This is discussed all over the place right now: since articifial intelligence, namely the recently-released-publicly ChatGPT service, writes fantastic content almost automatically, should human writers still bother with it? It’s an exciting question and this post won’t attempt to answer it fully.

A general thought: lots of internet content is… let’s say repetitive. I might use stronger language to describe it, since it’s basically loads of rip-off nonsense that has been regurgitated endless …

I got a Sony Blu-Ray player recently, a BDP-S370. Enjoyed my two blu-rays on it (stupid things are still nowhere near reality with their pricing…), nice. Back to normality. Pop in a few DVDs, and after a while I found that the stupid machine never seems to resume the discs. Now, there are lots of discussions about this on the net. Apparently there are issues with something called BD-J, something very weird where Java is somehow on the disc, for whatever unfathomable reason. In some other case …

I just learned something very interesting on the phone with O2 here in the UK. I haven’t got any time to research it, but then I’m not suspicious that the guy would lie to me about this — if somebody can substantiate this with some pointers to relevant materials, that would be good though. The thing is this. O2 is selling data roaming packages, called O2 Data Abroad. They are paid monthly and they have a cap of X MB per month, as usual with rollover rules too complex to understand and all that …

I just twittered a few minutes ago, saying “Seems like VS 2010 can still not show the same file twice in panels next to one another. Am I missing something?“. I’m still interested in the answer, if there is one, but meanwhile I thought I’d blog about something I’ve found interesting for a long time: the way our heads seem to work differently when it comes to applications of the words “horizontally” and “vertically”. You see, in Visual Studio (and that has been the same thing with MDI windows be …

My English language readers will have to forgive me for posting something in German for once — I just found this extremely funny text in an old email and I don’t want to lose it. Die Quellen dieser Texte sind mir nicht bekannt — ewig her, dass ich das zum erstenmal gelesen habe. Hat aber nicht nachgelassen seitdem.

Gebrauchsanweisung fuer eine Luftmatratze:
"Wenn das Wetter kalt ist, wird die Puff Unterlage sich langsam puffen.
Entrollen die Puff Unterlage und liegen auf ihr, dann wi ...

I’ve had a lot of trouble with external hard drives in the past. Sometimes the things just broke, sometimes they seemed to break and behaved wildly irregular — working one time, then nothing the next moment, or working with one machine and not with the other. A symptom I’ve observed several times with drives that were “not working” is that there’s a regular “clicking” noise coming from the drive when plugged in, as if it’s trying to get the mechanics working without success.

One of the things …

Just had this conversation in Twitter — well, as much of it as the 140 char limit allows. Somebody (keeping things anonymous here — own up if you want to! :-)) said the best session at the community event WebDD was one where the presenter had trouble with his laptop and couldn’t show any demos. Not the first time I hear something like this — perhaps I wouldn’t be bothered if it was. But most community events these days seem to have one or the other such incident.

Well, I’m afraid I don’t li …

I’ve had a BA Executive Club account for about 18 months. During that time I must have been on perhaps 15 BA flights — some UK domestic, some within Europe, some to the US. For quite a while I’ve also had a BA-sponsored American Express card, which pays miles into my Executive Club account. I’m not flying on BA all the time, because I find that pretty hard to do — basically I wouldn’t pay extra to fly with a particular airline, and usually it’s hard enough to find flights that go to the right …