I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Category: Tech

At times wonderful, and at times totally frustrating too. That’s technology, my experience of it anyway. I do a lot of stuff with technology and I suspect I will continue to do that.

New toy

Posted by on in Stuff, Tech

I bought this after wanting one for ages and it is a great noise maker to play with. I’m especially looking forward to what I can do with linking it to an Arduino.

So why doens’t Apple make dashboard stuff available in the Mac app store?

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I was just thinking about widgets for dashboard and started to wonder why Apple doesn’t have a store for that. I mean, they’ve got a store for just about everything else haven’t they? So why not widgets?

I’m sure that if developers could sell them then they could make even better widgets to justify the cost to the consumer.

I use a few widgets quite a lot, but have always found that there are never enough for the things I want to do, and I’d like to see a bigger and more diverse variety of the things available.

Maybe Apple will do that with Lion or some other big cat.

Newton

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I’ve been reading Newton Poetry for a while now and have been sitting on the fence about getting myself a newton. The main reason is that I know it will be another piece of hardware that hardly ever gets used and that I feel guilty about buying.

The trouble is that I still really want to get one, and reading Newton Poetry doesn’t help at all!

Automation

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I’ve started reading a book on Automator and AppleScript in what may be a vain attempt to automate some the things I do manually every day. I’ve no idea how or if it will work, but I thought it was worth a shot.

Of course the minute I started reading it I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to automate. That’s normal I guess. But I’m hoping that at some point it will prove useful and be a time saver.

I’ll see how I get on. Sadly there seems to be no way to automate reading the book. I think that’s something of a failure!

Turning a Mac Mini into a server

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One of my next personal projects is to turn an old mac mini into a little server for playing about with. For the most part it doesn’t look to difficult to do, but it might be a fair useful thing to have around.

As yet I’m not completely sure what I’ll use it for, but it might come in handy for stuff and if nothing else it’ll be fun to tinker about with.