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What’s Missing From The iPad

Jan 28

Posted by Phil in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

I feel almost guilty for buying into the hype and writing about it, but I’m well overdue a post and it seemed to be an opportune subject. I therefore present to you: what’s missing from the iPad! Pay attention now Jobs!

Widescreen

I mean, come on Apple. If you’re going to sell it as a good device for watching movies, you really needed to give it a wide screen. There’s not really any excuse for 4:3 these days

Transreflective screen

Similarly, if you’re going to pitch a device as an e-book reader, then straight backlit LCD isn’t a good solution. I agree that e-ink isn’t a solution for something which needs to be a multimedia platform, but trying to read at night on this is just going to keep me awake

iPhone Connectivity

Having the iTunes store on the device is a great idea, but if you can’t plug in your iPhone (no USB ports) to get the choons, it’s pretty crippled. Even better, let people sync wirelessly! Everyone hates dongles!

Multitasking

OK, it’s an easy dig, but this really is something people want and need. Think of a tablet with hot corners that activate Exposé-style blowouts? Sexy.

Stylus Input & Handwriting Recognition

Maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but for me a prime use case for a tablet is as a quick note-taking device. With a capacitive stylus and a quick notes app, this could have been a great bit of additional functionality.

Hardware Extras

Camera, front-facing camera, proper GPS, USB ports (as above), HDMI output . . . I assume these were all left out to keep the costs down, but not having them limits the potential of the device – particularly the camera and the GPS, surely this should have more functionality than the iPhone?

Doubtless in a year’s time you’ll all point to this post as an example of “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.“ but this is just how I see it right now. I don’t doubt it’s fantastic to use for what it is; I just think that it’s missing too much stuff to be truly great.

Edit: put much more succinctly by Bad Horsey on B3ta :)

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Why I Care About Christmas Number One

Dec 21

Posted by Phil in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

As it turns out, I was halfway through editing this post when I read Charlie Brooker’s column about the Christmas number 1. As per usual, he does a far better job than I could about putting thoughts onto e-paper (DAMN YOU BROOKER), but I may as well still post my slant.

Yesterday afternoon, me and the wife did a very rare thing for us: we sat on the sofa and listened to the radio. I can’t remember the last time we did that; we’re very much more a tv-and-video-games couple. But because of the competition for the Christmas chart, we sat there and bounced up and down with glee as Rage Against The Machine claimed the number one spot.

I’ve heard a lot of reasons why people thought it was a stupid idea: the Christmas number one has always been about cheesy pop; they’re both signed to Sony so Cowell sees the cash anyway; and most bizarrely, that the people buying a song which contains the lyrics “I won’t do what you tell me” are somehow being told what to do. Oh, the beautiful not-irony.

For me, it wasn’t about the type of music the X-Factor produces; I’m not a fan, I don’t think it’s particularly interesting, but at least it finds people who can hold a tune without the aid of a vocoder. I’m not (quite) even enough of a music snob to be anti-pop, per se. On the other hand, I definitely am cynical enough to think that the major labels are all facets of the same Big Bad Music Industry, so the fact that the money was going to Sony regardless was pretty incidental to me (only something released on an indie would make a difference). And as far as being told what to do, there’s a difference between a suggestion and an order, and you won’t get far in life contradicting every suggestion you’re given (“Don’t jump off that cliff!” “FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU AAAAAAAAARRRGH!”).

What it was about, for me, was breaking the predictability of the Christmas number one. X-Factor’s dominance has come to be regarded as such a forgone conclusion that no-one else even makes a credible effort to compete any more – I won’t say I ran out to buy Mr. Blobby or Bob the Builder, but at least there was an element of surprise, and maybe even a little excitement about the announcement. I think that even the X-Factor were getting a little complacent – last year’s may have been a cover, but at least it was a cover of a decent song with a history; this year they were covering a 6-month-old Miley Cyrus song. Miley Bloody Cyrus. You’d think they would at least pretend they were trying.

I feel a little sorry for the lad Joe. For a long time, the implicit prize of the show has been the Christmas number one, and he must have bought into that, having been drip-fed it for the last n weeks. What we have this year is a reminder that the prize is a chance to compete for the top slot, not to have it handed you on a plate. I think it’s telling that the vast majority of the texts and tweets that were read out supporting him were of the form “he’s so sweet / nice / cute” – very few praising the song or his performance of it.

Overall, I’m really chuffed. I think in some ways you could read too much into it. The X-Factor won’t go away overnight, in fact it’ll probably be bigger next year because of this. Conversely, I do think that this is the crossover event for the general public’s awareness of the influence of Twitter, Facebook and the like. Previous storms like Trafigura or Mandelson’s “Web War” were undoubtedly more important, and probably better supported by the community; however, they didn’t have the same visibility to the general public. I’m not sure whether this new awareness will be a good thing or a bad thing, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens in a post-Rage world.

