Elucid

'A quick meme' of quotes

2006-08-30T22:01:00.000+10:00

Jason Kottke engages in what he delightfully calls 'a quick meme' (ten a penny these days, do one while you step into the kitchen for a snack) in which you look through random quotations until you find five that you like or relate to. Mine:

The truth is that all of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible in this life whenever we use our native capacities to their greatest extent. -Dr Smiley Blanton
It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation. -John Gray in Children Are From Heaven
Never be haughty to the humble; never be humble to the haughty. -Jefferson Davis
It is not enough to aim; you must hit. -Italian Proverb
Maps encourage boldness. They're like cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible. -Mark Jenkins in To Timbuktu

What will Apple do next?

2006-03-02T20:04:00.000+11:00

After Apple's hardly world-shaking and over-hyped presentation of its latest products - the Intel-inside Mac Mini and the iPod Hi-Fi (which is essentially an Apple branded set of speakers for the iPod) - I'd like to make my prediction as to what's coming next. Apple hasn't been annoucing all too many new products in the last few months. (I'm not counting the Intel-based computers, because the computers themselves aren't new.)

Apple is a bit short on form factors for the PC, really. They have desktops and laptops, as well as wild speculation about an Apple phone. No PDA (just wait) and no tablet PCs.

My prediction, therefore, is that Apple will release a tablet PC sometime this year. They will then busily imply that they invented the concept.

Cross Crescent Crystal

2005-12-05T16:57:00.000+11:00

The Red Cross is set to accept a third symbol for humanitarian operations - the red crystal, which'll be a red diamond on a white background. This is in addition to the red cross and the red crescent.

When you see the two current symbols together, it really reminds you of the symbols for Christianity and Islam, modified slightly. And, indeed, the Red Crystal is being introduced primarily so that Israel will stop using its national symbol, the Star of David, as a humanitarian sign.

Cross, Crescent, Crystal. I like the idea that there'll be a symbolically neutral sign.

Save Van Nguyen

2005-11-18T17:22:00.000+11:00

In two weeks' time (December 2), Singapore plans to hang the Australian citizen Van Nguyen. Nguyen was caught smuggling a little less than 400g of heroin into the country three years ago.

This was Nguyen's first offence. He confessed as soon as he could and assisted the police with their enquiries. He was hardly a big fish - he was trying to get money to help his identical twin brother, who was heavily in debt due to a drug addiction.

Any instance of the death penalty in any country is inhumane, fundamentally against the idea of human rights (right to life, for instance) and hopelessly anachronistic. Particularly with all the mitigating circumstances above, Singapore should not be executing Nguyen (or in fact anyone else, but that's another issue). He's a young man who made a mistake. What he did was wrong, but executing him would also be wrong.

He deserves a second chance. He doesn't deserve to die.

Amnesty International is running a campaign to get Singapore to commute Nguyen's death sentence. Here's their details on how to email the Singaporean Pm or how to SMS your support for Nguyen.

Breaking news: Web 2.0 helpful

2005-11-03T20:59:00.000+11:00

There are those who are cynical about the value of tags (TagTagger, for instance - link from Kottke). There are those who think they're a pointless buzzword. I, for one, am hooked.

Why? Since I started tagging my posts, my readership has shot up. Forty per cent of my top referral pages are tag-related pages. That's the power of Web 2.0. Don't fight it. Embrace the power.

Cup Fever: The Reckoning

2005-11-02T16:47:00.000+11:00

Astute readers will remember that on Monday I issued my tips for the Melbourne Cup:

Mr. Celebrity will win; and
Makybe Diva will not.

Makybe Diva won. As you might expect. And Mr. Celebrity, as well as not winning, came 23rd in a field of 24.

Your best bet at next year's Cup is to do the exact opposite of what I tell you to do.

Cup Fever

2005-10-31T22:56:00.000+11:00

Well, every man and his dog have tips for the Melbourne Cup, so I thought I might put mine down for the record.

23: Mr Celebrity. Trainer: Gai Waterhouse. Current odds: $18.80 Win, $5.30 Place.

Why did I pick him? A few reasons.

He's not the frontrunner, so I feel independent.
He's got fairly good odds, so I have a chance of winning.
I like the name.
I like the colours of the jockey's gear.
The trainer is Gai Waterhouse. Who could resist?

