Articles

In Windows batch files, you can use a double-colon (::) as a comment. I’ve just spend a few hours trying to figure out why my batch file says, “The syntax of the command is incorrect.” when I run it. The answer? I’ve got a :: comment as the last statement after a group of IF statements. Obscure? Yes. Flaky? Certainly. Oh – hang on, it might be because I’ve got the :: before a for statement. For some arrangements of the :: comment, I’m also getting “The system cannot find the drive specified.”

:: is a bad, bad thing. My advice: Stick to REM

Mexicoco is the brainchild of my talented wife, Lisa Kember. Lisa shows groups of people the techniques and skills they need to make their own chocolates. Lisa also makes incredible chocolates with exquisite flavours influenced by Mexican cuisine. They’re amazing – you’ve never tasted anything quite like them!

Have you heard of chocolate tempering? It’s the art of melting and setting chocolate so that it’s beautiful, crisp and glossy. If you’ve ever tried to make your own chocolates, you’ve probably already realised that chocolate is naturally dull and squishy. There’s an art to making it beautiful and tasty, but you can learn it, and Lisa can teach you how it’s done.

If you would like to learn how to make professional-looking chocolates with fillings that taste really good, you can.

Have I piqued your interest? Take a look at the Mexicoco website. We’re looking for shops to distribute Lisa’s hand-made chocolates. Can you help? Please get in touch!

I love science. It provokes a sense of awe and wonder in me that is often not prevalent in my day-to-day life. Seeing the intricacies of Creation and – better yet – understanding something about them gives me a thrilling feeling.

I’m very grateful to the teachers who have demonstrated the finer points of physics, chemistry and biology to me over the years. So it’s with a sense of frustration that I watched this movie from the Training and Development Agency for Schools. It shows a really cool chemistry experiment called Screaming jelly babies in which a (poor unfortunate) jelly baby is dropped into a test-tube of hot potassium chlorate. The sugar in the jelly is, um, “rapidly oxidised” which is a scientific way of saying that it fizzes, burns, glows and smokes until there’s not a lot left. It’s a fantastic demonstration, but, hang on, what’s that the teacher says as he’s heating the test-tube?

…it’s getting really hot. Probably not just hundreds of degrees, but nearer thousands of degrees. The powder is starting to turn into a liquid…

Thousands of degrees? I don’t think so. The melting point of the potassium chlorate is 356 °C. The Bunsen burner flame itself tops out at about 1500 °C. Heck – if the temperature rose much above 800 °C, the borosilicate glass of the test-tube would start to melt!

The point I’m making is that if we hold teachers to high standards of accuracy, we should hold people who teach teachers to even higher standards.

…Is that there’s no back-door. If I forget the passwords, I’m stuck. I wouldn’t change them for the world – they’re both great pieces of software that I use lots. It’s just that my sieve-for-brain can’t remember the Access Codes. I end up with old Truecrypt volumes, file containers and Keepass databases lying all over the place. Still, they (clearly) don’t contain anything important, because I haven’t missed them.

I’ve got an Evoluent VerticalMouse 3 (rev 2) for work.

It’s like a normal mouse, rotated a quarter of a turn. It’s good because it means I can hold my hand in a more comfortable position. It’s bad because the buttons won’t do what their told!

My problem was that I kept clicking the extra button at the bottom of the mouse – that silver bit that’s lower than the normal mouse buttons is a button in its own right. I had the Evoluent mouse driver installed, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. My googling turned up nothing because the issue was addressed by their website as “Some buttons do not work” instead of “Some buttons do the wrong thing”. I did eventually make the connection:

“The VerticalMouse must not be moved to another port after installing the driver, otherwise the driver will not load and some buttons will appear not to work. If the VerticalMouse must be moved to another port, uninstall the driver and install it again after moving the mouse.”

Voila! Uninstall and reinstall the driver and all’s well.