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Chrome Switch Update

Dec 3

Posted by Phil in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

I’m now two weeks into my switch to using Chrome as my main browser. How’s it going?

  • The plugins are working really well for me
    • Chromed Bird (the Twitter client) updated soon after I switched, adding tabs for @replies and DMs, which made me a lot happier. There’s a couple of little odditie (clicking “compose tweet” doesn’t shift focus into the text box, for example) but overall I’m very happy.
    • The Gmail Checker also recently updated, giving a really nice preview with delete / archive / mark read buttons right in the plugin. I actually prefer this to FireFox’s Gmail Manager now.
    • Adblock is a bit flakey, but it’s doing a good enough job that I’m not driven totally up the wall.
    • Flashblock is, as always, ace.

One of the only other things that was annoying me for browsing at work was being able to set proxy settings. Chrome generally picks up the IE settings, but I have a couple of exclusions which I’d customised in FireFox but can’t in IE as we’re locked out of the settings. Thankfully, Chrome supports a command line parameter, –proxy-pac-url, which you can point to a Proxy Auto Config file. This allowed me to grab the corporate PAC file, make a few changes, save it to my local disk, and point Chrome at it. Happy days! Clicking on links to my internal Butty Run server no longer results in annoyance :)

At home, I’m using it on Linux, and the experience is largely the same apart from the click-in-url-bar issue. If you’re not familiar with this, then essentially on Windows the default is that clicking in the address bar selects the whole URL, where on Linux it’s not. I understand the arguments from both sides; I’d even agree that on Linux the default is correct; however as someone who switches between both environments, the change is quite jarring. I wish there was a preference to switch this around, but AFAICT there isn’t.

This brings me to the thing I miss most about FireFox. Overall, I’m very impressed with Chrome. It’s much, much, much snappier than Firefox; the startup time in particular is ludicrously fast. The downside is that I feel a little more locked down, a little less able to customise. On FireFox’s about:config page you can change pretty much anything about the way the browser works under-the-hood, but Chrome doesn’t seem to have an equivalent.  As someone who enjoys tinkering, this grates a little. I’m going to stick with Chrome because day-to-day I do find it more usable, but I’ll continue to miss the little bit of extra freedom that FireFox gave me.

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Coming Out

Nov 30

Posted by Phil in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

I’m about to publically post the first link to my blog. I’m actually a little nervous, though I don’t really know why. I suppose I’d got used to the idea that I could just play around here and no-one would know or care :)

I can’t see myself becoming the most prolific blogger in the world, but there’s precious little content here, posts or pages, so I feel a little naked. Ho hum, here goes nothing . . .

Beef in Ginger Wine Stew

Nov 30

Posted by Phil in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

As a few people requested it, here’s my recipe for beef in ginger wine stew. It’s a great winter dish :)

  • 500g stewing steak
  • 15 or so shallots, peeled
  • 4 good size carrots, peeled and chunked
  • Half a swede, peeled and chunked
  • Plain flour
  • Half a pint beef stock
  • Half a bottle ginger wine (green bottle)
  • Bayleaves, oregano, seasoning to taste

Flour and fry off the stewing steak in a casserole until it’s browned on all sides. If the flour sticks, add a bit of oil or water to get it to move. Once browned, stick it to one side.

In the same pan, fry off the veg for 5-10 minutes or so until it’s slightly softened.

Put the beef back in, along with the wine, stock, herbs, and seasoning. Put in the pre-heated oven (you did pre-heat it, didn’t you?) at gas mark 4 / 180°C for about 2 hours.

We usually serve it with mashed potato which has had a fried leek mixed into it, and savoy cabbage. Lovely.

God An’ That

Nov 26

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Since people will presumably be reading this blog to find out more about me, I may as well stick something up about my attitudes and feelings towards religion, since in my experience it’s something that people get quite het up about (way to play down the Israel / Palestine conflict, Evans).

In a nutshell, I’m not religious, but I don’t mind if other people are, particularly.

In a slightly larger nutshell . . . I was bought up in a moderately observant Church of England household, but I can’t ever remember really believing in God. My earliest memories of church are during the prayers, of esentially “daring” God to come out and show himself, if he was there. Even at that stage, I was probably about 70% convinced that there was no-one at the other end of the line. I didn’t talk to anyone about it, because I felt vaguely embarrassed, like I’d uncovered a secret that I wasn’t supposed to know.