Makybe Diva? I honestly can't see her winning three in a row. Arguably, I'm one of those people who has no interest in horse racing whatsoever, but who suddenly becomes an expert the day before the Melbourne Cup. And last year I said Makybe Diva wouldn't get two in a row. Shows how much I know.

31/10/05 Links

2005-10-31T20:12:00.000+11:00

The Plateau is the official website of Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities - making him essentially in charge of Egyptian archaeological administration. Fascinating if, like me, you're an ancient history buff.
The Forbidden Library records banned and challenged books throughout history and why they were objected to. An example - James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl, was challenged at two US schools in the early 90s because it uses the word 'ass' (as in "You silly ass!" or similar, if I recall correctly) and refers to, and hence encourages the use of, tobacco, snuff and whisky. Well, that's clearly inappropriate. Burn it, I say.
Google Hacks use the power of Google to create interesting projects. Examples are the program to find the colour of a word or the utility to translate a phrase through three languages and see what the result is.

Tags (but not the graffiti kind)

2005-10-30T18:20:00.000+11:00

As a service to the great work of building a tagged internet, I'm currently engaged in the tedious task of going through all my posts and adding tags to them. Thankfully, I've managed to get it automated, but it still involves a bit of elbow grease.

Anyhow. The idea of tagging is that all of my posts end with a list of keywords that are related to its content. As well as making it easier for the new breed of blog search engines (eg Technorati) to index the posts, it makes it easier for you, dear reader, to navigate the site.

If you read a post and want to see what else I've written on the subject, click the appropriate tag at the bottom of the post. For example, clicking 'Internet' at the bottom of this post takes you to a list of all the posts I've tagged 'Internet'. (This may not be many, as I'm still in the middle of doing the tagging for my older posts.)

If you want to browse, go to http://del.icio.us/elucidblog to see a list of all the tags for Elucid.

No doubt tomorrow Blogger will announce an in-house categories/tagging service and all my work with del.icio.us will be for nothing. That'd be just my luck.

(UPDATE 8.12PM: All tagging now complete, although some errors seem to be occurring on older post pages.)

30/10/05 Links

2005-10-30T16:04:00.000+11:00

FutureMe.org allows you to send an email to yourself someday in the future - to remind yourself of something you need to do, as a historical record, or somewhere in between.
The Apostrophe Protection Society deals with one of my pet hates - misuse of apostrophes. Remember, apostrophes are never used for pluralising a word.
Death in Sakkara is the latest ambitious online game from the BBC. It has four episodes, of which one has been released. I'm hooked already, even if the actual gameplay is rather sparse. Just the music and pictures are enough to draw you in.

Flock: The World's Newest Browser

2005-10-29T17:10:00.000+10:00

The new coolest browser around is Flock, currently at version 0.5pre (a developer preview). It's billed as an early Web 2.0 browser - in which interacting with the internet is easier and in many cases automatic. For example, Flock's bookmarks integrate automatically with del.icio.us, allowing your browser bookmarks and del.icio.us bookmarks to stay synchronised. It also integrates with Flickr to enable easy access to your photos, and has a rather nifty blogging function. The inbuilt Blog Editor (which I'm using now, or at least would be - see below) has a fairly full feature set, including (wonder of wonders for a Blogger user) automated tagging, which produced the tags you see below. It also allows you to drag text straight from a page into a new blog entry, including a reference.

Of course, Flock has its share of problems. My biggest gripe is that it treats the Bookmarks page as a webpage, so the only way of getting out of it is to click the Back button. What the hell is going on with that? It's also somewhat unstable (it's crashed a number of times, but that's to be expected on Version 0.5pre) and the new toolbars and such aren't as customisable as I'd like. Finally, the Blog Editor is rather intermittent. My earlier post on Iran worked perfectly on it, but I got errors when trying to post this current one and bullets didn't work properly on today's links. Hence, I had to copy-and-paste the text into Blogger's normal interface and manually enter the tag code. That needs to be fixed.

What effect will Flock have on Firefox? Right now, not much, since it's only being used by the very early adopters. Once it's out in a finished form, I think it could make a dent in Firefox's user numbers. Flock is actually based on Firefox's code, so Firefox users would find it easy to make the switch. I think the best solution would be to integrate Flock's features into Firefox, making them available to as many people as possible.

