If there’s one phrase, which we’re all going to hear a great deal of this year, guaranteed to annoy me on many levels, it’s, “God bless the Queen.”
Indeed.
Let us call upon a mythical being to protect and extol a parasitical, hierarchical, undemocratic figurehead.
It seems to make a lot of sense.
I’m enjoying using the Stumbler app on my tablet and thought I would share a couple of the excellent posters / images which I’ve found on several atheist web sites. These neatly and humorously encapsulate the point. I hope you enjoy them.
A twist on Michaelangelo…
The bibble, one of the most evil books ever “created.”
One for the parents out there.
And finally, not so much art, more unbelievable stupidity, here: Click to enlarge.
Muriel’s account is sadly, although maybe not surprisingly, now closed. Holy Jesus!
The seventh year of participating in the BGBW, was tinged with an amount of sorrow and trepidation. As regular readers will be aware, the tree of delight is no more, having been blown down in the storms earlier this month. As this was used as a landing pad by the birds, before feeding on the balcony of delight, I was expecting my traffic to be down on previous years.
This worry proved to be true in part.
This year saw 15 species in total which equals that of previous years, although the recorded number of individuals of each species was generally less, apart from the late arrival of a “gaggle” of goldfinches. Sadly this year, nothing “special” was viewed, no bullfinches or siskins, but in compensation the Dunnocks and House Sparrows were plentiful and always active. My favourite, the Coal Tit was in evidence, as were a couple of argumentative, territorial robins. The highlight was a Song Thrush, which lived up to its name and sang melodically for a good forty minutes as it flitted from tree top to tree top.
Here are the results and a comparison from previous years.
I’ve just taken delivery of the first of this week’s two watches, the legendary Seiko Orange Monster or if you’re being precise, model ref: SKX781K. The watch has achieved much fame on the internet for providing a huge amount of watch, literally and figuratively, for bugger all money.
After having held it in my hands for only a matter of minutes, I can tell that such high estimations of its quality are not overstated.
The OM comes on a substantial stainless steel bracelet which adds to the feeling of quality. Its chief attractions are; the brightest lume on just about any watch one can buy anywhere, having both a day and date on the dial, a reliable and resilient movement, a solid stainless steel case and drilled lugs to allow easy strap changes. This is my first watch with an orange dial and one of the reasons I like this is the way that the black edged hands provide an excellent and highly readable contrast.
Things which are less appealing are the fact that movement does not hack, cannot be hand wound and is not adjusted before leaving the factory, which means that it’s not necessarily initially accurate. The domed, hardlex crystal is not as scratch resistant as sapphire or as easy to polish as acrylic. However the movement can be regulated to provide sound accuracy and if one does zap the crystal, it can be replaced with an after market sapphire version. But doing these would to be miss the point of the watch. It is a fun, cheap, daily wearer when you want to rest more expensive residents of your collection. Mine came from Singapore, delivered with no taxes or handling fees for £130, 4 days after the order was placed. Nice.
For a “monster” watch, the OM does not wear or feel that large, and certainly these day there are many much larger watches available. The watch measures 42mm in diameter but feels smaller because of the width of the bezel and the accompanying bezel guards. It is heavy on the steel bracelet but I have yet to remove a couple of links to size it. The pin and collar system is more fiddly than a simple screw system but is easily managed once one is familiar with the concept and has the correct tools to hand.
We’ll see how I get on with it but initial impressions are certainly favourable.
A quick and dirty pic of the Monster on the wrist, with some other orangey things.
21/1/12
No that’s not a mis-spelling, but the name of the latest gadget I’ve bought for my computer elucidation and enjoyment. The Motorola Xoom 1, which is I suppose what we should call it now that a Xoom 2 has been released, is a 10″ tablet computer running the open-sourced, Linux based, Google owned, operating system, Android. Henceforth to be known as the tablet of joy.
When it was released about a year ago, the Xoom was the first tablet to feature Android 3.0, nicknamed Honeycomb which was tuned for tablets, as opposed to smart-phones. A couple of updates have extended the features, improved the speed and capabilities. I could drone on about the specs but that would be rather dull. However it was interesting to see the reaction of more than one person to whom I mentioned my purchase, who instinctively queried why I had not bought an iPad 2. The reasons are simple.
- It’s cheaper.
- It’s an open-sourced OS compared to Apple’s locked down philosophy.
- I have an iPhone and have experienced Apple’s iOS and I fancied a change.
- You can increase storage by inserting a Micro SD card – I have 64GB in total.
- I like Google and Linux.
- I can browse using Flash.
- It has a faster processor and better graphics display.
- It’s better.
When researching which tablet to purchase, I compared the Xoom with an iPad 2 and a Samsung Galaxy tablets all three of which received excellent on-line reviews. On actually handling them in HMV and John Lewis, the Xoom was noticeably the most responsive of all the Android examples and as fast as the iPad. So the decision was made to purchase the wi-fi model.
The tablet is a joy to use around my flat. Compared to my HP netbook (now sold) the table is so portable and light. I now use it everywhere in place of my old ThinkPad which is going to be farmed off the Fogeys. It’s super to be able to use in front of the TV, in bed or of course when on the pan. It easily handles all the multi-media stuff, playing music collection, video files, YouTube, Skype, digi-cam and has excellent apps for all of those functions. The Android Honeycomb interface is very designed, easy to use on the responsive touch-screen display. There are 5 desktops for apps and widgets, together with and excellent notification and preference setting areas. The screen obviously rotates from landscape to portrait when you turn the tablet.
For me, it’s best and most powerful functions are the web apps. The built-in tabbed broswer is just as fast and functional as Chrome on Ubuntu. Occasionally it cannot handle some video content but Opera is also available for those circumstances. Strangely the Android version of Firefox I tried was clearly written for a mobile rather than a tablet and had all manner of strange UI twitches. E-mail is perfect on the Xoom and there are a variety of Gmail and other apps, which allow me to keep work and private mail accounts entirely separate, and toggle which accounts notify me when.
For my geekery, there are all manner of SFTP, SSH, RDP and VNC clients available, so I can load up the tablet over my wi-fi connections from my home servers, without having to remove the micro-SD card and find the appropriate card reader. Dropbox works as perfectly here as elsewhere. There are many e-book readers available, and the Kindle app allows you to sync to your Kindle account and subscriptions. It has become my preferred device on which to read my daily Kindle edition of the Guardian. However as the Xoom is a back-lit device, the e-ink of the actual Kindle is preferable when reading for extended periods.
Games are not-forgotten, Angry Birds is perfect on the 10 inch screen, and I have also tried a mastermind clone, an on-line poker competition and will shortly be downloading some others, including a Scrabble clone.
While it is true that there are not as yet as many apps on the Android Market Place as Apple’s App Store, there are more than enough to keep me happy doing all of the things I need a tablet to do. The market is expanding and Android is under constant development by Google, so it should be a fun ride.
Tablet of Joy. Yes.
Birds
Death List
General
Humour
Music
Photos
Poker
Politics
Rants
Religion
Tech Stuff
Thoughts
Watches
Recent Comments