That’s right folks, I want my outdoor meals to make me smile like this man:

But you can’t buy Fancy Feast in the UK! I hear you cry.

Well, worry not, friends, because Andrew Skurka’s article gives away the tin’s dimensions: it’s 2.5″ in diameter, and by holding up a ruler to my screen I was able to estimate its height too. Converted to metric, it’s approximately 3.3cm tall and 6.4cm in diameter.

To my surprise, no-one batted an eyelid when I whipped out a tape measure in the canned goods section of the nearby Asda supermarket. (I know, I know: Asda = Walmart = bleurgh. I normally avoid the place. But it has the largest canned goods aisle of any of the supermarkets I’m aware of on my side of town, and I happened to be passing.) I found three products sold in cans of very nearly those dimensions:

• Princes Tuna Chunks in sunflower oil. Comes as a pack of 3×80g tins.
• Princes Tuna Chunks in brine. Comes as a pack of 3×80g tins.
• Essentials from HiLife Tuna Royale cat food. Sold in single 85g tins.

I recommend the latter. It’s about half the price of either of the others, per can, and because it’s sold in single tins you don’t need to buy any excess. Also, although both products claim to be dolphin friendly, Princes has a poor corporate responsibility record (and besides, the cat food is probably mostly made of waste meat). Furthermore, the Princes cans have reinforced rims top and bottom, whereas the cat food cans just have a reinforced top rim. The catfood cans are therefore closer in spec (and may well be identical) to the cans Andrew uses.

Now I just need a cat and a hole punch.

So far, so handy. Handier still is the fact that these Google Calculator features can also be accessed in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Want a cell in your spreadsheet to show the value of $250 (US) in pounds sterling? Enter this in the cell:

=GoogleFinance("CURRENCY:USDGBP")*19.9

Great! Now you can, for instance, compare the cost of international products or services no matter which currency they’re given in.*

Want a second cell to show what 1lb is in kg? Enter this in the second cell:

=GoogleLookup("1lb","in kg")

There’s a gotcha here, though. The above will give you 0.45kg. That’s not just 0.45 with a cosmetic kg: it’s as though you’d typed 0.45kg into the cell. Having some non-numerical information in the cell (the kg part) makes Google Docs treat the entire contents of the cell as text rather than numerical data. That means you can’t use it for mathematical calculations unless you process it first to strip away the non-numerical part. Here’s an example of how to do that:

=substitute(GoogleLookup("1lb","in kg"),"kg","")

Now, go forth and multiply!

* If I’m not mistaken, Google updates its currency information 20 minutes after the live currency exchange markets. This means you probably shouldn’t use Google Docs for, say, currency trading… but since ethically speaking you probably shouldn’t trade currencies anyhow, I won’t be sorry if you make a fat loss on the currency markets by trying to use Google Docs as your analysis platform.

(A quick aside: there are many companies providing copy shop services, some independent, some parts of larger retail chains. The interesting thing about Kinko’s, to me, is that it’s so ubiquitous in the US that (a) Kinko’s has become practically synonymous with copy shop, and (b) people know which services they will find on offer at branches of Kinko’s, and at what cost. This sort of combination of scalability and predictability is, I think, useful for customers, even though it is in other respects a rather sadly homogenising influence on modern consumer culture.)

Now, in an urban environment where room is scarce, flexibility is key, and travelling distances are short, companies like this make a lot of sense. Students, hobbyists and professionals alike may well need the services Kinko’s offers, but may not have the space or the budget to accommodate the necessary equipment or operators. Kinko’s, essentially, allows these customers to time-share their equipment, staff and floor space, on an as-needed basis. Even for those customers who have the facilities to print/scan/etc themselves, having a Kinko’s is useful: it provides a backup option in case the customer’s own equipment goes kaput shortly before a deadline.