The bottom line is that Flock clearly isn't ready yet for use as a main browser, however, the unique and useful features it offers will be great once the bugs and certain interface issues are sorted out.

29/10/05 Links

2005-10-29T14:46:00.000+10:00

The Lorenz Butterfly is a very interesting study in chaos theory. This Java Lorenz generator is also almost hypnotic.
How Much Is Your Blog Worth? This site, using Technorati's popularity rankings and Tristan Louis's research, aims to answer that question. I'm happy to report that Elucid is worth, at time of writing, USD$2258.16 (AUD$2994.51)
The Skeptic's Dictionary is always helpful for rebutting mythical ideas like biorhythms and magnet therapy.

Iran vs Israel

2005-10-29T14:12:00.000+10:00

The UN Security Council has criticised the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map". A good move. If there's ever going to be lasting peace in the Middle East, Israel's right to existence should be accepted. This will, at least, make Israel more amenable to a more lasting and wide-ranging agreement, which can only be a good thing. Eventually, the only thing conflict in the Middle East achieves is death and instability. To find peace, Ahmadinejad needs to realise that.

27/10/05 Links

2005-10-27T18:56:00.000+10:00

Yes & No bills itself as a dyseducational road movie. It's bizarre, but once you get the idea it's quite funny, in a way. (Opens directly into a Flash movie)
Russell Beattie on why he might switch back from Mac OS to Windows.
An old CNN video featuring an unpleasant surprise for Bill Gates. (Opens directly into a Quicktime movie)
Take a look at the information any site can get just from you visiting it. You might be surprised.

An Apple story a day keeps the objectivity away

2005-10-26T18:20:00.000+10:00

Yes, Apple make some good products. I accept that. But the press coverage is getting ridiculous.

Take, for example, this gushing Time article. A quote:

Even though [the new iPod] costs the same ($299) as its immediate predecessor, which Apple introduced only 15 months ago, the new iPod has more memory (30 GB as opposed to 20 GB), and it's thinner (0.43 in., as opposed to 0.6 in.). Plus, it plays video. The screen is just 2.5 in. diagonally, but because it's extremely bright and very sharp, it looks bigger than it is. It's the kind of thing you could definitely imagine being unable to live without.

There are other portable video players out there, but none look as nice or are as easy to use as the new iPod.

Well, thanks for that advertorial, Time! We don't have to bother reading the press release now. Only the thinnest veneer of objectivity prevents this article from needing an 'Advertisment' note at the top. Another example:

[On the new iMac G5, Apple has shipped] a nifty feature called Front Row that lets you run your computer from across the room, lying on a sofa, clicker in hand, without crouching over a keyboard. That is cool stuff.

Front Row is very similar to a Media Centre PC, which run on Windows XP Media Center Edition. They're available from such major companies as HP and Packard Bell. The difference between Front Row and Media Centre? Better marketing from Apple, based, as always, on Apple's 'cool'.

This Time article is symptomatic of the media's love affair with Apple. Think about it - how many articles do you read about Microsoft? (This is consumer-type articles, not stock market-type articles.) And how many do you read about Apple? Have you seen any coverage outside tech magazines and websites about Windows Vista, the major new version of Windows coming next year?

Don't worry, the next version of Mac OS is going to receive far more coverage than that when it's announced. It will be trumpeted as the Next Big Thing, even if it simply adds a couple of features of limited use. Bear in mind here that Windows is used by the vast, vast majority of computer users (95%+) and Mac OS by a tiny minority (~3%).

As John Dvorak of PC Magazine (through Slashdot) points out:

Microsoft can roll out a dozen cool products, and the media goes ga-ga over the video iPod—a rather late-to-market Apple product. They all swoon over the prospect of paying $2 to download an otherwise free TV show so they can have the privilege of watching it on a 2-inch screen.

Cool products, indeed, like the Media Centre PC. Stay tuned to be hearing a lot more about Media Centres now that Apple has one. And prepare to have them trumpeted as revolutionary and totally original.

I'll repeat here, to attempt to alleviate the hatemail I'll no doubt get from Apple fanatics, that Apple make some good products. I use iTunes, for instance. What irritates me is the media's incessant, unwarranted, fawning coverage of Apple products which lacks a shred of critical analysis, in comparison to their total failure to cover similar or better products made by other companies.

Timon-style supporters - now in soccer!

