
At night Christian and I met with Margaret at a restaurant in Armonk, Opus 465, for a light dinner and interesting discussions about processes (so yes, we did get some work done and not just eat all day long!)
It was good to meet so many colleagues and friends, including some people who I had worked with for a while but never met in person. We started with drinks and hors d'oeuvres in the garden, followed by short talks by our executives and an awards ceremony before we went on with lunch. Well, actually, since we were running behind, lunch didn't quite start after but during the business session. It was kind of weird to see restaurant staff squeeze through between our executives with soup bowls while they were still handing out awards and congratulating award winners. The lunch was excellent though, and we all had a good time at Le Château.
At night Christian and I met with Margaret at a restaurant in Armonk, Opus 465, for a light dinner and interesting discussions about processes (so yes, we did get some work done and not just eat all day long!)
Labels: travel
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Wabisabilabi
While sitting at Vienna airport and waiting for my flight to New York, a newspaper article about a security startup caught my attention: The Swiss company Wabisabilabi has established a market place for security exposures with the intent to give security experts "fair compensation for their discoveries".
Googling for the easy to remember company name (Vienna airport now has wireless connectivity and unlike other airports this is offered for free, nice!) I stumble across a good number of articles which sound very similar to the press release, I mean, article I just read ... becoming the EBay of zero-day exploits, finally a market place for security issues.
The first two search results are obviously the new site that's going to make the world more secure. Not that they have figured out how to give pages meaningful titles yet:
On to the press release at https://www.wslabi.com/wabisabilabi/news.do -- mistakes happen but finding a typo in the first press release of a company looks odd. Equally odd is their math: "Recently it was reported that although researchers had analyzed a little more than 7,000 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities last year, the number of new vulnerabilities found in code could be as high as 139,362." Exactly 139,362, huh?
Not much information about the company either, looks like a British Limited company although there is no company registration information on the site (or at least I haven't found it). I guess I will sign up anyway and see what they have to offer.
Googling for the easy to remember company name (Vienna airport now has wireless connectivity and unlike other airports this is offered for free, nice!) I stumble across a good number of articles which sound very similar to the press release, I mean, article I just read ... becoming the EBay of zero-day exploits, finally a market place for security issues.
The first two search results are obviously the new site that's going to make the world more secure. Not that they have figured out how to give pages meaningful titles yet:
On to the press release at https://www.wslabi.com/wabisabilabi/news.do -- mistakes happen but finding a typo in the first press release of a company looks odd. Equally odd is their math: "Recently it was reported that although researchers had analyzed a little more than 7,000 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities last year, the number of new vulnerabilities found in code could be as high as 139,362." Exactly 139,362, huh?
Not much information about the company either, looks like a British Limited company although there is no company registration information on the site (or at least I haven't found it). I guess I will sign up anyway and see what they have to offer.
Labels: security, technology
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Google dropped my site
Google's Matt Cutts asked for feedback on the webmaster guidelines and I gladly shared my experience there:
Recently, Google sent me an email entitled "Entfernung Ihrer Webseite sitename aus dem Google Index", notifying me that one of my sites had been dropped from the Google index for violating the content quality guidelines. Now that site certainly deserved to be dropped for various reasons, not the least being that the content was old and not highly relevant and I am quite happy to see that site dropped.
I couldn’t find anything related to the specific issue highlighted. In addition the issue highlighted doesn’t exist (or I don’t understand what it is trying to say, maybe something got lost in the translation since the mail was in German):
Wir haben auf Ihren Seiten insbesondere die Verwendung folgender Techniken festgestellt:
*Seiten wie z. B. example.com, die zu Seiten wie z. B. http://www.example.com/index.htm mit Hilfe eines Redirects weiterleiten, der nicht mit unseren Richtlinien konform ist.
Translation: In particular we have noticed the following techniques on your pages: * Pages such as example.com, which redirect to pages such as http://www.example.com/index.htm using redirects, which is not compliant with our guidelines.
Now since when does Google consider redirects within a site evil? Plus, the referenced domain example.com does not even exist, nor does the homepage redirect either.
I couldn't care less about this particular site. What worries me though is that I haven't been able to identify how the site violates the guidelines, even after reading the guidelines more than once, and chances are that I have used the same techniques on other sites where I do care.
Recently, Google sent me an email entitled "Entfernung Ihrer Webseite sitename aus dem Google Index", notifying me that one of my sites had been dropped from the Google index for violating the content quality guidelines. Now that site certainly deserved to be dropped for various reasons, not the least being that the content was old and not highly relevant and I am quite happy to see that site dropped.
I couldn’t find anything related to the specific issue highlighted. In addition the issue highlighted doesn’t exist (or I don’t understand what it is trying to say, maybe something got lost in the translation since the mail was in German):
Wir haben auf Ihren Seiten insbesondere die Verwendung folgender Techniken festgestellt:
*Seiten wie z. B. example.com, die zu Seiten wie z. B. http://www.example.com/index.htm mit Hilfe eines Redirects weiterleiten, der nicht mit unseren Richtlinien konform ist.
