⌘Mac

The price of train tickets in Italy varies depending on the type of train you take. Prices seem a lot higher than they used to be so it took some digging around to find good value. The Italian railways site only offers a high-level timetable search. Better to go to the Swiss equivalent (I know what you’re thinking, but the pastries are better in Italy).

But there’s a trick, don’t use the train search on the homepage, navigate to the online-timetable and then click on Advanced Search. To find out when the reasonably priced trains go, deselect ICE/TGV and EC/IC.

It turns out there several Regional (R) trains that go from Milan to Venice direct and are only 20 minutes slower than the Intercity train (3h 13 vs. 2h 52). I’ll let you know the exact price difference when I get back. 

Update: The Regional (R) train costs €12.90, Intercity costs €24.00 and the Eurostar (2h 35) costs €27.60 - all one-way. By the way the last train from Milano Centrale to Lugano leaves at 22:25 (it’s the train to Bergamo change at Monza)

It seems there are no ultra-compact/portable LCD projectors that will do HD formats on the market yet.

About projectors is a pretty comprehensive and easy to navigate site. There are a couple of things you need decide when looking;

resolution: 720p (1280×720) or 1080p (1920×1080),

brightness: 1000 or 2000 ANSI lumens (2000 is better if you want to watch during the day) and of course,

price: for HD LCD does not have any real size advantage over DLP (the other most popular display system) at the moment, but DLPs are generally a bit less expensive than LCD.

Before buying a DLP check that you’re not affected by the “rainbow effect” … it only affects a very small number of people, but it’s probably worth a check before you buy.

I started reading the news in italian, mainly from La Repubblica. Needed a quicker way to look up words. This bookmarklet now lives in my bookmarks bar. Works for it-en and en-it and looks up the highlighted word when you click on it. 

IT

Right click and add directly to your bookmarks, in the bookmark bar. More language reference tips to follow soon. 

After years of using Dictionary.app, I noticed I never look at dictionary defintions and only use the Thesaurus piece. Much less scrolling this way.