2005-10-23T17:46:00.000+10:00

A peculiar sense of deja vu: Australia is again to play Uruguay to determine which country will qualify for the World Cup.

If Australia gets through, stay tuned for plenty of fair-weather friends who suddenly have followed soccer all their lives. It's like the Sydney people who think that AFL is a game for wimps until the Sydney Swans got into the finals.

That's the sort of attitude the Soccer Australia's counting on to whip up public opinion in favour of Australia hosting the World Cup in 2018.

Gadgets/widgets/whatever else - Microsoft leaps onto the bandwagon

2005-09-29T23:08:00.000+10:00

An interesting trend in the last couple of years has been the movement of major tech companies into delivering environments in which users can install small applications with one specific purpose. These mini-applications are known as gadgets, widgets, modules and various other things, and have diverse uses. Classic ones give you weather reports for your area, headlines drawn from RSS feeds, stock quotes, monitoring of system resources and so on. Another popular one is controlling a program like iTunes or Windows Media Player without having to open the full program window. An important point is that anyone with a bit of coding knowledge can write them, so there's a very high potential for innovation.

We've seen a number of major companies experimenting with the idea: Yahoo! with its recent purchase of Konfabulator, Apple's inclusion of Dashboard in OS X Tiger and, to a lesser extent, the Sidebar in the beta version of Google Desktop.

Now Microsoft is getting in on the act, and in a far more interesting way than you might expect. According to the site of the new feature, which is known in a collective sense as Microsoft Gadgets, there'll be what you could call a three-pronged approach:

Windows Sidebar - as far as I can tell, a cross between Google's Sidebar and Apple's Dashboard, to be included in Windows Vista. Your gadgets or widgets or whatever get docked on the side of the screen where they are easily accessible. It's helpful, but frankly it's been done before.
Start.com - an MSN feature which reminds me a lot of Google's Personalised Homepage or My Yahoo!. It's essentially a customisable homepage, to which you can add internet-based variants of your gadgets/widgets/whatever. Interestingly, Microsoft Gadgets talks about being able to dock gadgets/widgets/whatever from Start.com in the Windows Sidebar. The transfer between a web environment (particularly Start.com's currently rather spatan interface) to the lavish Sidebar would be interesting.
Windows Sideshow - this is a feature which, as far as I can tell, is unique to Microsoft. Sideshow allows you to run gadgets/widgets/whatever away from the main computer screen. The suggestions from Microsoft are things like displays in the lids of laptops and in keyboards, as well as being able to access system and program controls from a mobile phone or PDA.

What can we say from this? Obviously, Sidebar and Sideshow will somehow be integrated, and the suggestion that Start.com will be able to integrate with the rest says to me that Microsoft is trying to move in on this field of technology with a lot of force. Microsoft is building support for Start.com into Vista as it built support for Passport into XP. No doubt this will take custom away from My Yahoo! and co. However, I'm not sure that Start.com has that bright a future - why use it when you can use a pretty similar concept built into your OS?

Sidebar's major limitation is the limited amount of screen real estate it has - perhaps 1/5 of the screen at most. Presumably it will autohide instead of hanging on the side of the screen all the time. The advantage Apple's Dashboard has is that it has the full screen, so there's far more space for users to distribute their widgets/gadgets/etc. Sidebar will inevitably have problems with this. However, the availability of the Sidebar will take away from Konfabulator's users, particularly if it doesn't hog resources like that program does. Konfabulator is thought of as Dashboard for Windows, and I can't think of any advantages it would offer to a Windows user if Sidebar has normal features.

But it's Sideshow that is going to be most revolutionary, in my opinion. A second visual interface with the computer is something that has never really been seen before, as far as I can think of. Laptop lid or keyboard displays are fascinating ideas, but I think the mobile phone/PDA model is most interesting, as it could act as a remote control for the whole computer. Music player, video player, Powerpoint, etc. Being able to control functions of them from afar would be one of the most convenient innovations in a long while.

God, that was long. It was only meant to be a couple of paragraphs.

On rereading, I apologise for the poor editing, but it's almost midnight and I can't be bothered getting rid of all the redundant prose.

Firefox FAQ

2005-09-27T14:53:00.000+10:00

In the course of my usual technological evangelism I've recommended to many people that they use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer or similar. The questions and comments they made were common to many of them, so I thought I might put the answers up in a central location.

