Simon Rules!

A year ago I gave myself a goal to stop making interest payments on credit cards. I have to admit that it never really dawned on me that making interest payments on credit cards is like paying more for every single product you buy on it.

Something else occurred to me – people tend to use credit cards to buy stuff that they can’t afford at the current time, and then make payments on it later. This is fine if you really need something immediately and you know that in the long run, you will be paying more for the product through interest payments. However, a lot of people use them to live beyond their means in the hope that tomorrow they’ll be making more money. This cycle continues, because when they make more money their credit limits go up, and they live further beyond their means.

However, credit limits exist for a reason. They don’t allow you to live infinitely beyond your means, because some people just can’t stop themselves from spending. They allow you to spend a dollar/pound/yen amount over your means, literally your means plus some fixed amount. However, you end up paying back more than you originally spent because of interest, so over time you are effectively living below your means!

Imagine you decided to have a really frugal year and you put all your extra money in a savings account. When the year is up, you continue using your credit card as normal for purchases, but you pay off your card every month using your savings account, thus accruing no interest. Everything you save on interest goes back into this savings account. You can spend within your means plus the contents of your savings account. Your savings account doesn’t empty because instead of a portion of your salary going to credit card payments (including interest), it gets paid into your savings account. Essentially you have become your own lender, and as a result, you don’t make any interest payments! Not only that, but the bank will actually pay you interest because of the money in your account. As a result, after one frugal year, you have more spending power than the person on the credit card. You also maintain good credit scores because of the constant use and good payments of your credit card.

So why don’t all people do this? Because people prefer to live for now and not for next year. Because credit card companies advertise that taking on debt is good (just look at MasterCard). Because credit card companies feed off hard times by increasing their interest rates when people are struggling to pay. Credit cards are seen as the normal way to spend, when in fact they should really only be used as tools to access money you already have, and for strict emergencies.

The same is true of mortgages – imagine that your parents are wealthy enough to buy you a house, on the one condition that you save to do the same for your kids. As a result, no one in the family (as long as the chain is not broken) ever has to make interest payments on a mortgage! The family through generations can even share an account to put surplus money into, so that if one generation hits hard times, the chain will not be broken. This is actually not a big secret – wealthy families have been doing this for many generations, and it’s the lack of interest payments that helps keep them wealthy.

I was on a plane not too long ago and someone took a look at my third generation iPod and said “oh my god, that’s so retro, where did you get it”. “Er… 2003,” I replied.

That led me to think about things that get better over time, like classic cars and good wine. Then I thought I would draw up a list of comparisons between the iPod 3rd gen and the iPod Touch. Bear in mind that this list consists of things that make a great music player (and it is fairly lighthearted).

I own both, but rarely use my iPod Touch because I don’t like it. Don’t get me wrong, the Touch is a great portable web browser, calendar, email client and games platform, but it’s a mediocre music player at best. For one thing, there’s no way to turn off the screen lock. You have a dedicated on/off button, but you still have to slide something across the screen to bring up all the music controls (I’m reminded all the time about the double-tap on the button to bring up the music controls, but this is only about 75% reliable, and doesn’t let you switch album or artist). Also, there’s a bug in the playlist system where if you have a playlist with live updating turned on in iTunes, the songs will appear in reverse order in the Touch but not in any other iPod. Turning off this feature will cause the songs to be sorted correctly.

Apple, please focus on sound quality with the next iPod. Since the first generation iPod, sound quality has remained virtually the same. Where is my 24-bit DAC, virtual surround and high-impedance output stage?

Enlarge this picture and take a good look. Isn’t this miniature village fantastic?

It’s really detailed… and it should be, since it’s a real life full-size town. It’s actually a real photo of Ouray, Colorado, and here’s the original:

I Photoshopped the image to simulate a type of lens called a “tilt-shift”, where the image plane is not parallel with the lens plane. This causes certain parts of the image to appear out of focus. When taking a picture like this, focus is set at infinity, so everything at distance in the image is in perfect focus. If this was really a miniature, everything would be very close to the camera, so only part of the image would normally be in focus. Also, miniatures tend to look brighter and more colourful when compared to weathered, washed-out buildings and cars.

I followed a great tutorial on how to do the effect. Also, here’s the lens that lets you take these photos without any messing around.

I’ve finally upgraded to a “proper” SLR camera after outgrowing my tiny Rebel XT.

It’s the Canon 7D, and it goes perfectly with my 24-105 “L” lens. Once the workload at the office starts to ease up in December, I’d like to take a wider variety of photos for my portfolio. I’m especially interested in live bands, so if you need some photos taken for free, please let me know. I’ve been working silly hours since I got the camera and I’ve had almost zero opportunities to take any interesting pictures. However, I did manage to sneak this one in. If you can tell me where this was taken, I’ll be impressed!

In a break from writing about my life, I thought I’d give some Android developers out there a hand with a problem. Google don’t yet support the building of Android on OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard), but I managed to get it working. To do this, you’ll need to do four things:

1. Install Rosetta
2. Install JDK 1.5
3. Install OS 10.4 support for XCode
4. Change some gcc headers

First, install Rosetta from your Snow Leopard installation DVD. This allows you to run flex from the command line. Without this, a file in libwebcore won’t be generated correctly and you’ll get an error about a missing lex() symbol.

