Hmm, maybe I’ve found that house with a garden I’ve been looking for…? Er, no. Very nice, but 2 megaeuros is a bit much for my bank manager – I made a new year’s resolution not to give him another break-down!

Nice though, if you have the wedge, and you fancy living near the sea, near the mountain, with a pool, underfloor heating, sob, sob…

Watch, as they say, this space…

Secondly, the restore from Time Machine was pretty damn simple and effective. It’s always the same question with backups – if you don’t test them, do you know they’ll work? I’ve grabbed individual files from Time Machine and that seemed fine, but I had no way of knowing, without having a new drive with which to test, if a system restore would work. It did. Just boot with the DVD (or a copy of it on an external drive, if your DVD drive doesn’t work, like mine) and choose to restore from Time Machine. Just pick which backup to use, pick where to restore it to and wait. I suppose it took about an hour.

Once that’s done, reboot with the new system.

The only things I noticed awry were that my hosts file wasn’t there and that my Downloads directory wasn’t either! Seems a bit odd… Anyway, copy old hosts file to new location, copy old Downloads directory to home dir and sorted. I need to look into the missing directory issue, but all in all, not too bad an experience.

[Update: small, possibly even unrelated error: the firewall seemed to have Ruby blocked for some reason, even though it was listed as allowed - just switched it to block, then back to allowed and it worked.]

[Update2: the Downloads directory wasn't there because I, er, set it to be excluded... ahem. I'd forgotten about that.]

I recently helped out updating a friend’s online shop: Nunoya in Barcelona. As well as the obvious stock of kimono and other clothing items, they have some cool accessories. But my favourites are the Kokeshi, which I don’t remember having seen before – slightly mad (in a good way) dolls that look a bit like Russian dolls, but Japanese. And they don’t contain smaller versions of themselves, so actually, they’re nothing like Russian dolls!

[update: forgot to mention I did some photos of Sofia in kimonos for the site...]

I’ve just been trying Mailplane which is a nice OS X desktop app for Gmail.

• Drag and drop to attach a file? Check!
• Automatically take and send screenshots? Check!
• Send pics from iPhoto? Check!
• Optionally optimise photo attachments? Check!
• Growl integration? Check!

The screengrabbing and sending in one swift move is very nice, if you end up doing that sort of thing a lot.

But, why provide an interface (this is just a wrapper around Webkit, after all) to one of, if not the best keyboard-controllable web app there is, then not allow the same shortcuts? All those years (yes, years!) beating Gmail shortcuts into my fingers! Actually, it’s not so much the years using Gmail as the previous years using Mutt, and for that matter vi/vim, that made these shortcuts automatic. That’s why, when I first looked at Gmail as a possible replacement for Mutt, the fact that there was no change of habit really impressed me. (And that includes the conversations/threading model, too.)

Well, nice try uncomplex, but I’ll stick to for my Gmail window for now.