So, why exactly do I want to use Firefox instead of IE?

Because IE's features simply don't cut it any more. IE hasn't had a major upgrade for years and is beginning to show its age. IE is the least sophisticated browser on the market that I'm aware of - anyone who wants more than a bare-bones experience from their browser should switch.

What features, precisely, are you referring to?

Well, the best-known at present is tabbed browsing. This allows you to have more than one web page open in a browser window at one time - each page is accessible by its own tab at the top of the browser. As well as saving system resources, tabbed browsing is great for the 'surfing' that the internet was supposed to be about - if you see a link that looks interesting, send it into a tab to look at later. You don't have to fool around with opening other windows or finishing what you're currently reading and searching around for the link. Tabbed browsing makes unmapped exploration of the internet easy. It's more efficient as well - you don't have to waste time opening menus to find the window you want.

But Browser X has tabbed browsing as well...

Yes, absolutely. Safari, Mozilla, Camino, Netscape, Opera and pretty much any other browser you can think of have tabs. In fact, IE is the only major browser without them. But Firefox has an advantage over many of the other browsers I mentioned because of its customisability.

Customisability?

If there's a feature Firefox doesn't have which you want, take a look at http://update.mozilla.org. There you'll find hundreds of extensions written by Firefox users, offering pretty much any extra feature you can think of. An in-browser controller for iTunes or Windows Media Player, an embedded IRC client, a countdown timer ... if you can think of it, it's probably there.

Also available are themes, to customise the look of Firefox. I still use the default theme, majorly because I can't find a theme which both meets my exacting standards and doesn't make Firefox inoperable. However, if you aren't as picky about design as I am, no doubt you'll find a great theme.

There are plenty of other features I could talk about, but I haven't got the time.

I'm too used to IE to switch.

If you can use IE, you can use Firefox - it's not at all difficult to get used to. Firefox imports your Favourites from IE into the Firefox equivalent, Bookmarks, so you don't even have to bother transferring them.

What about security? Didn't Symantec say that Firefox is less secure than IE?

Yes, it did. However, Robert Vamosi of CNET contends that Symantec's methodology is flawed, and that a fairer analysis shows Firefox to be more secure. Firefox includes a couple of simple but helpful security features, as well as a system which allows it to quickly patch security flaws once they are discovered.

What have I got to lose if I download Firefox?

Nothing at all. Just try it out. If you don't like it, you can go back to IE, uninstall Firefox and nobody'll be harmed. However, with around 10% of internet users now running Firefox, I doubt you'll want to go back.

Download Firefox now.

Google Blog Search

2005-09-15T20:43:00.000+10:00

Google Blog Search is the latest utility from everyone's favourite multinational. It's been a long time coming - I recall reading about the idea a couple of years ago. Interface is stock-standard Google with even less frills than normal - it doesn't even have the links to other parts of the site at the top. Technorati's UI is more sophisticated, so it'll be interesting to see how Google fares against it. Jason Kottke, of course, isn't happy about Technorati, which means those who follow his every move will likely flock to GBS.

The logical next step is for Google to integrate Blog Search results into its normal results. Web/news/blog search results rolled into one would allow a user to choose seamlessly between in-depth information and live information. That would make life easy.

Big Brother is watching your confinement

2005-08-29T21:11:00.000+10:00

We've all heard the dire predictions about how Big Brother will eventually turn into a show in which the competitors die at the end, they're forced to have sex in challenges, blah blah blah to sate the public's insatiable thirst for such things. Maybe a little far-fetched, but in that vein a Dutch woman wants to give birth on Big Brother. The series starts broadcasting in a few days and the woman, Tanja, is due in six weeks.

Are they going to broadcast the actual birth? Live?
Is the baby going to spend its first six weeks in the house?
Will the baby count as a contestant? (Actually, don't answer that one.)
What if one of the housemates gets drunk and somehow mishandles it?
Who's the father? What does he think about the idea?

It's the sort of thing that you'd expect in the Netherlands, isn't it?

A brief message for bombers

2005-08-28T18:53:00.000+10:00

Another suicide bombing in Israel. It astounds me that the people responsible did it, especially after the Gaza pullout. Israel, they need to accept, isn't going anywhere. So instead of attempting to keep the divisions and the conflicts, why not take part in a peace process? They're not helping anyone or anything, other than their own misguided nationalist egos.