That’s all well and good, but let’s get back to fab labs. Increasingly, students, hobbyists and professionals are interested in manipulating 3D information and materials for prototyping purposes, or for very limited production runs. New recipes for rapid prototyping tools like 3D scanners, 3D printers, CNC routers, electronic fabrics and items that can be made using them appear frequently in the pages of Make magazine, Instructables.com and other modern DIY publications. This does increase the affordability of such things but the trouble is, even the basic tools (drills, saws, etc) and materials required to follow some of these recipes take up a fairly large amount of space relative to the size of a small urban apartment or office. If you want more sophisticated options like 3D scanning and printing to be available to you as well, then you need even more space. This is much like the problem once faced by students, hobbyists and professionals who needed 2D information tools like photocopying available to them; the problem Kinko’s business model is based on ameliorating.

I’m going to advocate that someone – maybe even FedEx (the owner of Kinko’s); it doesn’t really matter who – creates a chain of Fabrication Stations that operate on roughly the same principle as Kinko’s. For a small fee, these outlets should offer to perform, either with the customer’s assistance or while the customer waits, such services as:

• 3D scanning
• 3D printing (at least one kind)
• PCB manufacture
• Sewing (using conventional, high-tensile, or conductive thread as desired)
• Drilling
• Cutting
• Grinding
• Sanding
• Buffing
• 3-axis milling/routing

Just as Kinko’s stocks various kinds of paper and ink to run their equipment, so the Fabrication Stations should stock standard PCB boards, commonly-used construction fabrics and threads, and any consumables necessary for their 3D scanning and printing devices.

This isn’t so far-fetched – several universities already have fab labs providing these services – and it needn’t require a large amount of real estate: it’s possible to fit a fab lab into a trailer (and they come in many other shapes and sizes too).

It’s likely that Fabrication Stations having commercial viability as their primary requirement might differ somewhat from the standard fab lab specs, which seem to assume a non-profit environment, but although this might mean they would be slightly less suitable as educational tools, they would appear to be a socially valuable proposition nonetheless.

Why am I writing all this? I’ve got a list of handy things I’d like to create, but I don’t have the time or equipment to make them all. Having a Fabrication Station in my neighbourhood where I could get some of the more equipment-intensive parts of the fabrication completed would tip the balance in favour of getting (these) things done rather than putting them off, and I’m all in favour of the former!

It’s not a lot to ask.

I propose that online music stores should, except perhaps when they are selling solitary songs, sell their records in a format that includes all of this. It would probably be something like a JAR file but for musical records instead of Java programs. Each file would have a copy of the inlay card and cover art as a PDF or suchlike, and a playlist in XSPF or similar. The tracks would also be included in the JAR (or whatever; let’s call it a UZQ file in honour of Michael Paradinas’s best-known alias) file as FLAC files.

How hard would this be to implement? For a major online music retailer like 7digital or iTunes, not very difficult. What about player software? Most player software could very rapidly be extended to accommodate such a file structure.

So, why hasn’t this been done? Is the industry waiting for someone to write a UZQ file format specification? Has someone already written an archive file specification for music based on JAR, TAR, XAR or similar, but it didn’t catch on? Please leave your thoughts and insights as comments below. Thanks!

Dear Mr Brodman,

I write to you with some concern that T-Mobile may have misled customers over the use of tethering apps on the Android phones T-Mobile sells. Specifically, you suggested, I believe, that tethering apps would not be blocked. Yet it appears that at least one has been removed from the Android Market in the US.

I call on you to openly address your customers' concerns, and to work with Google to ensure that of those customers, the Android users who wish to use tethering apps can do so with the aid of the delivery platform that the Android Market provides.

Yours sincerely,

Sam Kuper

The first problem was a series of broken spokes on the rear wheel, when the bike was around two years old. I had the wheel rebuilt (at some cost!), and this stopped the spoke breakage. Unfortunately, the shop mechanic who rebuilt the wheel messed up the rim tape while doing so, and also left some burrs on the spoke nipples inside the rim, which caused me a series of punctures until I figured out where the problem lay and fixed it myself.

Next came a crack in the seat tube. This necessitated a new frame, though fortunately this was covered under warranty. Still, it meant the substantial hassle and expense of shipping my bike back to the original dealer for repair, and hiring a replacement for the interim.

