It’s official – I’m sick of waiting February 9, 2009
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Old Kindle. Ugly
Despite the decidedly uncool aesthetics of the device, the idea of having a book library in my bag that could also subscribe to national newspapers was something that I was prepared to buy into.
But because of licensing deals over the way the Kindle receives wireless publications, the first version never saw the light of day in good old Blighty.
Today Amazon have announced an all new Kindle. It looks nicer, it’s a lot thinner, it has a battery life that improves on the already impressive first model. Hell, it will even read to you. All these things make it more desirable than ever before.
Which is all well and dandy but counts for a hill of beans for one reason. It’s still not going to be available in the UK.
So I’d like state here and now that I’m officially sick of waiting. I don’t care what the issue is, I just want to give you my money, Amazon! We might not be as numerous as the US but there are plenty of us here who would fall over themselves to buy your device and then fill your coffers even higher buying books for it.
What’s interesting is that this ‘no show’ Kindle news comes just a couple of days after news from Google that it is making 1.5m books available to mobile devices through its book search.
So here’s my prediction – and I hope it comes true. Within a few months it will be commonplace to read books on your smartphone and so-called eBook readers like those offered by Sony and (partly) offered by Amazon will be a thing of the past. Most other portable devices have been consumed into the mighty mobile so there’s no reason to think digital books won’t go the same way. A wide screen view turned to landscape is perfectly comfortable for reading when out and about so Amazon can keep their fancy gadget and hopes of vast incomes from digital purchases.
If one comes out later this year and I buy it, please forget that you read this.
Becoming a Virgin (again) February 9, 2009
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Virgin Media offers speeds 'up to' 50Mb. Hmmm...
If you read me regularly you’ll know that I’ve been procrastinating like a nervous bungy jumper about signing up to a Virgin Media cable account for about a million years.
My biggest problem is the fact that this is actually the old NTL which whom I had numerous incredible and frustrating issues with when I first had a cable modem installed back in the day. I’ve been online and read reports that Virgin Media are no better than NTL (in fact it’s even suggested that it’s entirely the same staff etc.). I think if I ever faced the kind of incompetence that I encountered at the hands of NTL I would probably go postal.
But I really want a faster connection than my ADSL line can provide me with. Apparently I’m just the wrong distance away from the exchange so the measly 1Mb that currently squeezes its way down my copper wire is as good as it’s gonna get.
This sort of speed is fine for work (indeed, it’s a work-provided line) and I can hook into my company’s VPN and use RDP no problemo, BUT a) it’s not good enough for personal stuff. For example, I’d like to watch BBC iPlayer in higher resolution but since the BBC decided not to buffer their stream, it’s a total no-no.
So I’ve bitten the bullet and opted for Virgin Media’s ‘up to’ 20Mb line. A friend of mine has it and says he gets around 8Mb which I’m hoping I can beat but even that will be a considerable improvement. It’s gonna cost me £30 a month which is reasonable and I’ve always got the option to whack it up to the full 50Mb service if I think I’ll get near to that much. That particular speed sets you back £50 a month which seems excessive but I remember paying that to NTL for a 1Mb line when they first bought them out! Imagine that.
Booking the service and installation online was an absolute doddle so credit for an easy experience there. Where I feel somewhat frustrated already (and I’ve only been a customer for a couple of hours) is that the booking process allows you to request a particular installation date and time. Great! Please come out on Saturday morning. That would be most handy.
Shortly after finishing the purchase I received an email. Lo and behold they were apologising but couldn’t make the date I had requested so suggested another some days later.
I’m happy enough to wait but what gets me is that they could easily have worked that out when offering me times which they clearly only did to make me feel happy. Once the order was set, then they can tell me they can’t do that time. Typical.
A bit of honesty wouldn’t go a miss, Virgin Media! Hook you online booking diary up to a real-time diary of your engineers’ availability. Grrrr….
Anyway, I shall make sure I’m on-hand next Tuesday when they run the cable up to the house. I want to be absolutely sure they don’t do what the Sky engineer decided to do and find the shortest route possible from source to destination even if it meant hanging a cable over my drainpipe, running it straight down the side of the house and drilling a dirty great hole halfway up the all.
I’ll let you know how well the service works come next Tuesday. Can’t wait – <MARVIN-VOICE>Though something’s bound to go wrong. It always does.</MARVIN-VOICE>
Awesome sunrise and sunset February 9, 2009
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I’ve been seeing some amazing sunsets and sunrises from my house over the past couple of days. The look like the sky’s on fire.
Sunset
Sunrise
The sunrise was so good it was enough to get me out of bed on a Sunday morning
Natural selection just misses out February 9, 2009
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Network Rail have just released this footage to warn people of the dangers of level crossings.
How’d've guessed that vaulting a closed gate and pacing it across a railway track could be dangerous?
iLife ’09 and why you want it February 6, 2009
Posted by David in Apple, Software.add a comment
Last week Mac owners were treated to updates of the two most essential software collections for their computers.
iWorks ‘09 gathers together the best office-type functional software (Pages, the word processor, is assisting me in the creation of this week’s column) but far more excitingly for the more creative type, iLife ’09 shows off some excellent applications that really should form the backbone of just about everybody’s Apple computer, including iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and the unrivaled fun and power of Garageband.
In its previous incarnations, iPhoto was already doing a sterling job of managing my ever-growing collection of digital photography but a couple of new features are little short of mind blowing.
First up is ‘Faces’ which attempts to sort your pictures by who is in them. By telling it the name of one or more people in a particular shot, it uses face recognition technology to find them in others. Initial results were usually accurate and sometimes way out (it suggested that my daughter might be her grandfather, for example!) but guesses become more reliable as errors are corrected.
The other new feature, called ‘Places’, had a friend and me literally gasping in amazement.
A Google map of the world featured a forest of red pushpin icons around central England. Zooming in increased the number of pins until they were dotted around the southern half of the country with particular emphasis on Oxfordshire. Certain modern cameras and the iPhone 3G plot your location coordinates when a picture is taken and embed the position within the photo’s data. ‘Places’ can then literally pinpoint where a photograph was taken anywhere in the world. Amazing.
I though I’d caught it out when a path of red pins traced a line right down the middle of the Thames until the pictures reminded me of a boat trip last summer.
iMovie makes editing your video footage an absolute breeze and my personal favourite, Garageband, combines a home recording studio and music teacher that is unrivaled by any other software out there.
No Mac should be without iLife. An excellent suite of software that’s just £69.
To ’09 or not to ’09? February 10, 2009
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Worth the upgrade?
It’s not that I don’t like it – I certainly do. Apple’s suite of office applications is vastly more elegant that anything offered by anyone else.
I just don’t know if there’s anything in ’09 that makes it a must-have purchase over ’08 which I already own. I generally don’t like to be behind the curve, using software that has a more recent version available, but in these credit crunch times I just might stick with what I already have – at least for a little while.