Second, install JDK 1.5. I found a guide online to do this. Instead of using update 4 as mentioned in the article, download the 1.5 JDK update 5 from apple.com: http://support.apple.com/downloads/Java_for_Mac…

Third, download the XCode 3 package from Apple and install support for building for the OS 10.4 target.

Finally, you need to add softlinks from some OS 10.4 gcc includes to the 10.6 ones. This is fairly easy to figure out when building, but the ones I changed were all in /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include and are as follows:

• emmintrin.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/include/emmintrin.h
• float.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/include/float.h
• mm_malloc.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/include/mm_malloc.h
• mmintrin.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/include/mmintrin.h
• stdarg.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Kernel.framework/Versions/A/Headers/stdarg.h
• xmmintrin.h -> /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/include/xmmintrin.h

If you are building Android, then I am fairly certain I don’t need to tell you how to make softlinks.

Enjoy!

Update: in order to build the kernel, you’ll need to grab a copy of the elf.h header from Linux and copy it to /usr/local/include on your Mac. Comment out the #include <features.h>, otherwise you’ll get a compilation error.

Some garden (yard) progress this weekend – despite a week of sun, and then an entire weekend of rain and thunderstorms. We were almost thwarted by the landscaping company delivering 7 tonnes of the wrong kind of rock (4-8″ river cobble as opposed to 2″ decorative rock). They scooped it all away and delivered the right stuff in less than 24 hours, which was good. Here’s the wrong rock – click any of the pictures for larger versions:

Here is the right rock in place:

And here’s the border between the rock and rubber mulch:

This area currently only has a weeping crabapple – people have said “oh my god, what’s wrong with that tree?” many times! We’re going to cover it with rubber mulch for now to stop the weeds growing, but eventually this area will have a pool.

Finally, here’s the deck so far with Amber pulling weeds around it. I need to put the stairs on before I can finish the trim, which is a darker shade of composite wood (Trex).

Usually when we go away on holiday, something happens with either the server (power supply fails, Comcast decides to knock it off the Internet) or the security cameras (transmissions mysteriously stop, etc). This holiday was no exception. I noticed after we landed that there appeared to be a large piece of tumbleweed completely blocking the lens. I thought it might have been put there deliberately – and I was right.

I give you exhibit A:

It built a pretty good nest, but the camera mount couldn’t hold it up and eventually tilted downwards, at which point the bird gave up. There was a single blue egg inside, but sadly it never had a chance because there was a snow storm a couple of days after the bird finished the nest.

Is anyone else seeing a 5 second delay when they visit simonrules.com? I am, and indeed any site on my server. I don’t think it’s the DNS because one of my sites is using a different DNS provider. That leaves either my ISP (comcast) doing something weird with incoming requests, my router (which hasn’t changed) or my server (which hasn’t changed in a while either). Anyway, let me know…

We’ve finally been given permission at work to reformat our computers to use as Ubuntu workstations – yay! This is my final stage in my abandonment of Windows. Three years ago, I realised I was spending a good portion of my weekends and evenings fixing Windows because of stupid problems. I’d install something and I’d get an error every time I booted Windows (if it booted at all), or it would get horribly slow, or I had a USB device that would work on one port but not the others. The usual solution was to reformat if it would take less time than to fix the problem. My solution three years ago was to go to apple.com.

I still have an Acorn RiscPC 600 on my desk at work, and it still works. It was manufactured in 1994, which makes it 15 years old. At home I still have an Iyonix (same type of computer), which is now 6 years old and still working well. Neither machine has ever been wiped. My MacBook Pro has not had a software problem in 3 years.

Windows XP was almost good. Almost good in that it almost didn’t suck completely, but it still managed to do things magnificently wrong, such as regularly lose all its icons, open tooltips below windows and change the height of the locked taskbar.

I won’t miss Word 2003 and its hundreds of autocorrect options that are impossible to turn off completely. I won’t miss having to install a USB driver once for every USB port on the machine. I won’t miss critical security updates. I won’t miss Windows Search that can’t find files that are in the first directory it looks at. I won’t miss playing games – that’s what I got the PSTriple for.

Windows, you won’t be missed. As Lily Allen would say, “fuck you, fuck you very very much!”

Slogans saying “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” have started appearing on London buses in response to a particular religious message that pointed readers to a website telling them they were going to have to endure torment in hell for all eternity.

As expected, the campaign has already drawn complaint from a religious group.

Now, a few things piss me off about the complaint. If it’s fair to have religious slogans on buses, then it’s also fair to have these atheist/agnostic ones. You could even argue that it’s fairer to have the atheist messages, since they are based in science. Put simply, if I told you that there was an invisible flying spaghetti monster that created the earth, you would have absolutely no way to disprove it. After all, non-believers cannot even see him. The lack of a way to disprove him simply means he has been designed to be impossible to disprove, not that he exists.

I hope when the complaint is brought to the Advertising Standards Agency, it is laughed at.