Now, about a week ago I had my bike serviced. I thought it probably needed new pedals - or maybe bottom bracket, or both - because I could feel a clicking/popping/grinding when I was pedalling. It turned out it probably did need new pedals, but the clicking and popping wasn't due to the pedals, it was due to a crack in the rear rim. The staff at the shop where I'd had my bike serviced said they hadn't been able to source any suitable rims and suggested that I try elsewhere.

Naturally enough, I tried the dealer I originally bought the bike from. They told me that a lack of rear rims for Dahon Piccolos and Dahon Curves was a longstanding problem, but that entire rear wheels (spokes, hub gear and all) were available for £145. That's half the new cost of the bike! Asking some other Dahon dealers the same question produced the same answer.

So, I had a choice between buying a whole new rear wheel or a whole new (or second-hand) bike. Blech.

A bit of spread-sheeting later, and I eventually opted for the new rear wheel. None of the second-hand bikes I enquired about had their original receipts available, which made me suspect they could have been stolen; and the new bikes I looked at worked out a little dearer than the Dahon per year of warranty remaining, since my Piccolo's frame, forks and handlepost are still under warranty for about another year and a half, and presumably the new rear wheel will be covered for a year.

Still, I'm disappointed. All bike manufacturers should recognise that it's in their interests to do what's in their customers' interests; and it's in their customers' interests to make spare parts readily available. Brompton does this, and so does Bike Friday. Why can't Dahon?

Next time it comes to a crunch like this, chances are it'll be more economical for me to get a new bike instead of repairing the Piccolo. And I don't think I'll be buying a Dahon again.

1. Probably the most common is the foreign-body puncture, in which a solid object penetrates the tyre from the outside, piercing the inner tube. I have three tips for dealing with these:
   1. Use tyres with a kevlar belt, or some other effective barrier between the tyre rubber and the inner tube. I use Schwalbe Marathons because they're the easiest to obtain for my wheel diameter; you may wish to shop around.
   2. Ensure your tyres are inflated to the recommended pressure. I prefer to use a pump with a built-in pressure gauge, for this. Don't over-inflate the tyres or you risk both blowing them and also increasing the shock your wheel experiences when it hits a bump in the road. Don't under-inflate either, or the tyres will pick up stones and glass shards like a sponge and you'll also increase your risk of pinch flats (see below).
   3. Use tyres with no more crenellation than is necessary for your riding conditions, as every nook in a tyre's tread can harbour a sharp that becomes worked deeper into the rubber during subsequent revolutions of the wheel.
2. Pinch flats affect the sides of the inner tube, and are caused by the inner tube being pinched between the rim and the bead of the tyre. A well-inflated tyre seated in a rim of matching size, with an appropriately sized inner tube, should never suffer a pinch flat unless you're cornering fast enough to skid badly (in which case, you've got other worries).
3. Spoke nipple wear can happen to an inner tube that is not sufficiently well isolated from spoke nipples. This isolation is normally achieved by rim tape, but rim tape can wear through. I've found cloth rim tape to work better than rubber rim tape. Velox rim tape is probably the most common, but there are other brands of cloth rim tape too. The most important thing is to make sure that your rim tape is fitted snugly. One the one hand, it mustn't be able to move from side to side - it must fill the well of the rim. On the other hand, it shouldn't extend too far up the sides of the rim, or it could fold up under the force from the inner tube, potentially pinching the inner tube in the fold.

I hope that this information will be as useful to someone else as it has been to me while I've been acquiring it over the last few years! If you want to learn more about bicycle wheels and their maintenance, you could hardly do better than to visit the website of the unique, incomparable, and now sadly deceased Sheldon Brown.

