The best use for a Kindle

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

In the 1970s and 80’s Britain’s brewing industry underwent huge changes as small independent breweries were amalgamated into the large computer-controlled factories we have nowadays. This also meant the loss of some of the countries favourite beers, replaced by bland brews that were made for shelf-life rather than taste.

They were truly dreadful, gassy drinks which many would say tasted the same going down as they did coming out an hour later. CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, represented public opinion and became the most successful consumer group in Europe. The country saw the rise of small artisanal breweries making beers with flavour as the aim and slowly public houses reinstalled their hand pumps and publicans learned how to tend to living beer.

There needs to be a similar movement to campaign for real bread. Even the best supermarket loaves have a list of ingredients including things you can’t even pronounce let alone want to eat. Unlike proper bread from by artisan bakers who make bread for its flavour and texture using only flour, yeast, salt and water. It is strange that the French, as a nation who value their bread, are buying soft and pappy loaves from supermarkets. The same bread would remain on the shelves and unsold in UK shops. This is in the birth place of Louis Pasteur where the French choose sterilised milk over fresh pasteurised.

In the 1980s and 90s another industry also went through complete upheaval as offset litho and desktop publishing ousted the old hot metal presses. Designers replaced most of the people involved in printing who became redundant because their skills weren’t needed. Ten years later content creation has become where the smart money is as desktop publishing is being ousted by digital publishing.

The recession has seen many publishers and book packagers move away from traditional, wet printing and into short-run digital output but even they are being moved aside as the artisan book makers come to the fore. Armed only with a text editor, a modem and a handful of ideas, they can get their books published and on sale at Amazon. It doesn’t mean that their books are any good, though.

Which is how some see the new small Kindle. The screen size is limited, grey-scale and without a backlight. While the memory holds a library of titles, reading on the Kindle’s screen is an acquired taste. However, I have found the ideal use for a Kindle.

Even with large amounts of time on my hands during a sojourn in hospital recently, there was no way I could get into Steve Jobs biography, the book is just too large and heavy. We didn’t have a Kindle when I ordered it so I’m stuck with trying to read a book the size of a family bible. Which in a way, is exactly what it is: a bible for all the Apple disciples of which I am one.

It’s got no blinking light

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

Ever since we can remember, before going to bed or going out for a while, we always check around the house and office. In the day time it’s to shut the doors so that when burglars break in, opening a door will damage their eardrums as our alarms set up a cacophony of deafening bells. At night time, it’s to make sure the Macs are behaving themselves.

Looking into the office we see at least 25 neon lights glowing from all the little boxes of electronics. Some pulse slowly as if the devices they are attached to are snoring, others blink rapidly as an iPhone or Pad check for mail. We have always wondered what the cumulative effect of 25 or so consumers of milliamps will be to our carbon footprint but they all stay lit unless we go on holiday.

Recently we checked the office and both felt something wasn’t right. There was a subtle difference that eluded us but neither admitted it to the other until a chance remark in a conversation about a film we were watching. The movie concerned the mysterious going’s on at a school where a ‘malevolent presence’ roamed around, bumping off people one-by-one.

Of course, none of the victims ran away when they entered the room containing the ‘presence’. Instead they stood awaiting their fate as the camera focussed over their shoulder onto the slowly solidifying mist.

It was the same with our office. Something was wrong but we couldn’t tell what. We could stand looking round the room, checking under desks to where the snakes live or into the corners where they spiders hang out. But nothing showed up. Then realisation came us.

The new iMacs have no blinking light.

Life can be so cruel

Friday, October 21st, 2011

iPhone Friday saw me at O2 checking out the new phones and very nice they are too. But where to get the best deals? (more…)

Is your brand in danger of sex domain abuse?

Saturday, August 20th, 2011

Cyber squatting is, for the most part these days, old hat as far as threats to your business go. After all, any business that wants to protects itself from others associating themselves with its name through the simple process of buying a related domain name can follow any number of routes to protect the brand from harm. Be it applying trademark protection laws or just buying up all the associated Top Level Domain (TLD) names from the outset, the processes are in place to prevent such abuse. Indeed, the Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy (UDRP) which has been developed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) deals with such matters regularly. So why should cyber squatting, namejacking and domain related brand protection be high on the business to do list now in the middle of 2011? The answer is an explicit one; in fact it’s xxx-rated.

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Mapping the London riots with Google

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

It’s all too easy to focus on the negative side of technology when looking at the devastation spreading across London as I write this. Everything from Facebook and Twitter through to the Blackberry instant messaging service have been blamed for helping the rioters to organise both the violent disorder and the looting which invariably seems to follow. However, technology can actually be helpful in times such as these. Facebook and Twitter have been reported as being used by police in working out where to deploy manpower by following postings which appear to be orchestrating events, for example. And, obviously live newsfeeds have been breaking the news of where riots are erupting before the 24 hour news channels get hold of the story.

