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13 year old kid reviews a 30 year old Sony Walkman
BBC Magazine gave 13-year-old Scott Campbell a gen-one Walkman in place of his MP3 player for a week, then gathered his impressions on the device:
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.
I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, "Walkmans eat tapes". So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day.
Next? We give him Pong™.
Two weeks ago I managed to forget a 256 Mb Compact Flash card from an old camera in my pocket when I did the wash.
Resigned to the loss of the data, I shrugged, tapped out a bunch of the water, and tossed it into the commercial dryer with my clothes.
Then I set it aside until today when I said "what the hey" and tried it in an old computer with a Compact Flash slot.
It was recognized and all my pictures appear to be there.
Wacky.
I use Coffee Cup HTML editor for submitting works to on-line publishers. It lets me compose in visual editor so I can concentrate on writing, then produces very vanilla html that can be plugged into just about any blog template or online content management without messing it up.
But I've never really been comfortable composing in it. I still like composing in word processors, but none of them produce anything like as clean html. Coffee Cup has of course tons of capabilities that I don't use, because I'm not making a web site - I'm submitting my deathless prose to someone to format as they like, with only very basic formatting on my part. Is there something out there that is frankly a better word processor, and even if a worse html editor, but can still do the whole "very vanilla html" thing.
Hmm. I'm not sure, Typo Boy. Pretty much anything that's designed to make standalone HTML is going to use CSS these days so as to guarantee more complete WYSIWYG. For example, the TextEdit program included with Mac OS X can save RTF as HTML, but it uses very simple CSS to make the paragraphs look like.
I used to have a livejournal client that let you edit visually, and since LJ required vanilla HTML it came out nice and vanilla, but pretty much anything that's designed to work as a word processor is going to fail at the "very vanilla" code rule.
Anyone tried Firefox 3.5 yet? Any word on stability?
I've been using it since beta. Seems plenty stable.
Anyone use SQL Server (especially SQL Server 2008) to generate XML?