The free Red Bean Subversion book gives some details here, but it's a bit vague on an important point. If you follow its instructions, and if your working copy contains uncommitted changes, then those uncommitted changes will be retained in the working copy. If that's what you want, then you're fine, but if not - in other words if you want to replace your working copy with a snapshot of the repository as it was at the point of the revision you want to "revert" to, you ought to:

1. Change to the top directory within your working copy (assuming you want to roll back the whole of the working copy).
2. run svn revert to revert your working copy's files to the state they were in when you last committed/checked out.
3. run svn status -v to see which revision number your working copy now corresponds to (it's the highest revision number in the list that svn status -v produces).
4. run svn merge -rXX:YY where XX is the number you obtained in the previous step and YY is the number of the revision you want to revert to.
5. Done! The possible exception to this is that files in your working copy that didn't exist when revision YY was originally made, will still be there, because by default svn doesn't remove things. If you want to get rid of them, run a svn del [filename] on each of them.
6. Well done! Now play with your working copy as though all those intermediate edits had never happened . And when you're ready to commit your efforts, just use svn commit as usual!

Hopefully I won't be the only person this information has helped.

My nice list:
    Foo
    Bar
    Moo
    Zoo

It ends up looking like this:

My nice list:
    Foo
        Bar
            Moo
                Zoo

It's a pretty annoying problem, especially if you're pasting in a lot of text that was neatly aligned or indented to begin with and which would now have to be re-aligned/indented all over again. Fortunately, it's an easy problem to solve.

The reason it happens is that Vim has an automatic indentation feature. This feature is useful for programming, because if you indent a line of code that you're writing, Vim will remember the indentation and apply it again when you begin the next line, which is ideal if that first indented line was the start of an indented block of code. Unfortunately, it's a slightly dumb feature in the sense that it's unintelligent. It just blindly indents the start of each new line as much as the previous one.

In the list above, because each item in the list was on a line that began with some indenting whitespace, Vim - if it had autoindent turned on - would indent the first item by the amount of whitespace it already possessed, and would then start the next line with that same amount of whitespace before pasting in the contents of the line. So the second item ends up with double the indentation of the first, and so on.

If this is happening to you, it probably means you've got a line in your .vimrc file which reads, set ai or set autoindent (these two commands are exactly equivalent: ai is just an alias for autoindent). If you don't need the autoindent feature switched on, just delete that line from your .vimrc. Alternatively, if you want it on most of the time, but not when you're pasting in text that's already indented, just make sure you're in command mode (by pressing the <ESC> key) and type:

:set noai

(note the colon at the beginning). Then hit <Enter>, and you'll have switched off autoindenting. Now enter insert mode where you want to paste your text (that is, use the keyboard to move your cursor to the appropriate place, and press i). Then paste your text, e.g. using Ctrl+v if you're on Windows or Apple-v if you're on a Mac. The indentations in the pasted text should have been preserved!

Now restore autoindent by going back to command mode (press <ESC> again), and type:

:set ai

Hit <Enter> again, and you're done!

DARLING DEAR
YOU ARE MY LOVING LUST: MY BEAUTIFUL HUNGER. MY AFFECTION LUSTS FOR YOUR WINNING HEART. YOU ARE MY DEVOTED FERVOUR: MY SYMPATHETIC LONGING.
YOURS AFFECTIONATELY
M. U. C.

... and people say the British are not romantic.

One of the earliest electronic computers, I recently discovered, was used to write love poetry. The Manchester Mark 1 was programmed by Christopher Strachey with the Loveletters program in 1952. (The letter above was outputted shortly before I wrote this blog post, by a Mark 1 emulator running the same program.) The Loveletters program constructs partially random sentences from a limited, but affectionate, vocabulary. Since many of the early electronic and electromechanical computers were motivated by military concerns, it's nice to see that the Mark 1 was used for something a little less combative.

Computer-generated partially random texts may no longer be very novel, but they are becoming increasingly sophisticated. The most engaging example I've seen so far, SCIgen, was written in 2005, and it generates scientific papers, based on a vocabulary of computer science terms. It's realistic to the point of satire - try it here, and be sure to click the Generate another one link when you want to see another paper. Incredibly, some of the texts it has generated have been accepted as submissions for supposedly reputable academic conferences and journals.