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Why Microsoft was right to apologise for Amy Winehouse tweet

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

There have been some pretty egregious moves by media and PR organisations recently, taking advantage of tragedies for their own gain.

Microsoft has come under heavy fire for a tweet following the death of Amy Winehouse. The Redmond firm’s tweetbox360 Twitter account posted a message recommending people pay tribute to Winehouse by purchasing the singer’s masterpiece ‘Back to Black’ via Microsoft’s online store Zune.

Yes, it was cynical. All Microsoft had to do was leave out the reference to Zune and it would have been fine. People can buy the album from anywhere after all – in my view they should get it from an actual record shop (remember real things? They still exist apparently). Some have jumped to the company’s defence, but Microsoft didn’t need to promote Zune in that context and shouldn’t have done, so it was right to say sorry for that reason alone.

Microsoft wasn’t the worst offender, though. At least its tweet contained a modicum of sensitivity. It was promoting the music of Winehouse – what she should be remembered for.

Numerous others have chosen to capitalise on the singer’s death, but in slightly more subtle ways. Security companies, for instance, have ironically/hypocritically posted numerous warnings about scammers posting messages on Facebook and Twitter to dupe users. Their aim is to have journalists back their warnings with articles, in turn getting their business coverage. Good writers don’t cave, of course.

Others have been far less surreptitious, the worst being The Huffington Post, which decided to publish an article on how businesses could learn from the tragedy. The writer, Tricia Fox, chose to compare the life of Winehouse to the life of a business. I’ll leave you to spurt out a few curses in disbelief.

These brazen acts of idiocy came after some fairly appalling ‘reporting’ of the killings in Norway, where various ‘news organisations’ assumed the perpetrator was carrying out the atrocities in support of the Islamic faith. But as one considerably more erudite journalist noted, the horrible events in Norway were of a European nature, derived from European ghosts (read Charlie Brooker’s piece here for a more incisive look at the reporting of the Norway tragedy).

During a time when the reputation of media bodies is taking a battering, you would have thought journalists hoping to sell stories to death-hungry civilians, as well as companies looking to promote their brand to writers, would have taken it easy.

But no, death has become a commodity. It is there to be bought and sold. Fox highlighted the fact perfectly in her comparison.

How have we reached this point? I’d cite the end of the Second World War as a turning point. It’s my personal belief that through the rise of mass media and technology, we have objectified death. We have almost crystallised it, wrenched it from ourselves and turned it into an invisible substance, a thing of commercial value.

Death is no longer such a spiritual thing, it is no longer something to be explored within oneself. Compare the Egyptian Book of the Dead to what most people read today and the case is made. Once, the journey to death was something to be taken with the utmost seriousness – contemplation of it was almost the purpose of life itself. Now, death’s meaning has been eroded away, its core has faded, it is something to report on and then make money from.

So, every other company along with Microsoft, be they media firms, technology vendors or indeed anyone who has contributed to the problem of death objectification, should be sorry too.

Maybe we should all be sorry… we’re the ones who buy into it after all.

Go West… err East…no, is it North?

Monday, July 25th, 2011

If you haven’t got a satellite navigation system or smartphone app, don’t bother reading any more than this paragraph. Buy CoPilot Live Premium and you won’t be disappointed. It does everything you need and a lot more besides, running on Android and iOS phones. If you have CoPilot Live 8 already and are wondering if it’s worth upgrading perhaps our experience will help you decide.

CoPilot Live Premium is a brand new app based on CoPilot 9 and not just an update to CoPilot Love 8. This means it will cost the same as you have already paid. Even so, the two prices added together are still cheaper than a dedicated sat-nav and arguably a lot better. In two weeks of testing, CoPilot Live Premium hasn’t let us down and there are still many new features to be explored. As before, maps, POI’s and speed camera updates are free. Try that with your Garmin or Tom Tom.

From initial start-up, CoPilot Live Premium is very different from previous versions. The screen display is less cluttered with emphasis on showing the next turn and the name of the road to turn into, as a large icon and text running along the bottom of the screen. After turning on the text to speech option, CoPilot Live Premium informs you “in 500 yards, turn left into Bayswater Road”. Unfortunately, Emily, who has lived in our CoPilot across Europe, isn’t up to this task and her colleague Eleanor speaks instead.

She sounds a bit like Katharine Hepburn in her ‘On Golden Pond’ voice, all juddery as if she is sitting on a one-cylinder diesel engine. Most of the time we leave her switched off and especially in Europe. After all, Place de Gaulle could be almost anywhere in France and who would know the Rue de Cholet as such when you are looking for the D960. However, once you get into city centres this changes especially if you are following a tourist map and know the road you are looking for.
Text to speech is especially good when you are walking and following Eleanor’s directions. Then you have time to search for the street names hidden behind a boulangerie’s awning or high up on a wall still pitted with bullet holes from WWII.

