Loose Bits, Sept 12 2006

A new Loose Wire blog feature, collecting some links that aren’t necessarily new, but worth pointing out in case you missed them: Google’s News Archive Search – lets you search back through news articles several years, decades, even nearly a century back. Stories are listed by interest (whatever that means) but with three very handy … Read more

Journalists’ Phobia of Digital Recorders

The AP picture that accompanies this OPEC story says it all: Journalists still don’t seem to have switched from cassette recorders to digital, even though prices have dropped amazingly in the past five years and features risen impressively. (I’ve just bought an Olympus DS-20 for a quarter of the price I paid for a DM-1 … Read more

The Commuter Factor

Watching the commuters of Beijing and Hong Kong brings home how usage of the cellphone is dictated by circumstance – in this case about how you get to work. This may be something that has been studied at length, but reading discussions about the difference in adoption rates and usage among countries and regions, to … Read more

Mapping Your Drive

I’m a big fan of treemaps, and a big fan of anything that keeps your hard drive organised (or any kind of media, really.) So treemap software that create a map of your hard drive are hard to resist, which is why I’ve written about them a fair deal. (For an attempt at an exhaustive … Read more