Translation: In particular we have noticed the following techniques on your pages: * Pages such as example.com, which redirect to pages such as http://www.example.com/index.htm using redirects, which is not compliant with our guidelines.
Now since when does Google consider redirects within a site evil? Plus, the referenced domain example.com does not even exist, nor does the homepage redirect either.
I couldn't care less about this particular site. What worries me though is that I haven't been able to identify how the site violates the guidelines, even after reading the guidelines more than once, and chances are that I have used the same techniques on other sites where I do care.
Labels: google
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Timely communication
Apparently IEEE offered some incentive last year for renewing the membership before year end which I had completely forgot about, or not even noticed when I renewed my membership. This morning I received a friendly invitation to claim my free eBook:
"Because you renewed your IEEE membership by Dec. 31, 2006, you are eligible to download an IEEE-USA eBook at no cost!"
Nothing terribly wrong with this, although I wonder why it takes an engineering organization 178 days to send an e-mail with a download link.
"Because you renewed your IEEE membership by Dec. 31, 2006, you are eligible to download an IEEE-USA eBook at no cost!"
Nothing terribly wrong with this, although I wonder why it takes an engineering organization 178 days to send an e-mail with a download link.
Labels: technology
Security by obscurity
developer.com ran an article about AJAX security, the title of which caught my attention. The suggestions the author makes, however, are either obvious (use a well-tested framework instead of writing your own code) or plain wrong (pretty much the rest of the suggestions). Michael Baierl has commented in detail about what's wrong with this article.
Another unfortunate case of security by obscurity.
Another unfortunate case of security by obscurity.
Labels: security, webdevelopment
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
.net special issue about Google
The .net magazine has a special issue about Google. Looks pretty interesting judging from Matt Cutt's totally unbiased comments about it :-) and I haven't read .net for a while, the only problem is that this issue has sold out! I had tried to order a copy from www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk (nice and easy to type URL!) but the Website was acting strangely when I tried and insisted that I had placed an order for the wrong continent, and when I tried again -- gone. Sooooo, if anyone happens to have a spare copy of the May 2007 issue of the .net magazine ...
Labels: google
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Nikon D80 battery woes continued
The battery problem I had last week is back and occurring with increasing frequency, so apparently it wasn't the lens mount. Nikon support suggests to have both the camera and battery checked, which probably means a few weeks without the camera. It may be faster to get another battery first (I need a spare anyway for traveling) and see if the new battery works any better.
Labels: photography, technology
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Nikon D80 battery woes
So far I have been pretty happy with my Nikon D80, but a weird problem has started to show up more frequently: At first the battery appears full, then after taking one picture the battery shows as almost empty and the camera refuses to take pictures. Turn the camera off and on, and the battery appears full again ... pretty annoying.
Google doesn't find any reports of exactly this issue, but some Websites suggest that this may be a problem with the lens mount. For some reason the lens waggles a little and seems to have been in awkward position causing this behavior, and joggling the lens seems to indeed resolve the battery problem.
Now the lens shouldn't waggle in the lens mount but that's a different story ...
Google doesn't find any reports of exactly this issue, but some Websites suggest that this may be a problem with the lens mount. For some reason the lens waggles a little and seems to have been in awkward position causing this behavior, and joggling the lens seems to indeed resolve the battery problem.
Now the lens shouldn't waggle in the lens mount but that's a different story ...
Labels: photography, technology
Sunday, April 8, 2007
The ten hour power strip project
How long does it take the average person to install a power strip? Probably less than ten hours, which is about the time I spent under my desk today.
When I had my apartment renovated some years ago, the electrician wondered why anyone would need as many as six power outlets in one corner. I should have insisted on at least twenty then. Over time I have accumulated several power strips, and when I ran out of outlets recently I bought another one, which was too large and bulky to place on the desk (where I needed more outlets) so it was time to shuffle the cables around.
While under the desk I figured that I could finally label all my cables (a long-term cleanup plan) so unplugging a device wouldn't be an adventure of following nested cables and eventually picking the wrong one anyway. And before I could do that I obviously had to untangle the snarl of cables, which meant unplugging all devices, and clean off the pile dust that had accumulated over time. We did go for shopping in the afternoon and I got ahold of nice cable binders, so after hours under the desk everything is nice and clean now, all cables nicely labeled and ... everything still works!
When I had my apartment renovated some years ago, the electrician wondered why anyone would need as many as six power outlets in one corner. I should have insisted on at least twenty then. Over time I have accumulated several power strips, and when I ran out of outlets recently I bought another one, which was too large and bulky to place on the desk (where I needed more outlets) so it was time to shuffle the cables around.
While under the desk I figured that I could finally label all my cables (a long-term cleanup plan) so unplugging a device wouldn't be an adventure of following nested cables and eventually picking the wrong one anyway. And before I could do that I obviously had to untangle the snarl of cables, which meant unplugging all devices, and clean off the pile dust that had accumulated over time. We did go for shopping in the afternoon and I got ahold of nice cable binders, so after hours under the desk everything is nice and clean now, all cables nicely labeled and ... everything still works!
Labels: home