According to MacUser, two separate Apple centres in the USA have refused to carry out repairs on a Mac because the owner is a smoker. Not because they feel that smoking has contributed to whatever has gone wrong but because their technicians consider the machines ‘contaminated’ and a ‘bio-hazard’.

Due to the computer having been used in a house where there was smoking, that has voided the warranty and they refuse to work on the machine, due to ‘health risks of second hand smoke’.

I agree that nicotine residue can be sticky and unpleasant stuff. But second-hand smoke? So much for Apple Care – the expensive, three year warranty agreement you can take out on a new Mac. I can see I wont be doing that next time around.

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When Internet Service Providers and every other organisation connected to web provision told the governments of Europe – including our own – that their ill-thought out plans for tackling music and video piracy wouldn’t and couldn’t work they were duly ignored by people with the technical understanding of a wardrobe. So it comes as no real surprise that ZDNet reports today of the first result of their idiocy. A pub – currently unidentified – has been fined £8000 for illegally downloading unspecified copyrighted material.

Only, of course, it wasn’t the pub at all. All the pub landlord did was offer a free WiFi hotspot to his customers. A nice gesture, thoughtful and generous and a good way of getting a few more customers through the door. Except that one of them abused the privilege. And the IP address used for the download belongs, of course, to the pub.

And that means that people offering hotspots all over the country will, sooner or later, be wondering if it’s really worth it.

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I’ve lost the link now sadly, but a BBC news item a few days back reported that some researchers have decided that letting your kids get dirty – or good, old-fashioned play – is actually, wait for it, good for them! Helps build up the immune systems. Of course, it’s not that long ago that we all knew this anyway and the extra benefit of a childhood not spent in antiseptic isolation was that we were not only healthy and largely allergy-free, but we had fun and learnt to socialise properly because you can only get seriously dirty outside.

Perhaps it should be a question asked of budding Apple technicians: “did you Mum let you play outside and get dirty when you were a kid?” Although, of course, they will probably regard such individuals as a bio-hazard.

A quick thanks go to commenter and regular visitor Malc for pointing this one out to me.

Back in August of this year I wrote a little piece on search engine Cuil hoping that this might just be the one to stand up to the near monopoly that is the evil Google giant. I still like and use Cuil wherever possible but the publicity that was generated by it’s launch soon dissipated and the momentum seemed to be quickly lost.

One thing I have never done is enter my own domain name into the search engine. I have not done that with Google either come to think of it. And so it was left to Malc to discover the horrible truth. The illustration shows the top search result from Cuil and of the many hundreds of images sitting up on the server that have graced these pages over the years what one does it choose?

In the words of Malc… “I thought it a very appropriate example of how a search engine shouldn’t do things”.

Bloody right.

Cuil: an old Irish word for knowledge. Apparently!

Anyone who knows me well may have heard my rant on the evils of Google. I loathe and distrust Google. They may well have started out as a nice little fluffy, ethical company – just like Adolf Hitler started out as a landscape painter, but, like Hitler, their status has almost grown into a religion and their power and stranglehold is beyond belief.

And yes – I use Google. It’s become a verb and you almost do it without thinking, the way Catholics genuflect and cross themselves. And yes – like a Nazi salute. You are so used to it that when you want to search the web – you just hit the ubiquitous ‘Google’ button that appears on every browser. But, at the same time, I have tried all the other search engines – and there are an astounding number out there – desperate to find one that stands up to the jolly blue giant.

Enter Cuil. OK – so some of the founders once worked for Google but this could just be the engine to give Google a run for it’s billions. (And yes – I know Google is now more than just a search engine but that’s the part I hate the most!).

You can find out more about Cuil here. I have been using it just for a day and I am already won over. At least give it a try.

I know I have touched on this stuff before but I am as mad as hell with my MacBook Pro this evening and nearly felt like throwing it out the window. No – it’s Apple I am really mad as hell with and there is just a chance that someone might read this and let me into the big secret.

Internet access at hotels and public places can be patchy. On the whole – or at least in my experience – there seem to be three types of WiFi access ignoring the ones you have to pay extra for.

There are the type that just pop up when you open a browser and connect you up without you having to do anything. And they always seem to just work.

Next come the type that are secured with a WEP or WPA key and once you have entered the correct info they also just seem to work.

And then there are the completely free and unsecured networks often found in bookshops, small cafes and friendly hotels. According to Apple you just select the network in your WiFi list and it will just work. Like buggery it does! And it is always the open, unsecured type that give me problems.

Oh, it finds and connects to the wifi OK. All my little bars go black. But it never assigns an IP address and gateway. It seems totally unable to deal with DHCP and happily ’self-assigns’ an IP that is, of course, totally incorrect. At this lovely hotel I am currently staying at (Solvang, California) they actually have about 4 free networks busily humming away and I can’t become a member on any of them. And here is the real kicker – bloody Windows connects like a charm! First time, straight in. OSX? Hasn’t got a fucking clue. Mention this to Apple and they just repeat the same tired old mantra… ‘it just works’. No it fucking doesn’t!

So if anyone out there knows the secret of how you get the OSX network preferences to actually talk DHCP with a free, open WiFi network then please, please let me know. because I really don’t want to have to take a Windows notebook on vacation next time.

Before I switched to exclusively using Apple Mac’s I thought that the only web browser available to those poor Apple folk was the – at the time – newly released Safari although I do recall knowing that an old and ugly version of IE (5.5) was also bundled. It was not, of course, true at that time and it is not true today. The Mac platform is as spoilt for choice as users of Windows. All the major browsers are available with the one notable exception of Internet Explorer – a demon which Mac users remain, thankfully, not tempted by.

Personally I have been a Firefox user since the Phoenix days and before the switch. Opera I find too confusing and idiosyncratic. Safari may be relatively fast but I find it’s dark grey toolbars and borders foreboding and just plain ugly and much prefer Omniweb which also uses the same webkit platform. But I have stuck to faithful Firefox partly because of it’s wonderful plugin architecture.

But therein lies, I believe, both the strength and the weakness of Firefox. It can not be denied that with every new update it gets just a little slower at core rendering and while some of the plugins become indispensable, each one adds it’s own overhead. I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the need to reboot my Mac because Firefox has, to put it bluntly, slowed to a crawl. But I like it – it does what I need – one or two plugins really are indispensable – so I carried on using it.

And then I was talking just a couple of days back to a guy who mentioned Camino. Camino uses the same framework and engine as Firefox but is both optimised for the Mac platform and has dispensed with the plugin architecture. It is a plain and simple browser without all the bells and whistles of it’s bigger brother. I tried it once a couple of years ago and didn’t like it.

I tried it yesterday and was, to put it simply, quite amazed. My own site here was displaying in a fraction of the time Firefox takes to render it. Other sites I regularly visit were suddenly popping up while Firefox was still looking for the progress bar. And the good news seems to be that Camino is not suffering from the same degradation that Firefox regularly displays. This – to me – is a revelation of some magnitude. If, like me, you looked at Camino a few years back, thought the centrally located tabs were a little weird and then dismissed it… load it up and have a go with today’s version. It’s just like the weather here in England today. Hot.