Getting ‘there’ is another new experience and a lot better than the previous CoPilot Live. From the start you are offered three different route options, based on your personal preferences or motorways or not and whether to allow toll roads or ferries. It is easy to adjust the routes by ‘clicking’ on the road marked on the map in one of three colours. Then dragging the line to the road you prefer to use. As before, CoPilot doesn’t get into a hissy fit if you miss the turning and rapidly recalculates back to the old or a brand new route.

ALK, publishers of CoPilot, ask you to send your automatically recorded routes to them so they can gather real-time data or correct errors. This is done easily from your cellphone as an option in one of the settings. At the same time you can grab some of their live updates such as traffic information. Live traffic data needs a data connection so it limited to the UK or the very wealthy. At only £7.99 per year it is still an upgrade worth buying.

We proved that the route selections are darned good too. Driving from Le Havre into France, CoPilot kept trying to get is to avoid the Pont de Normandie, which costs about a fiver to cross, and instead routing us to the nearby and free crossing of the Pont de Tancarville which would also take us onto our chosen route for very little extra time. En-route CoPilot continued to argue with the Nissan’s sat-nav we were following in the car in front and the route it chose to Saumur cost us about £30 more than CoPilot’s route.

There are still one or two glitches with the maps. For example: CoPilot wants to route me by way of Dover and Calais to get to Dieppe, rather than using the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry just down the road. It recognises the route but thinks the 4 hour crossing will take over 15 hours. It could just as easily route me from Portsmouth to Le Havre or Ouistreham in quicker time than the three hour drive to Dover.

As any sat-nav user will tell you, there are times when motorways meet in a spaghetti of options where getting on the wrong one may mean a round trip of 100 miles to get back to where you needed to choose the correct route. CoPilot Live Premium has tackled this with clearer route markings showing the correct route to take. I need to test it around Paris or Rouen before I will believe it. Where three or more roads combine then depart from each other, while you are driving at 130kph, on the wrong side of the road. Behind is a crazy trucker in a 40 tonne articulated monster, indifferent if he runs you over or not. Remembering Dennis Weaver in Spielberg’s Duel is not a good thing at such times.

The menus for settings and accessing other features of the app, are easier to get at with one tap on the map taking to the most immediate needs with a further button to get to the rest of the options such as POIs, PhotoNav and My Places. Along the bottom of the screen is a horizontal bar with icons for the remainder of the settings. Compared with the previous version of CoPilot it is far easier to use but has advanced options we haven’t tried yet and to be honest probably never will. We have no real wish to broadcast where we are to Facebook or Twitter, one of the new features for those who want it.

One thing we found a little irritating is that on tapping on the Points of Information to find the closest, you are presented by three options for the nearest: Restaurant, Hotel and Petrol Station. Not our chosen three which would probably be: Carrefour, vineyard and Public Toilet. Nevertheless, underneath is are two large buttons saying Search All which brings up a text entry screen, and More Categories, listing all POI types in alphabetical order as well as having a broader selection than earlier CoPilots. These work without a data connection and are downloaded to your cellphone regularly when data is available.

I note that according to CoPilot, my local Co-Op is called a Co-Opreative which just about sums up CoPilot Live Premium. For anyone about to buy a navigation app, it is pretty hard to beat and the price is very reasonable. We are glad we have the new version and going back to the previous one makes us realise all the new tricks you appreciate. With only a short time playing with the options and learning the menus, you’ll co-opreate with CoPilot Live Premium and trust it to get you to your destination. But do take a map with you as well, just in case…

Désolé monsieur

Sunday, June 26th, 2011

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

It is an interesting coincidence that I was enthusing about doing it for free
random-hacks-of-kindness/
as IT Pro is pulling this blog. Do I carry on elsewhere or do I give up? The coincidence is that I am paid by IT Pro, if I set up my own blog site obviously I’ll be doing for free.

Whilst I’m enthusing about volunteering I’m not sure about just blogging for the sake of it – it smacks too much of vanity publishing. How will I know if it’s read or even if it’s worth reading? If someone pays me I know someone values what I’m doing, if not…

Anyway this is pretty much the end here for me as the mystery blogger. So I’ll say farewell and finally reveal my true identity…

I am not an IT bod at all – in fact I am a Gay Girl in Damascus
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13744980

or am I?

Just embrace the goddamn cloud why don’t you?

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

So the European Commission is consulting with the great unwashed about the benefits of cloud computing. Better late than never I guess, perhaps I should be happy that that EC has actually heard of the cloud at all. Apparently it will be ‘seeking views’ from the general public, business and other interested parties (by which I assume it means service providers and government) in order to determine how Europe can extract the greatest value from cloud computing.

The rather grand sounding European Commission Vice President for the Digital Agenda (phew!) has launched the consultation process, and in a statement Neelie Kroes (which sounds a little less grand) says he, or she for that matter, is “excited about the potential benefits of cloud computing to cut costs, improve services and open up new business opportunities”. Hmmm, aren’t we all?

So what, exactly, will this consultation actually achieve?

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