THIS STORY has all the hallmarks of an urban myth, but the Ananova news
service ran it last month, so maybe it’s true.
According to the report, Kamal Shah of Mombasa in Kenya couldn’t find his
mobile phone, so he phoned it up from his landline. He immediately heard it
ringing—inside his dog.
Shah explained that he had left his phone on a bedside table, and when it
disappeared he assumed at first his son had taken it. In fact, his German
shepherd dog, Snoopy, had swallowed it.
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Hearing the phone ringing from his dog’s stomach was unexpected, he said. “It
sent me into shock.”
Snoopy subsequently had an operation to remove the phone and both dog and
phone are apparently doing fine.
THE BURY and District Petanque League 2001 has a website containing an
exhaustive set of rules for the game—better known as boules—as laid
down by the British Petanque Association
(www.petanqueleague.fsnet.co.uk/bparules.htm). Here is a flavour:
“Any member of the team winning the toss chooses the starting point and
traces a circle large enough for any player to stand with both feet fully inside
it…The feet must be entirely inside the circle without touching it and must
not leave the circle or be completely lifted off the ground…A player who has
lost a lower limb need place only one foot inside the circle.”
Isn’t that thoughtful?
THE CURRENT catalogue for the online retailer Jungle carries an advert for a
Sony video player. Among the features listed are: “PDC, 4-head NICAM video,
smart dial timer, SAT synchro record, reality regenerator.”
The last feature sounds particularly handy. We can think of many occasions
when we would like to have our reality regenerated—like when we’ve
recorded a football match and our team lost.
THERE IS an intriguing twist to the tale of NASA’s need to hack its Sony DVD
players so that the International Space Station crew can watch movies from any
part of the world, unhindered by Hollywood’s unpopular regional coding scheme
(New Scientist, 17 March, p 23).
Techtronics, the British company which did the hacking for NASA, makes clear
on its website that modifying the player so that it will play discs from
anywhere also disables Macrovision copy protection and lets viewers skip an
on-screen warning from the FBI about copying
(www.techtronics.com/uk/shop/50-sony-dvp-fx1-portable-multi-region-dvd-player.html).
The justification for disabling Macrovision is to improve playback on
high-quality TV systems. But of course disabling also lets people copy movie
discs onto videotape.
The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens five years in jail and
fines of half a million dollars for anyone tampering with copy protection. We
assume NASA’s bosses will have thought this through.
READER Stephen Boon tells us of a friend who took advantage of a special
offer on a SoundBlaster card for his computer. In order to register he had to
fill in a tick-box style customer research form. Among the usual questions like
“Where did you hear of this offer?” was: “Were the instructions for the
promotion easy or difficult to understand?” The boxes available to tick were
“Yes” and “No”.
IF FOR some reason you should type the string “= rand (200,99)” into Word,
you’re in for a surprise. We tried it, and got 246 pages of the typing test
phrase “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. We tried it again to be
sure, and got a mere 107 pages in smaller type.
We’re still waiting to hear from reader John Baird quite how he came to
discover this strange fact. Meanwhile, explanations for such weird effects in
computer programs range from the legalistic—like the non-existent words
that are included in dictionaries to serve as evidence of plagiarism—to
the whimsical: bored programmers insert unofficial jokes known as “Easter eggs”
in their software. Which applies here, we’ll probably never know.
THE BREATHARIANS—people who believe that not eating anything at all is
good for you—have this on their website: “The Breatharian Institute is
very excited to announce a series of weekend workshops…Come breathe in the
mountain air, enjoy the mystic earth energy, experience the altitude, and learn
a life lasting and self empowering philosophy . . . “
The site goes on to explain that the bargain price of $425 for a
weekend “includes the seminar, a single occupancy hotel room, meals . . . “
NOT the best way to perk you up at the start of the day. Reader Alan Hay
arrived at work to find a message in his inbox from an MP3 automatic newsletter
someone had signed him up to. Whoever did it neglected to give his name. The
letter began: “Hello NULL. This issue of the MP3 Communicator is dripping with
star power, baby! Read on to find out about the latest music and hottest offers
. . . “
Charming.
ONE of Sainsbury’s supermarkets in Cambridge is being refurbished and the
customer toilets are in a new temporary location. To avoid confusion there is a
large sign pointing them out: “Customer Toilets.” Underneath is the Sainsbury’s
slogan: “Making life taste better”. Did a lot of thought go into this, we
wonder?
USEFUL INFORMATION is provided on the packet of a Somerfield Basics Swiss
Roll. It tells us: “This pack contains approximately 4 servings of ¼ of a roll.”
FINALLY, the set-up instructions on reader Jonathan Miles’s new
Hewlett-Packard printer came on a poster. At the top it says in large type: “HP
OfficeJet G85 Quick Setup Poster (Windows). Side 1 of 2.”
There is nothing on the back. Nor is there a second poster.