Depressingly Diverse Downloads

2005-08-28T12:12:00.000+10:00

I'm afraid I have a rather bad habit. Now that I've got broadband (and let's not go into the circumstances of why it took so long) I tend to download almost any program that sounds half-useful or interesting that I can verify is spyware- and virus-free. This leads to a Start menu cluttered with programs that I will never use but which I refuse to uninstall on the hope that they will come in handy some day. To help me cope with this, I'm going to make them seem like they have some use by giving brief summaries.

Filezilla (http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/). An FTP client which is doubtless very good but which I have never used, because I don't use FTP.
PGP (http://www.pgpi.org/). An encryption program delivering essentially unbreakable encryption without the problem of key exchange. I have it because I'm interested in cryptography, not because I actually know anyone who uses a compatible cryptographic program or ever send emails (or so on) that need to be encrypted. The free version, which I use, does not have as many features as the paid version. PGP9, released recently, does not have a free version but a 30-day trial of the paid version, so I still use PGP8.
Mozilla Sunbird (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird.html). A calendar program from the makers of Firefox (which has the distinction of being one of the few downloads I actually use and find useful or good). The problem is that I don't actually have any need for a calendar program.
Google Desktop (http://desktop.google.com/). Desktop search program allowing you to search your own computer, which I don't need because my folder system is meticulously organised anyhow. Now that it's onto version 2, it also provides alerts when certain blogs are updated and when I get new mail. Nothing really revolutionary.
Hello (http://www.hello.com/), Google Talk (http://www.google.com/talk/), ICQ (http://www.icq.com/) and Skype (http://www.skype.com/). All instant messaging programs of various types, limited by the fact that I don't know anyone else who uses them. Hello involves lots of picture capabilities, Google Talk is IM as it would be in Sparta, ICQ is presumably a worthy program but one I can't use as mentioned and Skype is a VoIP (internet telephone) program made even more useless because my computer doesn't have a microphone.
The GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/). The GNU/GPL Image Manipulation Program - essentially, like Photoshop only free. Useless because of the amount of RAM it uses compared to the amount I have, the fact that I can't figure out how to use the myriads of features and because I don't have anything I particularly want to draw.
Konfabulator (http://www.konfabulator.com/). Program allowing you to run mini-applications known as widgets. Unfortunately, there aren't that many widgets that are particularly useful.

There are more, but now I'm just getting depressed. I don't even want to know how much hard drive space they take up. To coin a new term, I suffer from chronic uninstall resistance.

Piano Man: more answers

2005-08-25T18:05:00.000+10:00

All right. So I was mistaken in my earlier post. We have some answers to the questions I asked about the Piano Man.

His name's Andreas Grassl, he's 20 and he comes from Germany (the city of Prosdorf, to be precise). Apparently he was suffering a psychotic episode which rendered him unable to speak.

Now that the mystery's gone, it seems so unlikely that the world could have been fascinated by the story.

Speechless no longer

2005-08-22T20:13:00.000+10:00

Remember the Piano Man? He was the guy who was found in Kent a few months ago soaking wet and unable to speak, and garnered a global response.

Apparently, he's started speaking again. He said he was German and has now been flown home. The hospital's not releasing any more details for patient confidentiality reasons.

The questions remain unanswered: why couldn't he talk? Could he hear/understand what everyone was saying to him? What's his background? For that matter, what's his name?

Very anticlimactic, I'm afraid.

Review: Fingersmith (TV)

2005-08-07T16:19:00.000+10:00

The second and final episode of this miniseries is airing tonight at 8.30 on the ABC (that's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, incidentally, not the American one), so I thought I'd give my advice as to whether to watch.

Don't bother.

Fingersmith is the second-worst period drama I have ever seen (I'm not even going to mention the worst). It has a few good points, but it is overlong and tedious. The producers seem to think you can get away with 1.5 hours of boredom by inserting a fairly predictable plot twist at the end of the first episode.

Nothing springs to mind that is particularly good about this miniseries, but the above (as well as the contrived plot points - I'm thinking of the illogical and poorly explained way they get the main characters in bed together) spring out as particularly bad. Therefore, unless you're desperate for fully-clothed lesbian soft porn (not so remote a possibility for some, I suppose), I'd recommend you avoid it.