Just when I thought I was either going to have to write a tip about configuring Grandstream VOIP phone extension modules (which I can do, if there’s enough interest…) along comes this article from Web Worker Daily full of useful tips for Microsoft Word. No news yet as to how many of them work in Open Office as well… Paste Your Formats. If you want to apply your formatting and styles for a given paragraph or document to a new paragraph or document, hit Ctrl+Shift+C to copy, select the text you want to apply the formatting to, then hit Ctrl+Shift+V.

I’ve been following the “Timmy’s Telethon” debate with great interest, as, I’m sure, a lot of people have. I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been more comment from different blogs about it, but there we go. The whole debate struck a chord with me though, for the simple reason that I am involved in the process of trying to change the mindset of an organisation from a reliance on closed source software to one where open source alternatives are used, where possible and appropriate.

I was quite excited to find that you can use openstreetmap data in your own GIS environment by loading it into PostgreSQL. To me, this makes it much more useful, as I can now begin to use it as an alternative to costly data from the Ordnance Survey. The procedure took some time (mainly due to trial and error), but the following worked for me in Ubuntu: Install osm2pgsql by downloading it from here using subversion

Again, better late than never are a couple of links I’ve seen over the last month that are worth having a look at: A History of Visual Communication, from cave painting to computer design, via Kottke. I especially liked the earliest sections from cro-magnon cave painting to the Nazca Lines. I’m still working through the later sections! What happens to your blog post when you click publish, from Wired.

As the title kind of gives away, it was the annual Computing Applications in Archaeology UK Chapter annual conference over the last few days. It was held in York this time, rather than Southampton, as it has been for the last few years, heralding, I hope, a plan to move around the country from now on. Normally I like to blog daily from these conferences, whilst it’s all fresh in my mind, and because it’s easier to blog about one day’s papers than two, but guest houses with wifi in York are a little difficult to come by (gotta get me one of those mobile broadband thangs).

From the postgis maestro himself comes a handy tip for mass loading shapefiles of identical schemas into postgis: First, get the table schema into the database, by loading a small file, and then deleting the data. We delete the data so we can loop through all the files later without worrying about duplicating the data from the initial file: shp2pgsql -s 3005 -i -D lwssvict.shp lwss | psql mydatabase psql -c “delete from lwss” mydatabase

There’s the beginnings of an interesting discussion here and here about using archaeological data in Second Life, or using Second Life as a teaching resource. I’m more interested in the first idea, of publishing your excavation as an “experience” rather than as some data and a report. I hadn’t even realised that you could link to external datasources in Second Life, but apparently you can, and people are already using this to release their own GIS projects.