Alex Muller

Somebody told me about her (nameless) school in West London that has simply bizarre practices regarding pupils’ safety online. The Catholic school, for girls aged 11 to 16, has a Facebook account shared by the staff, and pupils were encouraged to accept a friend request at a beginning of term assembly. They were then told that if they did not accept this friend request, they would be made to log in to their accounts in front of a member of staff so that the adult could check for any privacy issues or "social problems." They’re searching for underage drinking, smoking or potentially revealing photos, but don’t seem to have quite grasped that Facebook is not the entire Internet.

This is crazy. What’s more crazy is that parents will support it, in the name of safety.

Take an Airport Express connected by the headphone jack to some decent speakers downstairs, and leave your computer on upstairs.

Use the Remote application on the iPhone or iPod touch from downstairs – it can browse and play the iTunes library on the computer, but it can also change the output speakers so that you’re streaming the music to your nice audio setup. It’s a Sonos, but comparatively cheap (and yes, lacking features).

Whatever… made me smile quite a bit ;).

All credit for this goes to Rodéric (and I wish there was somewhere I could link to him). I figured it might help to learn how to make a little food, just two months before university starts…

No idea what this is called, and you’ll have to trust me when I say it tastes goooood. Oil in saucepan, cut up vegetables (we had onion, tomato and mushroom) and "shove in" (technical terminology). Cook vegetables until, well, "cooked" (again, very technical). Tear up little chunks of bread and throw in saucepan. Leave a few minutes, and devour like you haven’t eaten in a few weeks.

This is cheap, easy, kinda healthy and hasn’t killed me yet. Love.

Hey everyone, say hello to Isabella (serious disclaimer: I’m not crazy for giving my phone a name, promise…)

A couple of very, very quick thoughts:

• Battery life is horrible on this – I guess I’m a heavy user, but I’ve found myself charging just running out of charge as I get home in the evening.
• GPS is the coolest thing ever.
• It’s so much easier having phone and music in the same place. I always used to miss calls because I couldn’t feel my K800i vibrating.
• The camera’s not great. Meh, so what?
• I have conversations in SMS, finally.
• I still need to find a good IM application.
• Twitterific works well, as does TubeStatus, Facebook, Last.fm and Shazam. Tris is a great game. Remote is kinda cool.
• It’s nice having a hardware switch for silent/ringer.

Now time to pack and run to the airport… data roaming is off.

Oh, and I obviously need to style li here… :(

As if we didn’t have enough crap to deal with on the tube, TfL (or CBS) have gone and installed these projectors to show us videos while we move around the city.

I know I’m a little late posting this, Londonist got it at the end of June.

Because I’m a stats geek.

I’ve listened to 29,919 songs, made 9,287 edits to Wikipedia (deleting 512 articles), tweeted 1,134 things, used Firefox for 1,148 hours, written 129 comments on Digg and 68 blog posts right here.

? numbers.

I keep on getting surprised by the corners of this operating system. The corners that a tiny proportion of the customer base use, but that have obviously had lots of thought go into them. Voilà: changing time zones for events in iCal.

iCal Time Zones from Alex Muller on Vimeo.