I was 11 when I first heard the word atheist, in a Religious Education class, ironically – a lad called Tim mentioned that he was an atheist, and the teacher made him explain what that meant (not in a harsh way, to be fair). I felt genuinely relieved – it wasn’t a dirty secret, it was OK, I wasn’t weird. Since then, I’ve never made a secret of it, largely because from then I never felt I had to.

I’ve never felt persecuted for being an atheist. I’ve never felt betrayed or angry at being deceived into a religion. I don’t feel like I’m turning against anything, because I don’t feel like it’s anything that was ever really there. I don’t believe in God because I don’t feel like I need to – I can’t explain everything in my worldview, but there certainly isn’t a gap big enough to fill with a God.

I tend to get on pretty well with religious people who don’t try and shove it down your throat – which in my experience is most of them. I married one, after all. Maybe I’m lucky to live in the UK, where most people are pretty laid back about their faith; I think a very vocal minority give the majority a bad name. I can (and have) had long, respectful conversations with Christians, Sikhs, Jews, and Muslims about why we believe what we believe and why we stand where we stand.

My main failing is that can get a rant on when religion starts imposing itself onto public life, particularly education. I’ve (inadvertently) upset people when I’ve started banging on about faith schools, creationism and the like – because I feel strongly that religion doesn’t have a place in schools. I respect people having different opinions, I just sometimes fail to get that across in the heat of the argument. I can be guilty of enjoying myself a little too much if we get Mormons or Witnesses knocking at the front door (particularly if I’m hungover), but in that case I feel like they’ve gone out of their way to encourage debate. I’m not one of those people who feels the need, if someone mentions that they’re religious, to immediately go out of my way to challenge them and look for an argument – I’m always up for a debate if someone wants one, but I won’t start it. I think it’s more important to get along with people than to challenge and possibly alienate them at every opportunity.

So that’s a little bit about me. I suppose I’m putting this out there as a contrast to the angry atheist types with their traumatic growing up experiences, just to show that some people don’t define themselves by what they don’t believe, and can maybe even be quite easy-going about it :)

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Flicking the Switch

Nov 20

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Well, I’ve done it – at least for now, I’ll see how I feel about it over the next few days / weeks . . .

I’ve always said that the one thing holding me back from switching from FireFox to Google Chrome was the lack of extensions. I rely on GMail Manager, EchoFon (formerly TwitterFox) and the Google Reader Notifier to be my eyes and ears during my browsing sessions, and I feel lost if I don’t have a browser that supports them. Today, I came across a blog post on OMG! UBUNTU! which describes 5 new Chrome plugins . . . including ones which replace all of the ones above. So I’m trying it.

One week on Chrome, at home and at work, and I should know pretty quickly whether I can stick with it or not. There will be other extensions I’ll miss, doubtless (AdBlock Plus, FlashBlock I’m looking at you), but I’m hoping the increased snappiness of Chrome will make up for them. Besides, I’ve been meaning for ages to set up my personal web proxy to strip out ads there . . .

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Ears

Nov 19

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I have an ear infection. It hurts.

It’s bizarre having something wrong with you like this, that’s always with you and affects the most basic things you do. I’m functionally deaf in my right ear (apart from severe tinnitus), my balance is right out of whack, and I keep having to stop to wince from the pain. Somehow injuries to other parts of your body are easier to ignore, but something that’s IN YOUR HEAD seems to be impossible to get away from.

Still, I’ve got some antibiotics which will hopefully make short work of it. Now all I’ve got to do is resist that urge to poke, scratch, and wiggle it . . . . argh . . . .

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Geek Desires

Nov 13

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This morning, the birds were singing, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky . . . . because I’d got a Google Wave invite in my inbox! Finally! My life was complete . . .

I’ve had serious Wave envy since the first people started getting their invites, along with most other heavily-online people. It was the same with GMail as well – I swear that if Google announced GWetPaintWatch then people would be clamouring for invites to it. It’s odd that even when the feedback has been largely “meh” people still want to see what they feel they’ve been missing out on. I think it’s a more ephemeral version of standard geek gadget lust – whatever is the latest and greatest, we want to be part of it, even when it’s not something we can physically hold.

First thoughts? It’s technically impressive, but it’s got the classic problem of most communication mediums – until most people you know are using it, it’s largely useless. Jury’s out until next year or so then.

That being said, I do have some spare invites if anyone else wants to get amongst :)

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Mobile Blogging

Nov 12

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Obviously, being a big geek, I’ve got to get as many different ways of blogging as possible. Assuming this is successful, it’s been posted from my Android phone using an all called wpToGo, which is novel. Yay technology!

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